Graphic Cards World's first pics of Vista D3D10 hardware?

O

octave

Contributor
Source Hexus.net
HEXUS.net : Beans : World's first pics of Vista D3D10 hardware? : Page - 1/1
The things you find when you sort out an old-ish images directory....

Rumour has swirled for a while now about S3 Graphics not creating any D3D9 Shader Model 3.0 part, instead going straight to building a D3D10 Shader Model 4.0 GPU, given the proximity of their dev schedule to the release of Microsoft Windows Vista.

We certainly believe that to be true, now, and we have what we believe are the first spy shots of that SM4.0 chip on a PC PCB, in somewhat working form. Clearly a bring-up or engineering example board, VT6344C -- showing the VIA Technologies parentage -- sports both HDMI and DVI on the backplane, and a modest cooler.

Tiny DRAMs flank the GPU area on two sides, giving either 128MiB or 256MiB depending on density and hinting at mid-range aspirations. Indeed we don't expect S3 Graphics to go after high-end SM4.0 and D3D10 at all when Vista arrives.

Instead we believe S3 to be targetting the mid-range on Vista arrival, where it seems ATI and NVIDIA will leave a gap to more affordable D3D10 parts as they introduce big and (presumably) expensive chips for high-end SKUs first and foremost. If so, S3 Graphics' strategy could well prove fruitful, if their hardware efforts are backed up by some sterling work on the software side.

If these pics show what we think they show, it hints that S3 are a decent way down the development path for such a GPU, hinting that three IHVs will have completed SM4.0 parts when Vista finally breaks cover. We'll say no more for the time being.
Click to expand...

Images Courtesy hexus.net




 
I think that a lot of manufacturers will hold off till the UDP standard has been formalized. It does not make sense to go with HDMI if UDP is backward compatible with both HDMI and DVI.
 
So S3 will finally have a part that will perform as well as a 6600GT!Whoopie big news!Its may support anything it wants but S3 is always 2 generations behind on performance.
 
Performance of the chip itself aside, its the drivers that are the main problems. S3 dosent hold a candle infront of nvidia and ati in that respect. Its because of the drivers, especially when u enable AA and AF that performance suffers.
 
at one time back in the days of the 2D cards S3 was considered a very reputed manufactuer with is Verge series. Even the savage was an ok chip in the middle end segment. lets see what S3 does with these new chips.
 
hunt3r said:
Performance of the chip itself aside, its the drivers that are the main problems. S3 dosent hold a candle infront of nvidia and ati in that respect. Its because of the drivers, especially when u enable AA and AF that performance suffers.
Click to expand...

Yup... exactly. Its not that the hardware itself is lacking. The deltachrome/gammachrome were excellent in terms of hardware but totally sucked in terms of drivers. Without the right software support these cards are just well cards that do nothing :P.
 
Back
Top