nVidia and ATI have had the speed
crowns for quite some time. The last real competitor to them
was 3dfx, and that was years ago. S3 is definitely coming
around, however. You aren't going to see any screaming
speeds with these cards - Even with the 700MHz clock of the
S27, you're looking at performance that is roughly on-par
with a GeForce 6600. That isn't anything to shy away from,
though – GF 6600 level performance with a card that is
feature rich and power friendly may be just what is needed.
Just how feature rich are these cards though?
S25:
PCIE 16x Compatible
GPU Clock 600MHz
Memory Clock 400MHz
32 or 64bit 128MB
Memory Bus
DDR1, DDR2
S27:
PCIE 16x Compatible
GPU Clock 700MHz
Memory Clock 700MHz
128bit Memory Bus
DDR1, DDR2, DDR3
MultiChrome
The cards will not support Pixel Shader
3.0 (in hardware), but do support Pixel Shader 2.0 which the
majority of current-day 3D applications make use of. With
ample clock speed, and configurations at 128MB of RAM, the
figures provided by S3 place the ChromeS27 in the realm tad
above the 6600. Since review samples are not available yet,
it is difficult to provide solid numbers except those
provided by S3. There are some features worth noting
however, such as MultiChrome, Chromomotion 3.0, HiDef
support and some others.
I asked Nadeem directly about the
output of the cards. Though many cards support HD out, there
are cases where a card is not capable of doing full HD out
or does interlacing in order to achieve high resolutions.
Not so in the case of the S25 and S27, which will natively
support all common HD resolutions for output purposes. This
is important in media machines, especially those used on
non-PC displays.
1080 x 1920 support for 60i and 30/24p
720 x 1280 support for 60i and 30/24p
480 x 704 support for 60p, 60i,
30/24p
480 x 640 support for 60p, 60i, 30/24p
You may notice the lack of full 60p
support at highest output resolutions, though that is still
a rare find, and doing interlaced 60FPS output for HDTV is
pretty standard, and when done natively looks good. We'll
have to wait to see the cards in action before we can judge
visual quality, though in the past the Unichrome series has
offered very decent 2D appearance. Both cards also implement
the "PureFlow" technology, which does not convert to RGB
before passing visual data to the encoder, meaning
theoretically you should have no quality loss in using a
standard TV or HDTV display versus a monitor.
All in all, performance is not going to
be up to par versus top tier desktop cards. Moreover, if the
figures given are accurate, depending on price these cards
may end up being a perfect entry-level solution, and perhaps
a golden media center solution. The cards will carry Vista
support, and apparently will be enough to run the next
generation of Windows just fine.
To me, visual quality is often more
important than speed, especially when dealing with video and
video playback. The S3 cards natively support various
image-enhancing filters, such as the ability to vary the
interlacing method used on screen at different spots,
depending on what would look better.
