The Specifications

Here it is!

We pulled these features directly from S3's Savage2000 presentation:

2 multi-textured pixels/clock
Single-pass quad texture engine
Up to 64MB memory
Core clock up to 200MHz
Memory clock up to 200MHz
Transform & lighting engine
AGP 4x/2x
HW emboss bump mapping
S3 Texture Compression S3TC
32-bit color rendering
Full screen anti-aliasing
Anisotropic filtering
8-bit stencil buffer
16/24/32-bit Zbuffer
DX7 & OpenGL compliant
Range-based, vertex & table fog
Specular lighting/diffuse shading
Enhanced alpha blending modes
128-bit 2D graphics engine
Dynamic multi-tap scaling
3rd generation motion compensation
Subpicture blending and highlights
Fully compliant VIP 2.0 port
Multiple HW video windows
Digital interface port to NTSC/PAL TV encoders
Digital interface to FP encoders
Resolutions up to 2048 x 1536
350MHz RAMDAC

Look at dem pipelines!

That's a lot of features

We're most interested in the 2 multi-textured pixels per clock, the onboard T&L, and the DVD options. Current 3D accelerators such as the Voodoo 3 and TNT2 only do a single multi-textured pixel per clock. The Savage2000's 2 multi-textured pixels per clock virtually doubles the performance of the Voodoo 3 and TNT2, the Savage2000 can also do single-pass quad texturing for a single pixel.

S3 states that their transform & lighting engine S3TL "Enables Next-Generation Content with 4-10X Polygon & Lighting Complexity," with up to "8 dynamic hardware lights with 3X performance of today's CPUs." S3TL also features real time load balancing between hardware T&L and the CPU. The video card will be able to pump out far more polygons onto the screen, and we'll see even more realistic 3D games as programmers take advantage of the technology.

Current games don't even need the 3 million sustained triangles per second current 3D accelerators can push out. Fill rate is still the main bottleneck and will continue to be the bottleneck until games start using more polygons.

As for DVD playback, the Savage2000 can dynamically adjust up to 16 taps. The number of taps is the number of times the card filters an image. Most cards can only do 8 taps or less. The chip also supports a VIP 2.0 video-in port, digital flat panel and TV-out ports.