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S3 DeltaChrome S4 Pro Performance Preview July 14, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: ATI and NVIDIA are already established names in the 3D business, but what if a third alternative existed that offered just as many 3D features, good performance, and excellent multimedia, DVD, and 2D capabilities? That's exactly what S3 is striving for with its DeltaChrome line. Today S3 is taking the wraps off its value offering, the S4 Pro. This card is intended to dethrone cards like NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5200/5200 Ultra, but does it accomplish this? See what we think of this card in this article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 14 ) |
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While ATI and NVIDIA have continued to release new products every six months in the high-end segment of the 3D market, the mainstream, and especially the value sectors have seen little change in the past year.
NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5200 family continues to service the value segment. And while GeForce MX 4000 was quietly introduced at the end of last year, this card is more of an OEM play – believe it or not there were some who wanted to replace their GeForce2 MX’s, but weren’t quite ready to pony up to a base GeForce FX 5200.
ATI has been just as reluctant to refresh their value lineup. RADEON 9200 is still the predominant offering, which is essentially just an AGP 8X rehash of RADEON 9000. ATI’s counter to the GeForce FX 5200 series, RADEON 9600 SE, has never really taken off due to its narrow 64-bit memory interface, crippling memory bandwidth and thus the card’s potential performance. ATI has just recently developed a solid DX9 value offering in the X300, but ATI currently has no plans to ever bring this card to market with an AGP interface.
This stagnation has quite frankly left the value market a dull segment to write about, nothing exciting has happened in this space for quite some time. S3 hopes to change all that though with their S4 DeltaChrome.
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The name DeltaChrome probably sounds familiar to you if you’ve been a long-time reader of this site, we’ve previewed one derivative or another of the DeltaChrome for the past 18 months now, with four articles dedicated to DeltaChrome and its development. S3’s plans for DeltaChrome have changed with the evolution of the 3D market. Whereas S3 had originally planned to produce three families of DeltaChrome cards, the highest end DeltaChrome variant, the “F1” line, was cancelled due to market conditions. S3’s S8 DeltaChrome line has seen a limited release so far, with boards shipping from a handful of board partners including Chaintech, Club3D, and IO Data. None of these cards have found their way to US shores however, where the 3D market is considerably more established and competitive.
Now S3 plans to bring their DeltaChrome technology first found in the S8 and S8 Nitro down to the value segment with their S4 family. With the window of opportunity still wide open in this space, and S4’s aggressive pricing and capable feature set, S3 hopes to put a solid dent in the 3D market, but does the S4 have enough gusto to challenge more established players like ATI and NVIDIA? That’s what we’re here today to find out!
| S4 Features | Page:: ( 2 / 14 ) |
In case you’re not familiar with S4, we’ll provide a quick refresher, then get into image quality observations.
S3’s S4 DeltaChrome is a true DirectX 9 part, with support for 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders and floating point data formats. Like ATI’s DX9 offerings, S4 supports 128-bit vertex precision and 96-bit pixel precision, the minimum required for full DX9 compliance.
Borrowing a page from ATI’s playbook, DeltaChrome can use its pixel shaders to apply all kinds of cool post-processing effects to video signals (MPEG 2/4, Windows Media, etc). Neon edges, soft focus, sharpen, and emboss being the current examples. DeltaChrome even has a de-blocking filter, which can be used to clean up Internet webcasts. These features fall under S3’s “Chromotion” video engine and can all be adjusted in the current DeltaChrome driver as part of S3’s “screen toys” under the S3Chromo tab.
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Basically, S3 isn’t pitching DeltaChrome as a benchmark-crushing 3D powerhouse, but a solid all-round card. You’ve got good, playable 3D performance, more than capable 2D and DVD playback, excellent multimedia and video capabilities, and even the ability to drive HDTV; all HDTV resolutions are supported and a component video output (YPbPr) is provided.
In order to make the S4 affordable to produce for the value market, S3 has trimmed the number of pipelines in S4 from eight in the S8 DeltaChrome, to four in the S4 line. Each pixel pipeline is paired with one texture unit for a 4x1 pipeline configuration. For added triangle-pumping prowess, S3 one ups NVIDIA by integrating dual vertex shader units on the S4, double that of GeForce FX 5200. This should theoretically give S4 an advantage in systems with slower CPUs.
Two S4 cards are currently planned, S4 Pro and the faster S4 Nitro. We don’t have final clocks for the Nitro, but the S4 Pro is clocked at 300MHz core and 300MHz memory (in comparison, GeForce FX 5200 Ultra is clocked at 325MHz core/325MHz memory). In order to further reduce manufacturing costs, TSOP, rather than BGA memory modules are used, as well as a four layer board design.
Memory configurations will range from 64MB-256MB, with the graphics core featuring a 128-bit interface to the card’s memory, although we wouldn’t be surprised to see someone ship a very low-end 64-bit S4 card if the market demanded it.
| AA/AF Quality | Page:: ( 3 / 14 ) |
Anti-aliasing
Like all DeltaChrome products, S3 is utilizing supersampling for their AA in S4, which is limited to one setting, 2x. Unfortunately, S4’s AA quality has definitely taken a turn for the worse since we’ve last explored DeltaChrome’s AA quality with the S8. Take a look:
S3 S4 DeltaChrome:
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ATI RADEON 8500:
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NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
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There are several instances where S4’s AA quality isn’t up to the level of ATI and NVIDIA’s. Some notable examples include the right wing of the F-15’s wing and its cockpit canopy. S3’s AA produces noticeably sharper jaggies than the other cards (excuse the NVIDIA shot with no AA, for some reason the canopy and other areas weren’t accurately reproduced in the screenshot, this didn’t occur in the game).
Anisotropic filtering
With ATI, S3, and NVIDIA all implementing some form of filtering optimizations in their current drivers, it’s important to keep an eye out for any shenanigans in terms of image quality. We decided to boot up Far Cry to take a closer look at the filtering implementations presented by the three contenders:
S4 DeltaChrome
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RADEON 8500:
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GeForce FX 5200 Ultra:
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Taking a closer look at this screenshot, we can clearly see the richest textures on the S4 DeltaChrome. The NVIDIA and ATI boards are closer to each other in IQ, with the edge going to RADEON 8500. You can see the added detail just underneath the hedge in this screenshot.
DeltaChrome S4 Pro
RADEON 8500
GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
| Test systems | Page:: ( 4 / 14 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe Rev 2.0
512MB Corsair XMS3200 DDR SDRAM
ATI RADEON 8500
Driver version CATALYST 4.7
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
Driver version 56.72
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0b
Benchmarks
Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
Call of Duty (demo0032 custom demo)
Unreal Tournament 2004 (T3 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (Beyond3D custom demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved (stock benchmark)
Far Cry 1.1 (monkey bay custom demo)
| Call of Duty | Page:: ( 5 / 14 ) |
Call of Duty – OpenGL
| IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles | Page:: ( 6 / 14 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL
| Lock On: Modern Air Combat | Page:: ( 7 / 14 ) |
Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D
| UT 2004 | Page:: ( 8 / 14 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2004
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 9 / 14 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
| Tomb Raider | Page:: ( 10 / 14 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
| Halo | Page:: ( 11 / 14 ) |
Halo – Direct3D
| Far Cry | Page:: ( 12 / 14 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| AF performance | Page:: ( 13 / 14 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2004
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 14 / 14 ) |
Thanks to a lack of activity in the value space, S3’s S4 DeltaChrome has the potential to turn a lot of respective buyer’s heads. Sound outrageous? Just look at the paper specs:
S4 DeltaChrome is a DX9 part with a 4x1 pipeline configuration and dual vertex shaders. In fact, if you look at S3’s basic configuration, S4 shares a lot more in common with ATI’s recently announced X300 rather than NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5200, which is the most popular value DX9 solution on the market right now. S3 also supports nifty video capabilities such as de-blocking of Internet streams and pixel shader powered post-processing effects. This again goes well beyond the capabilities NVIDIA is providing today with GeForce FX 5200. DeltaChrome even provides hardware-accelerated display rotation for single or dual monitor configurations, a feature you’d expect from a Tablet PC instead of a value graphics card.
All this is packaged in a $75-$129 graphics card (depending on configuration) that generates very little heat and runs quietly, making DeltaChrome an interesting alternative for those of you who may be planning to build an inexpensive home theater PC (HTPC).
Because of all this, S4 could be very competitive. We’d even go so far as to say that S4 has more potential for success than any of S3’s other DeltaChrome cards.
But before this can all take place, more has to happen. S3 definitely needs to improve DeltaChrome’s OpenGL performance. Call of Duty and IL-2 Sturmovik performance results with S4 DeltaChrome were far lower than with other cards. Tomb Raider testing also suggests there’s room for improvement in some D3D applications as well. Fortunately, driver stability was good, and compatibility is much better than it was a few months ago, but a little more tuning is definitely necessary.
Second is distribution. Securing design wins with system vendors may be difficult, especially now that Intel has released a DX9 integrated solution in the form of its 915G chipset. S3 could potentially offset this by flooding the Asian OEM market with S4 parts, where Intel’s 915G platform will have a harder time competing due to its price. If S3 can then supplant this with a couple of good board partners with extensive distribution channels worldwide, they could make a solid entrance into the retail market with S4 as well. This is going to be a difficult task in the US market though, where the board partners are established and the American consumer tends to be more brand aware. S3 may really have to undercut their price for S4 in order to compete here.
In any case, it will be interesting to see how the S4 DeltaChrome fares. S3 has a solid piece of hardware here, but it takes a lot more than having a good part on paper in order for a product to ultimately achieve sales success. If anything, watching the DeltaChrome story unfold over the past 18 months has shown just how difficult it is to enter and compete in the 3D market today.