S3 Deltachrome S8

Good potential from this early board.

Price: £115

Manufacturer: S3

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Verdict

Pros:
Brave attempt to re-establish S3 brand.

Cons:
Performance testing.

Verdict:
Some potential but boards and drivers need to be reliable and demonstrate good performance if S3 is going to get a foothold in the market.

Nigel Donnelly, Personal Computer World 24 Jun 2004

S3 has long been associated with graphics kit, but the company has been quiet on the serious new launch front for a very long time. Long since absorbed into chipset giant Via, S3 seems excited by the impending arrival of video cards based on its Deltachrome GPUs.

S3 claims the DirectX 9-compliant Deltachrome will offer excellent 3D performance and 2D enhancements to make Windows XP look good without loading the processor too much. All this is expected to be delivered at a competitive price.

We tested an early 256MB board. Despite the bold claims and high hopes, we were a bit disappointed by this early production board. In regular 1,024 x 768 tests, everything ran fine and then we hit problems. Although the card was happy to bench at all resolutions up to 1,600 x 1,200, as soon as full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) was enabled, things started to go wrong. We got a test result with two-times FSAA but the benchmarks crashed at four-times FSAA.

Although this is an early build, such flakiness on standard benchmarks is a bit of a worry. The scores we did get suggest the Deltachrome could perform to a respectable mid-range standard about on a par with an Nvidia FX5700. If S3 can develop solid driver support for the card, it could have potential, but we'll need to wait for full retail versions before we make any decisions.

Contact: S3
www.s3graphics.com

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