S3 Graphics: Gone But Not Forgotten

[neeyik]

#TBT These days it's rare to see a new hardware company break ground in the world of PCs, but 30 years ago, they were popping up all over the place. Join us as we pay tribute to S3 and see how its remarkable story unfolded over the years.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/article/2230-s3-graphics/

 

[Loadedaxe]

I remember my first PC game, Terminal Velocity. I played on a Diamond S3 card and added my own 2 mb of ram in the addon slots.

 

[theruck]

What about the power of S3 graphics was it consuming high power

nobody ever measured

 

[Raytrace3D]

Ah good times... my very first 4MB graphics card was an S3 VIRGE. I later owned several of them and purchased several more for other people's computers who had an available PCI slot. It was a decent upgrade at the time if you had integrated graphics on store bought PCs and needed a cheap upgrade. I also had a S3 Savage at one point, but by then 3dfx had started offering more compelling cards and jumped over to owning a Monster 3D, Banshee, and a few Voodoo cards.

 

[Aranarth]

I had several of the cards pictured including the diamond multimedia in various 486 and Pentium1 machines.

When I worked at PC Warehouse in Lansing we used to get boxes of the Trident 64's to throw in new pc's. Cards worked really well for 2d graphics, the Solitare test was impressive for the price we were getting the cards at and if you needed 3d we would throw in a voodoo 2.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I had an ECS PM800-M2 (man, how on EARTH did I remember that model number?) way back in the day that had integrated S3 Chrome graphics. I used it as a file server in my home network because the Pentium-4 CPU it supported wasn't useful for anything else at the time so I streamed movies, music, etc. through my home network with it. The S3 Chrome graphics were more than sufficient for Windows XP Pro and I didn't really use them much as the only time I ever powered up the old CRT monitor attached to it was for diagnostic purposes or to add more content to the library. It only had an AGP slot anyway so it's not like a card would have made it any kind of graphics powerhouse. At the time, S3 was a part of VIA and was included in the VIA PM800 chipset.

It was a pretty-looking motherboard with a striking purple PCB colour:

PM800-M2 (1.0) ECS ELITEGROUP Motherboard Mainboard Drivers Manuals BIOS

 

[Athlonite]

So you're going to go from ISA to PCI and completely miss the VLBus versions S3 had?

 

[Wrinkle]

Nice article, thanks for the links to the old reviews

These guys were omnipresent. For a while the first thing you would see on practically every pc was a S3 bios message.

 

[elementalSG]

I have fond memories of wanting to play Quake III and Unreal Tournament, but being too poor in college to actually afford a NVidia TNT2 or GeForce256 or 3dfx Voodoo. So S3 Savage 2000 it was and great fun I had with it 20+ years ago now!

 

[nnguy2]

I have fond memories of wanting to play Quake III and Unreal Tournament, but being too poor in college to actually afford a NVidia TNT2 or GeForce256 or 3dfx Voodoo. So S3 Savage 2000 it was and great fun I had with it 20+ years ago now!

I was in same boat! Being a high school sophomore at the time, the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 was first AIB card I bought to play games.

 

[Musician]

I had the S3 Virge back in the day and as a student, I could only envy the folks with Savage, Voodoo and Riva TNT.

 

[Markoni35]

One day I'm gonna buy myself one of those new GeForce cards. I hear they can run Quake II at ultra-res 1024x768 without stuttering.

 

[0VERL0RD]

Other great names at the time - Bitboys? Pity Vaporware doesn't count as releasing an actual Product!

 

[DSirius]

Thank you again for this wonderful journey in hardware graphics history. Please keep posting more article like this.
Minor observation: Yara's link is not working, is returning 404 error. When I saved it, it was a pdf file which also did not open.

 

[i like foxes]

Hah hah I ve got such a card in an old PC which is lying in a box .I m 99.99% sure it will run . The PC has Pentium 200MHz ,S3 2MB video card and 16MB RAM , 6GB WD hdd . he he

 

[ChrisH1]

They do live on; the S3 card is one of the most emulated ones in the field of retro gaming or software via things like dosbox and PCEm. My copy of Windows 95 on PCEm is running on an emulated S3 ViRGE/DX/GX Rev A with 4Mb, and Voodoo 3dfx v2-1000. Ah, memories.

 

[jpvalverde85]

Had the Stealth 3d 2000 Virge with 4MB. Good for 2D, lackluster for 3D, always ended playing in software mode or with a smidgen higher res on 16bit bpp but without bilinear. Tested a Savage4 and Savage2000, the hardware was 95%-99% ok but software support was so poor that tanked the performance, actually Savage2000 was pretty fast on OpenGL on some games but the lack of a working hardware T&L engine I guess killed it, otherwise could have been a great rival to GF 256 and GF2 MX series, ATi did it right with the first Radeon and survived to keep fighting another round. The S3 Graphics IGPs under the VIA brand actually where useful on cheap systems, workable at least for a good amount of time when VIA was a brand at chipsets.

 

[Manimattor]

Yeah! Quake 3 Arena with S3TC on Savage 2000 with the custom texture packs was awesome!

 

[Ben Myers]

Interesting times. As a member of the trade press back then, I got to meet Yara, the Diamond people and the Number 9 people.

 

[Kam7r]

The S3 Trio 64v2 4mo EDO pci was my 1st graphic card... I almost said "GPU" hahaha added a Voodoo 1 4mo, used it until I switched the voodoo 1 for the voodoo 2 12mo it was better than the ATI 3D rage pro 8mo agp I had too ( still have this ati, and it's still working ) then I upgraded to a voodoo3 3000 16mo but you now what ... I still have the S3 trio in a cardboard to this day and I really think it's still working, it's in pristine condition