The Competition

The players

Currently, there are only two other high performance mobile 3D chipsets on the market (or soon to be on the market), the ATI Mobility Radeon and the NVIDIA GeForce2 Go.

S3 sees the ATI Mobility Radeon as its primary competition and has all but written off the GeForce2 Go. S3 doesn't see the GeForce2 Go as a threat because the chip uses too much power (2.8W), placing it in the small desktop replacement laptop niche where power issues are less important.

New blood

NVIDIA has, however, recently announced two new mobile solutions, the GeForce2 Go 100, a 32-bit DDR solution, and the GeForce2 Go 200, a 64-bit DDR solution. The 100 should have better power consumption characteristics than the other, more powerful GeForce2 Go models.

ATI has four different Mobility Radeon variants that should also match up well against the SuperSavage. The Radeon has the edge in DVD playback with its hardware iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform).

Looking at the pure performance aspect, the GeForce2 Go will come out on top since it's basically an underclocked GeForce2 MX chip. The Go is the also only chip with hardware T&L since ATI chose to remove its T&L engine due to power and size constraints.

The GeForce2 Go retains two pixel pipelines with two textures per pipeline. The Mobility Radeon has a single pixel pipeline with three textures per pipe, but developer support for the third texturing unit is slow in coming.