S3 Savage4 Preview

by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 1, 1999 8:55 PM EST

Savage4 Specs

High-Performance 2D/3D/Video Accelerator

  • Floating point triangle setup engine
  • Single cycle 3D architecture
  • 8M triangles/second setup engine
  • 128-bit rendering pipeline
  • 140M pixels/second trilinear fill rate
  • Full AGP 4X/2X, including sideband addressing and execute mode
  • S3 DX6 texture compression (S3TC)
  • Flat panel desktop monitor support
  • High quality DVD video playback

3D Rendering Features

  • Single-pass multiple textures
  • Hardware bump mapping
  • Full scene anti-aliasing
  • Anisotropic filtering
  • 8-bit stencil buffer
  • Single cycle trilinear filtering
  • 32-bit true color rendering
  • Specular lighting and diffuse shading
  • Alpha blending modes
  • MPEG-2 video textures
  • Vertex and table fog
  • 16- or 24-bit Z-buffering
  • Sprite anti-aliasing, reflection mapping, texture morphing, shadows, procedural textures and atmospheric effects

Motion Video Architecture

  • High quality up/down scalar
  • Planar to packed format conversion
  • Motion compensation for full speed DVD playback
  • Hardware subpicture blending and highlights
  • Multiple video windows for video conferencing
  • Contrast, hue, saturation, brightness and gamma controls
  • 60MHz VIP video port allows HDTV resolutions
  • Digital port for NTSC/PAL TV encoders

High Speed Memory Bus

  • 125/143 MHz memory interface
  • 2 to 32 MB frame buffer
  • 1Mx16 or 2Mx32 or 4Mx16 SDRAMs
  • 256Kx32 or 512Kx32 or 1Mx32 SGRAMs
  • SO-DIMM memory upgrade
  • Block write support

2D Acceleration Features

  • Highly optimized 128-bit graphics engine
  • Full featured 2D engine for acceleration of BitBLT, rectangle fill, line draw, polygon fill, panning/scrolling and hardware cursor
  • 8, 16, and 32 bpp mode acceleration

Flat Panel Desktop Monitor Support

  • 24-bit digital interface for flat panel encoders
  • Auto-expansion and centering for VGA text and graphics modes
  • Support for all resolutions up to 1280x1024

Full Software Support

  • Drivers for major operating systems and APIs: [Windows. 9x, Windows NT 4.0/5.0, Windows 3.x and OS/2. 2.1/3.0 (WarpTM), Direct3DTM, DirectDrawTM and DirectShowTM, OpenGLTM ICD for Windows 9x and NT]
  • Comprehensive SDK, utilities and ISV tools
  • ISV and bundling programs

Additional Features

  • 300MHz RAMDAC with gamma correction
  • I2C serial bus and flash ROM support
  • ACPI and PCI power management
  • Hardware and BIOS support for VESA timings and DDC monitor communications
  • PCI 2.2 bus support including bus mastering
  • 27x27mm PBGA with 336 balls
  • 2.5V core with 3.3V/5V tolerant I/O
Step 2: S3TC The Test
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