Via's S3 Graphics is going to try to make a comeback to the standalone graphics market, and has offered up the PCI Express-based GammaChrome S18 PCIe to the Developer Forum this week in San Francisco. S3 said that its first target will be to compete with the ATI X600.
According to Nadeem Mohammad, Via's product marketing manager, the GammaChrome S18 will contain four vertex pipelines, with a core clock that will range up to 500 MHz. The chip's memory interface will connect to GDDR-1 DRAM, with an interface ranging up to 450 MHz. In a demonstration running on an ATI-configured machine, the chip generated a 3DMark score of about 1,960 3DMarks using the default settings of 3DMark'05, under a resolution of 1,024 x 768 pixels.