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S3 DeltaChrome S8 Performance Preview December 18, 2003 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: After nearly a year of speculating, S3's DeltaChrome is nearly here! This DX9 graphics card is aimed squarely at the mainstream market and offers all the right features to compete with the latest parts from ATI and NVIDIA. In this article, we take a prototype DeltaChrome S8 board for a spin through a few of our regular benchmarks. See how it fares right here!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 15 ) |
It has nearly been one full year since we first brought you details of S3’s DeltaChrome. First slated for arrival at the end of the 2nd quarter of this year, slowly but surely the release date has been pushed back further and further. Fortunately for S3, that wait is about to come to an end, but not just yet. S3 and its board partners are busy qualifying the final board design, as well as working on the graphics drivers, but S3 recently supplied us with an engineering sample of a prototype S8 board and an early video driver.
Before we get into the image quality analysis and benchmarks though, we’ll quickly recap DeltaChrome’s feature set and variants. For more detailed discussion on both topics, please refer back to our DeltaChrome preview from January 2003, and the DeltaChrome update from last September of this year.
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DX9 architecture
For starters, DeltaChrome is not a RADEON 9800 XT killer. In fact, it would be very hard pressed to keep up with last year’s RADEON 9700 PRO. Since it’s limited to a 128-bit memory interface, it lacks the memory bandwidth to put up a proper fight. DeltaChrome’s micro-architecture is nothing to scoff at however. S3 actually goes beyond DirectX 9’s specs in some areas.
S3 starts DeltaChrome off with an eight-pixel pipeline architecture. Each pixel pipeline is outfitted with a single texture unit, just like ATI’s 8x1 configuration used on the RADEON 9700/9800. Also like ATI, DeltaChrome has four vertex shader units. S3 claims they’re able to cram all these features into a core that contains fewer transistors than RADEON 9800/9800 XT, but they won’t give us an exact figure other than to say it will be in the 60-80 million transistor range.
This helps to keep manufacturing costs in check, which is important since S3 will be primarily competing in the value and mainstream segments of the graphics market with DeltaChrome. To further ease production costs, DeltaChrome is built on TSMC’s 0.13-micron manufacturing process, just like many of NVIDIA and ATI’s latest products are.
Like the other DX9 cards on the market, DeltaChrome supports floating-point data formats. This is important for handling all sorts of complicated math. What does this mean to the end user? Scenes with more color ranges are possible without running into problems like color banding, creating a final image with more vibrant, lifelike colors.
DeltaChrome supports 128-bit vertex precision (32-bit floating point) while pixel precision is 96-bit (24-bit floating point). A lot has been made about NVIDIA’s decision to offer 128-bit precision in both. NVIDIA argues this gives them more flexibility than ATI (and now, S3 which boasts similar capabilities in this regard) but it remains to be seen if 128-bit precision is even feasible with today’s latest DX9 cards – the performance impact going from 24-bit (FP24) to 32-bit (FP32) may not be worth the increased precision.
In addition, many developers tend to stick with Microsoft’s minimum specifications in order to appeal to the widest audience possible. Right now the minimum precision called for by Microsoft that meets full precision requirements is 24-bit. NVIDIA’s performance mode, FP16, is considered half precision.
SIDEBAR: The codename for DeltaChrome was Columbia
| 2D/HDTV features | Page:: ( 2 / 15 ) |
Now that you’re a little more familiar with DeltaChrome’s 3D guts, let’s go over its 2D and video engines. If you’re a multimedia buff, you’re really going to like what S3 is offering here.
Hi-Def HDTV encoder
This is because S3 has integrated an HDTV encoder into DeltaChrome, the first chip to support this feature. Of course, the encoder can also act as a standard video encoder for video editing duties.
This feature makes DeltaChrome the perfect solution for editing your home movies off the camcorder, or using its video capture capabilities to record that perfect lap in Project Gotham Racing 2 on your Xbox. It goes without saying that it’s surprising to see this feature incorporated into a mainstream graphics chip, even ATI and NVIDIA’s high-end parts rely on external chips to support this feature. (ATI relies on the Rage Theater/Theater 200 chip for its RADEON cards, while NVIDIA utilizes video encoders manufactured by Philips.) As a result, many of the mainstream cards from both companies don’t even offer video input support among their list of features.
Resolutions of 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p are supported via a component (YPbPr) output, while 480i is supported via standard S-Video/Composite output. DeltaChrome will offer full range RGB to YUV color space conversion with hue, saturation, and contrast adjustment.
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Chromotion
Like ATI’s latest chips, DeltaChrome’s pixel shaders can access video streams, where they can apply post-processing effects such as emboss, sharpen, and neon edges. DeltaChrome can also use its pixel shaders to clean up video signals such as Internet webcasts, MPEG-2/4, Windows Media 8/9, and other media standards.
S3 has a video de-blocking filter similar to ATI’s:
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S3 has signed a deal with Intervideo, bringing support for pixel shader effects in its popular WinDVD playback software.
SIDEBAR: S3 recently updated their website with more DeltaChrome details.
| DeltaChrome Models | Page:: ( 3 / 15 ) |
S3 has been working on three DeltaChrome variants to service the high-end, mainstream, and value segments of the graphics market: the F1 family, S8 series, and finally, for the value segment, S4.
S3’s F1
S3’s F1 family consists of two products, F1, and F1 Pole. Originally these cards were intended to take on the low-end of the high-end segment but recent market pressures have probably ensured that these cards will never likely see the light of day. When you’re competition is selling graphics cards with 256-bit memory interfaces and high-speed DDR memory at the $200 price point (read: RADEON 9800, GeForce FX 5900/GeForce FX 5900 XT) it’s pretty hard to compete with a card that boasts significantly less memory bandwidth.
F1’s specifications call for a core/memory clock speed of 350MHz, equating to a fill-rate that’s not too bad in comparison to ATI’s latest offerings, but as we mentioned, considerably less bandwidth. As a result, S3 has no schedule for this product at this time.
The S8
Unlike F1, S3’s S8 family is very much a viable product thanks to its eight pixel pipes, a feature that is unique to S8 now that the RADEON 9500 PRO is gone. S3 will be producing two S8 cards, the S8 and the S8 Nitro, with the only difference between the two cards being clock speeds. S3 clocks the standard S8 at 300MHz on the core and its memory, while the S8 Nitro checks in at 315/315MHz.
If you refer back to our article in September, these clock speeds are right in line with S3’s earlier estimates, in fact they slightly exceed them. S3 was originally shooting for a clock frequency range of 275-300MHz. And while these figures are below ATI and NVIDIA’s latest and greatest mainstream products, thanks to the chip’s 8-pixel pipeline architecture, it doesn’t need breakthrough clock frequencies to achieve high fill rates. In fact, at 300MHz, the S8 already exceeds RADEON 9600 XT in terms of texel fill rate, and matches the chip in memory bandwidth, both at 9.6GB/sec.
This could make the S8 a very worthy competitor to the remains of ATI’s RADEON 9600 (whose status has recently been changed to EOL) and NVIDIA’s vanilla GeForce FX 5700, both of which it will be taking on directly in terms of price. Both S8 parts are slated to hit retail channels in Q1 of next year.
S3 S4: Battling at the low-end
Unlike the cards we’ve mentioned above, S3’s S4 series cut the number of pixel pipelines from eight to four in order to reduce transistor count, and ultimately, manufacturing cost. Likewise, the number of vertex shaders is reduced from four to two.
Stats-wise, this puts S4 in good company, although final details on its clock speeds have not been determined. S3 says they will at least meet S8 Nitro’s 315MHz as a minimum specification, although they haven’t gotten more specific than that. It’s also unclear what type of memory interface retail boards will support. The chip is capable of supporting a 128-bit interface to its main memory, which will be present in S4 Nitro, but we wouldn’t be surprised if some vendors built 64-bit S4 boards. (Two variants are planned, the S4 and S4 Nitro.)
Ideally, we’d like to think the days of 64-bit video cards are long gone, but as the RADEON 9600 SE has just recently shown us, this unfortunately isn’t the case. NVIDIA also has a 64-bit version of GeForce FX 5200, which makes a 64-bit S4 more than just a quick guess on our part.
S3 doesn’t plan to launch S4 until the CeBIT/GDC timeframe, so they still have a few months to sort out the final details on this board.
SIDEBAR: Club3D is the first board partner to announce a DeltaChrome card.
| Image quality/Drivers | Page:: ( 4 / 15 ) |
One aspect where DeltaChrome is a little weaker in comparison to the competition is its anti-aliasing engine. Whereas most of today’s graphics accelerators have implemented multisampling AA, DeltaChrome relies on supersampling. While supersampling does a good job of removing the aliasing (the jagged, broken lines you typically see in sports titles and racing games) present in the final image, it does so at a huge hit to the graphics accelerator's fill rate.
Back in the RADEON 8500/GeForce3/4 days, this really hurt ATI as their RADEON 8500 relied on supersampling while the GeForce cards used multisampling. This gave the GeForce cards a huge performance advantage. In fact, most RADEON 8500 users left AA off. ATI ultimately resolved this problem with the introduction of RADEON 9700 (and all of their follow-up products since its release) by implementing multisampling AA.
Due to S3’s reliance on supersampling, AA is limited to just 2X mode and resolutions up to 1024x768. At least, that’s where S3 plans on going, S3’s current display driver hasn’t implemented AA support yet. Quite frankly, this is probably the highest setting that will result in playable frame rates anyway. We did go ahead and take a few screenshots however in 3DMark 03 and Unreal Tournament 2003 however (all screenshots were taken with basic settings, 0xAA/0xAF):
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Drivers
S3 was quite open with the fact that they’re still early in the development of the OpenGL portion of their display driver. Basically, they’ve reached the point where they’ve got OpenGL up and running and not much else. They have yet to begin any optimization work, so our performance numbers in Quake 3 should be regarded as a baseline, with performance improvements to come in the final driver.
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Overall stability with Direct3D applications was for the most part very good, considering that we’re still dealing with early hardware and drivers. But there were quite a few little snags here and there that need to get fixed however. For instance, we noticed that IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles doesn’t work properly with FRAPS running in the background, but runs fine once FRAPS is left off. Therefore we didn’t run any benchmarks with IL-2. Textures would occasionally flash in Unreal Tournament 2003, while we were unable to benchmark Tomb Raider with depth of field disabled (and some benchmarks wouldn’t complete with DoF in place). S3’s water in Tomb Raider isn’t quite up to snuff either. Halo and 3DMark are the only applications where we’d really give S3 a thumbs-up at this point.
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Keep in mind that S3 is by no means finished optimizing the D3D portion of their driver, only they’re a little further along in D3D than they are with OGL.
SIDEBAR: I still haven’t had a chance to try DeltaChrome out with Max Payne 2. S3 has worked hard to get this game running well also.
| Board layout | Page:: ( 5 / 15 ) |
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The board is sprinkled with capacitors and voltage regulator modules, which reiterates the low power requirements of the DeltaChrome graphics core. Remember that this is board that shares a common ancestry with the mobile market.
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Like NVIDIA, Silicon Image’s Sil 164CT64 DVI transmitter is used for the DVI connection while the output on the card’s backplate can be used to hook the card up to an HDTV, or your regular television.
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S3 is playing a pretty active role in the board design, just like ATI and NVIDIA with their high-end boards. In particular we hope that they set some type of standard on the board’s output circuitry. The DeltaChrome chip includes dual 400MHz 10-bit DACs, so that should help somewhat, but we’d hate to see the sharp 2D visuals present on our reference board degenerate into an atrocious display output on a $70 S4 card.
Two board designs are available for DeltaChrome, a six-layer 8”x4” BGA PCB (the one pictured here) and a four-layer 8”x4” TSOP design.
SIDEBAR: I told myself I wouldn’t take as many pictures for this article, but I just kept snapping away (as you can see)!
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 6 / 15 ) |
System Setup
AMD Opteron 244 (1.8GHz)
MSI K8T Master2-FAR
1GB Corsair XMS Registered DDR400 SDRAM
ATI RADEON 9600 XT
Sapphire ATLANTIS RADEON 9500
Driver version CATALYST 3.9
S3 DeltaChrome S8 reference board
Driver version 15.06.33.4
MSI GeForce FX5600-VTDR128
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
Driver version Detonator 53.03
Driver version Detonator 52.16 (for 3DMark testing)
Seagate Barracuda SATA hard drive
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 9.0b
Benchmarks
3DMark 03 Ver. 340
NASCAR Racing 2003 Season (Bristol custom demo)
Quake III: Arena version 1.32 (fscrusher demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003 (T2 custom demo)
Halo
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (Beyond3D custom demo)
SIDEBAR: Bapco recently released SYSmark 04.
| 3DMark 03 Synthetics | Page:: ( 7 / 15 ) |
3DMark 03: DirectX
SIDEBAR: We tested the NVIDIA cards with Detonator 52.16 for 3DMark, with patch 340.
| 3DMark 03 Gaming | Page:: ( 8 / 15 ) |
3DMark 03: DirectX
SIDEBAR: We tested the NVIDIA cards with Detonator 52.16 for 3DMark, with patch 340.
| NASCAR Racing 2003 | Page:: ( 9 / 15 ) |
Nascar 2003: OpenGL
SIDEBAR: What racing game do you suggest we replace NASCAR 2003 with? Hint: NFS:Underground is not the answer unfortunately.
| Halo | Page:: ( 10 / 15 ) |
Halo: DirectX
SIDEBAR: Microsoft really needs to reduce the price on Halo PC.
| Quake III | Page:: ( 11 / 15 ) |
Quake III - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: We also tested the S8 with CoD. Lets just say it wasn’t pretty.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 | Page:: ( 12 / 15 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: We recently conducted an interesting interview with AMD. It will go up next week.
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 13 / 15 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: Splinter Cell is based on a modified version of the UT engine.
| Tomb Raider | Page:: ( 14 / 15 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: We test Tomb Raider with the V49 patch.
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 15 / 15 ) |
For instance, S8 sports an eight pixel pipeline architecture, just like the RADEON 9500 PRO. The chip is clocked at an even 300MHz, which goes beyond RADEON 9500 PRO’s specs, and is paired with a 128-bit 300MHz memory interface (600MHz effective) that yields up to 9.6GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth, a figure that also surpasses the RADEON 9500 PRO. Likewise, S8 supports 96-bit pixel precision (128-bit vertex) and S3’s own occlusion culling techniques, although they’re not quite as robust.
S3’s 2D/video engine is also capable of performing many of the same functions as ATI’s, thanks to its Chromotion programmable video engine, which can apply pixel shader effects to video as well as handle fixed function processing such as IDCT.
What really separates S8 and DeltaChrome in general from the other graphics players however is its integrated HDTV/video encoder. Typically this functionality is provided by an external chip, with DeltaChrome it’s now integrated on the graphics core. This should bring video encoding functionality to all new price points, assuming S3’s board partners provide the proper cables. We wouldn’t be surprised if some skimped here.
This is where S3 runs into another potential snag with DeltaChrome – finding board partners. So far, the only company that has announced an official agreement with S3 is Club3D. While Club3D is a big player in Europe, their presence in USA and Asia is much smaller. These are two important markets that S3 must penetrate in order to achieve sales success. In our opinion, CP Technology seems like a perfect fit – the company has a large presence in Asia and the US through its Powercolor brand, as well as extensive distribution channels in both markets. CP has also demonstrated a willingness to adopt multiple graphics manufacturers, having built products on SiS and NVIDIA GPUs in the past. Of course, the fact that they have a DeltaChrome page up on their site is also a strong indication that they will be jumping onboard.
But other than these two companies, who else will adopt S3’s DeltaChrome technology? It will be interesting to see how this story develops.
Editor's Note: It has come to our attention that Club3D is owned by CP Technology. So technically, S3 has one board partner up to this point. (Thanks Stefan Bassing!)
The S8 board we tested with today is aimed to compete at the low-end of the mainstream segment, think RADEON 9500/RADEON 9600 and GeForce FX 5600/GeForce FX 5700. This card will not be competing with RADEON 9600 PRO/XT or GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. We only included scores with the RADEON 9600 XT and GeForce4 as a point of reference. When you keep that in mind, the S8 isn’t too bad, but performance does need to improve. Fortunately S3 still has a little more time to polish its drivers, but already we can’t help but wonder what if this board would’ve been delivered on time. S3 would’ve had an instant contender on their hands! We’ll have to wait and see how things pan out with final drivers and a final board, but even in today’s market S8 still has the basic specs to compete well in its intended market.
In light of all this, it’s too early to come to any conclusions on DeltaChrome. Obviously, it’s too bad this technology won’t see retail until 2004, but at the same time it’s good to see that S3 isn’t rushing this product to market. S3 is spending the next few weeks polishing up its display driver and finalizing the retail board design. As it stands now, the driver shows promise in games such as Unreal Tournament 2003 and Halo, but still needs work in OpenGL as well as titles like Tomb Raider, NASCAR Racing 2003, and Splinter Cell. Having a solid display driver that performs well, and, just as importantly, offers excellent stability and compatibility with a wide range of software applications is critical for S3’s reemergence in the desktop graphics market.
If S3 can get this formula down with DeltaChrome, and then build on it with follow-up versions like DeltaChrome 2, S3 could be well on its way to sales success.
SIDEBAR: What do you think of S3’s DeltaChrome so far? Was it worth the wait, or were you hoping for more? Speak!