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S3 DeltaChrome S8 Nitro Performance Preview March 09, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: S3's DeltaChrome is back up for testing again! This time around, we've taken the S8 and faster S8 Nitro out for a test drive. S3's newer driver also offers anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, so we took the opportunity to compare its visuals against ATI and NVIDIA's latest and greatest. See how both cards perform against four other mainstream 3D cards in today's article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 19 ) |
The latest on DeltaChrome
S3’s DeltaChrome has been prepped to offer consumers a third alternative to the ATI/NVIDIA duopoly that has dominated the 3D graphics market for the past several years. Originally DeltaChrome was intended to service the value, mainstream, and high-end markets, but product delays and market conditions have forced S3 to cancel their high-end product, the F1 and F1 Pole Position.
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If you recall our previous DeltaChrome stories, DeltaChrome is S3’s first foray into desktop graphics since their Savage 2000 graphics controller debuted over four years ago. We won’t go into too many of the details, as we’ve posted three articles on the DeltaChrome architecture and its mobile origins, but DeltaChrome is a true DX9 product, supporting 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders as well as other key features such as floating point data format support, 128-bit vertex precision and 96-bit pixel precision.
Like ATI’s high-end offerings and the RADEON 9500 PRO, DeltaChrome’s S8 family sports an eight pixel pipeline configuration, with one texture unit per pixel pipeline. This feature in particular made the RADEON 9500 PRO a tough card to follow for ATI, as its eight pipe configuration allowed it to blaze by the RADEON 9600 PRO in most benchmarks. S3’s S8 also shares another feature with the RADEON 9500 PRO: both cards share a 128-bit memory interface, although in the case of DeltaChrome S8 the controller accesses data in 128-bit chunks, which is not quite as efficient as ATI’s split design.
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S3 has two DeltaChrome S8 variants, S3 S8 and S3 S8 Nitro, with the Nitro part running at higher clock speeds for the core and memory. S3 has increased the S8 Nitro’s clock frequencies since our last article, Nitro will now ship at 325MHz core and memory (an increase of 10MHz), while S3 is still aiming for 300MHz core and memory for the S8.
Building on S3’s roots in 2D and video performance, the DeltaChrome is quite capable in these areas as well. Not only does card boast integrated HDTV encoding, DeltaChrome’s pixel shaders can access video signals such as MPEG 2/4, Windows Media 9, etc. where the shaders can apply post-processing effects like neon edges, sharpen, and emboss. S3 even has a de-blocking filter for cleaning up internet webcasts. S3 also signed a deal with Intervideo, whose popular WinDVD software also supports the technology once patched.
Price and availability
S3 had hoped to have both boards available at the beginning of this year, but manufacturing delays have prevented them from bringing S8 to market. Now S3 plans to have S8 and S8 Nitro cards hit retail soon in Europe, where S3 has a board partnership with Club3D. In fact, boards can already be ordered. Asia will follow shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, S3 hasn’t given us a firm date on when we can expect S8 to hit North American shores other than the beginning of the second half of this year, but with the ATI and NVIDIA manufacturing exclusives broken, S3’s chances of snagging a board partner or two aren’t as difficult as they would have been 12 months ago. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if S3 could snag a board partner or two, provided consumer interest and the price/performance ratio is there.
As far as pricing is concerned, S3 hasn’t nailed down final prices, but we’ve been told that the S8 should be priced in the $136-$149 range, while the S8 Nitro should retail for $169. This places these boards squarely against the RADEON 9600/9600 XT from ATI and the 5700 and 5700 Ultra from NVIDIA.
SIDEBAR: S3 DeltaChrome is built on a 0.13-micron manufacturing process by TSMC
| AA image quality | Page:: ( 2 / 19 ) |
Of course, all the performance in the world is worth nothing if your output looks like a stick figure. This is why we decided to take another look at DeltaChrome’s 3D output display quality. In our last preview, we were limited by S3’s driver, most features were disabled. Fortunately S3’s latest build opens up 2xAA, which is limited to just Direct3D for now.
We say “2xAA” as that’s the name of the setting S3 has chosen, but S3’s 2x implementation actually takes 4 samples. As we've mentioned previously, S3 utilizes less efficient supersampling rather than multisampling, so DeltaChrome will likely never win any benchmarks with AA enabled, and for optimal performance you will want to stick to low resolutions. We originally reported that AA was limited to 1024x768 (as we were told) but found that 1280x1024 seemed to work properly. Let’s take a look at FutureMark’s 3DMark first:
First S3:
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ATI:
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NVIDIA:
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Notes
If you look along the leading edges of the two B-17s on the bottom of the image, you’ll see that the ATI RADEON 9600 XT continues to rein supreme in AA. Play close attention to the wings in particular. We’d have to give the second place nod to NVIDIA, the jaggies on the edge of the wings with GeForce FX 5700 Ultra blend a little bit smoother than S3 DeltaChrome S8 Nitro.
DeltaChrome S8 Nitro
RADEON 9600 XT
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
IL-2 Sturmovik
Normally we run IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles in OpenGL mode, but since the S3 driver doesn’t offer AA support in OpenGL we ran the S3 card in D3D mode. Let’s start with S3 first again:
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Now ATI:
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NVIDIA:
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Notes
The standings remain unchanged, clearly ATI is the leader in AA quality (we apologize for the 800x600 S3 IL-2 screenshot).
SIDEBAR: S3 uses film houses for the codenames of its chips.
| AF image quality | Page:: ( 3 / 19 ) |
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ATI:
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NVIDIA:
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Notes
We’re going to have to zoom in to get a real good look, but offhand the S3’s grass really stands out on the left hand side, just off the runway. Whereas the grass on the ATI and NVIDIA cards blends smoothly up to the runway in this area, you can clearly see the difference between the runway and the field on the DeltaChrome card at the 16x setting, while it’s hard to spot a difference between ATI’s 8x implementation and their sharper 16x setting:
S8 Nitro
RADEON 9600 XT
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
After S3 takes the top spot, it’s a hard call between ATI and NVIDIA.
Quake 3
S3:
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ATI:
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NVIDIA:
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Notes
Once again, we’re going to examine image quality at their maximums, although in Quake 3 the differences are harder to spot. The bottom line is that all three cards look good, so the final call is going to be more subjective.
We’re going to crank out the magnifying glass and focus in on the area just beneath the rocket launcher. The screenshots below are taken with a 500% zoom:
S8 Nitro
RADEON 9600 XT
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
Even when zoomed in, it’s very hard to see a difference here. The S3 and ATI boards render the floor beneath the rocket launcher very similarly. It does look as if the gray floor textures behind the RL on the S3 board are sharper and more distinct, with the ATI and NVIDIA cards a step behind. We leave this call to you to decide.
Before we go, we did notice one interesting aspect with the S3 card once the mipmap transitions are highlighted:
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Notice the harsh transitions between the mipmap levels, which are highlighted red, green, and blue. This suggests that S3 isn’t giving us true trilinear filtering, although we’ve clearly enabled it in the control panel.
SIDEBAR: DeltaChrome was internally codenamed Columbia.
| Test conditions | Page:: ( 4 / 19 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
ASUS K8V Deluxe
512MB OCZ EL PC3200 (DDR400) SDRAM
ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 9600
ATI RADEON 9600 XT
Driver version CATALYST 4.2
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600
Driver version ForceWare 52.16/56.56 (52.16 was used for 3DMark, 56.56 for all other tests)
S3 DeltaChrome S8
S3 DeltaChrome S8 Nitro
Driver version 15.08-09.b
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0b
Benchmarks
3DMark 03 v340
ShaderMark 2.0
Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
Call of Duty (demo0032 custom demo)
Quake III: Arena version 1.32 (fscrusher demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003 (T2 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (paris demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved (stock benchmark)
SIDEBAR: The S8 Nitro card ran cool and quiet during our testing.
| ShaderMark 2.0 | Page:: ( 5 / 19 ) |
ShaderMark 2.0
SIDEBAR: As you can see, ATI is still the only manufacturer capable of performing all tests.
| 3DMark 03 synthetics | Page:: ( 6 / 19 ) |
SIDEBAR: Did think you’d see 3DMark 03 again did you?
| 3DMark 03 | Page:: ( 7 / 19 ) |
SIDEBAR: We ran the NVIDIA cards with Det 52.16 for 3DMark testing.
| Call of Duty | Page:: ( 8 / 19 ) |
Call of Duty – OpenGL
SIDEBAR: S3 uses a 6-layer board design for S8 Nitro.
| IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles | Page:: ( 9 / 19 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: S3 DeltaChrome Product Webage
| Quake III | Page:: ( 10 / 19 ) |
Quake III - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: S3’s DeltaChrome partner in Europe will be Club3D.
| Quake III 8xAF | Page:: ( 11 / 19 ) |
Quake III - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: DeltaChrome will also power the video behind the ApeXtreme video game console.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 | Page:: ( 12 / 19 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: DeltaChrome was initially unveiled at CES last year
| Unreal Tournament 2003 4xAA | Page:: ( 13 / 19 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: For the value segment, S3 offers its S4 DeltaChrome variant. As its name implies, S4 features half as many pixel pipelines as S8.
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 14 / 19 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: Pandora Tomorrow went gold yesterday.
| Tomb Raider | Page:: ( 15 / 19 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: We enabled depth of field for Tomb Raider testing (V49).
| Lock On: Modern Air Combat | Page:: ( 16 / 19 ) |
Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: In LOMAC you can fly the F-15 and A-10, as well as 3 Russian aircraft.
| UT 2003 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 17 / 19 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003
SIDEBAR: DeltaChrome also shares a mobile cousin, AlphaChrome.
| Halo | Page:: ( 18 / 19 ) |
Halo
SIDEBAR: All cards were forced to run in shader 2.0 mode for Halo testing, keep in mind that this isn’t a custom demo.
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 19 / 19 ) |
S3’s DeltaChrome has matured nicely since we last took a look at it in December. OpenGL performance is more competitive, but as our results show, still needs work. It’s also good to see that S3 has implemented anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in their display driver. Our S3 board even shipped with InterVideo's WinDVD patch that has been optimized to take advantage of DeltaChrome’s Chromotion video engine.
Despite all this, we can’t help but think back to January 2003, when we first reported on S3’s DeltaChrome. The board’s paper specs were impressive, NVIDIA’s NV30 was AWOL and RADEON 9500 PRO was soon to be replaced by the slower, but less expensive RADEON 9600 PRO. If S3 had been able to deliver in summer of last year as promised, S3 would have had a very competitive product on their hands.
Now the DeltaChrome has to compete with NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5700 family, and the ATI RADEON 9600 XT/RADEON 9600. Making matters worse is GeForce FX 5900 XT, street prices on these boards are less than $20 of the retail price we’ve been quoted for S8 Nitro.
The bottom line is that S3 either needs to spend more time to refine its drivers a little more, or undercut ATI and NVIDIA on pricing. Fortunately for S3, they probably have a little room to maneuver on pricing, as DeltaChrome has a modest transistor count, and the board design is fairly tame on the S8 Nitro by today’s standards. If they’re able to achieve good yields at 0.13-micron that should help lower costs as well.
In fact, DeltaChrome’s low power and heat output along with its 2D and video capabilities make it an excellent candidate for use in a multimedia box such as a small form factor system that’s being used as a home theater PC, or a micro-ATX case that’s used to perform similar duties, all it needs is a solid TV tuner.
It’s still too early to come to any final conclusions on DeltaChrome however. Until S3 stamps a final driver for release, all we can do is speculate on the potential for DeltaChrome. One thing is certain though, with ATI and NVIDIA’s next generation mainstream parts right around the corner, the window of opportunity for S3’s S8 family is beginning to close.
SIDEBAR: Are you tired of reading DeltaChrome previews, or are you really hoping S3 will deliver a winner? How do you think it’s progressed since we last tested it? Feel free to share your thoughts in the news comments!