Diamond Stealth III S540 Xtreme

The Specs

.25 micron manufacturing process
128-bit 2D, 3D, and video engine
AGP 4x/2x/1x
32MB 166MHz SDRAM
166MHz core clock speed
32-bit color
24-bit Z-buffer
8-bit stencil buffer
S3 Texture Compression
2048x2048 texture support
300MHz RAMDAC
Full speed DVD video playback w/motion compensation
OpenGL Performance ICD
Floating point triangle setup engine
Single cycle trilinear filtering
Single Pass Multi-texturing

Not the Average Bear

The Stealth III Xtreme offers all the new goodies we expect from a current 3D accelerator. It matches just about every feature offered by the TNT2, and one ups the competition with S3TC support and true trilinear filtering with multi-texturing.

S3TC is S3's texture compression technology first developed for the Savage3D chipset. The technology has had DirectX support since DirectX 6.0. Only a handful of games currently support S3TC, but many upcoming games, including Quake III and Unreal Tournament, have announced that they will support S3TC.

S3TC will actually allow games to use those 2048 x 2048 textures, but we've noticed that nobody really seems to realize how big a 2048 x 2048 texture actually is. If you run your monitor at 1024 x 768, your screen would be able to show less than a fourth of a 2048 x 2048 texture.

We asked S3 about their single pass trilinear filering with multi-texturing. Both the Voodoo3 and the TNT2 are unable to do true trilinear filtering with multi-texturing enabled. Instead, they do mipmap dithered bilinear filtering when multitexturing is enabled. Both Paul and Mark assured us that the Stealth III Xtreme can perform true trilinear filtering with multi-texturing enabled.