Unfortunately, in practice, the Savage3D turned out to be one of the biggest failures of the industry. While the Savage3D did manage to find its very own niche market with Super7 users as well as some lower end Slot-1 users, the product itself as well as its drivers were quite immature and the product never really attained its full potential. The only big-name to boast a truly reliable Savage3D solution was Hercules, a company whose devotion to quality led them to a discriminating process of hand picking Savage3D chips for their accelerators, which made Hercules' Savage3D boards undoubtedly the best in the industry.
But in the grand scheme of things, it would take much more than Hercules, a company much smaller than the Diamonds and Creatives out there to save S3's rear with the Savage3D. What S3 needed was another chance, should the market give them another chance and more importantly, is it worth re-visiting S3 after what they pulled with the Savage3D?
Let's find out as AnandTech takes an in-depth look at S3's latest shot at a low-cost, high-performance video-solution. Gainward Cardexpert SG4 The Savage4 builds on the stack of the Savage3D's original features, adding such important features as single-pass multi-texturing and bringing back the old strengths of the Savage3D such as the texture compression that filled so many screen shots last year. As with most other 3D accelerators that are just now hitting the streets, the Savage4 provides compatibility with both AGP 2X and 4X specifications, with the 4X versions of the parts hitting the streets towards the end of the year with Intel's release of the upcoming AGP 4X compliant chipset aka Camino.
The Savage4 allows for a number of different memory configurations, allowing for manufacturers to custom make their products fit the price and performance needs of their target market. At first, only 16MB and 32MB boards will be seen on the market, however there is always the option of pursuing a cheaper 8MB alternative for OEMs and other such cases where price is a very delicate issue.
After discussing the topic with a couple of manufacturers, it seems like the 32MB Savage4 based products won't be too big of a rarity in the low-cost isles at your local computer hardware store. Also, mimicking the latest from 3dfx and NVIDIA and soon to be Matrox , the Savage4 also supports the "oh-so-marketable" digital interface for flat panel LCD displays, a feature which will slowly gain popularity and eventually pick up as the desired output port on video cards when digital LCD monitors drop to a more reasonable price point.
Released June 10, Offered good value for the money at the time. The i used interleaved memory. High performance GUI accelerators during and The family includes the , , and chips. The x68 chips include motion video acceleration features including color space conversion and video scaling. An evolution of the Higher integration reduces overall product cost. There are several variants.
MX was designed as a power-effecient mobile graphics solution, yet it made appearance on desktop due to low cost. The original chip and the VX have inadequate performance outside of S3D games. S3 Trio3D lacks support for S3D titles. The DX and GX have approximately double the 3D performance and can run some Direct3D adequately if the driver is compatible with the game. Later chips are somewhat faster still.
The x boot-text problem can be resolved by altering the savagefb. Now, locate the following function:. Alter the lines. Recompile and reinstall the Kernel, reboot or reload the module and the savagefb should use the new resolution. Some quirks in the interactions between the OS and the Savage hardware can cause system lockups, especially due to high video load and 3D rendering operations.
For a more complete description of this problem and the workarounds, see the Problem with video related system lockup page. On some systems a black 'X' which is actually the old default XFree86 pointer appears frozen in the middle of the screen inside of X Windows.
This problem can be remedied by setting. Also see the Problem with black X page for more information. If 3D acceleration is not working on your system after installing the DRM savage module , or 3D programs are exhibiting strange behavior, one of the following changes may fix the problem.
First, most Savage chips do not have enough video memory to support 3D textures and acceleration with a frame buffer depth of 24 bits. Therefore, you may need to change "DefaultDepth 24" to "DefaultDepth 16" in the "Screen" section of xorg.
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