S3
Savage4
Full
scene anti-aliasing, true 32 bit 3D rendering, DVD playback, S3TC with
improved 8 bit alpha channel and so on. This article will help all those
who are currently looking for the Savage4 specs on the web(I recommend
that you read the 'Savage4 Reality' article after this). Well, before I
begin here is a brief (not really) overview of what the Savage4 is capable
of.
2D Acceleration
Features:
-
128 bit
graphics engine.
-
BitBLT,
rectangle fill, line draw,polygon fill, panning/scrolling and hardware
cursor.
-
8, 16,
32 bpp mode acceleration
3D Acceleration
features:
-
Anisotropic
filtering (Hitman, Bleem! etc.) ()
-
Full scene
anti-aliasing (Drakan, Hitman, Die Hard Trilogy 2, Max Payne etc.)
-
8 bit stencil
buffer
-
Single
pass multi-texturing
-
Hardware
bump mapping (Tomb Raider : The Last Revelation etc.)
-
Single
cycle Trilnear filtering
-
S3 Texture
Compression or S3TC (Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament, TrickStyle, Deep
Fighter etc.)
-
Sprite
anti-aliasing, reflection mapping, texture morphing, shadows, procedural
textures and atmospheric effects
-
Specular
lighting and diffuse shading
-
140M pixels/second
trilinear fill rate
-
8M triangles/second
set-up engine
Memory
Interface:
-
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
Other Features:
-
300Mhz
RAMDAC with gamma correction
-
Resolution
for CRTs upto 1920x1440 in 32 bit color
-
Resolutions
for Flat Panels upto 1280x1024
-
Refresh
rates upto 160Hz.
Support
for Hardware and Software:
-
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 (Warp™), Direct3D™, DirectDraw™ and DirectShow™,
OpenGL™ ICD for Windows 9x and NT]
-
2.5V core
with 3.3V/5V tolerant I/O
-
ACPI and
PCI power management
The anisotropic
filtering and anti-aliasing features were something new back in 1999's,
when the Savage4 card was released. Not a single card had this feature
and this made the Savage4 a clear winner. Now many cards have these features
including the Voodoo 4 and 5, Geforce 2 etc. Also Savage4 was the second
chip with the new faster AGP 4x technology (after SiS), which when combined
with S3 texture compression (S3TC) provided large sized images to be compressed
and used without any performance loss.
Back