Conclusion
Looking at the non 3D elements of GammaChrome S18 S3 appear to have got things right with the the PCI Express interface, which seems quite robust as far as performance is concerned, and the video decode processing is up there as well.
Reflecting on the 3D performances, many of the earlier theoretical and specific tests in this review highlighted that S3 have got a number of 3D elements to the GammaChrome S18 working very well - the general image quality is fine, the pixel fill-rate can achieve its theoretical rate in some tests, it appears to utilise a fairly efficient early Hierarchical Z rejection scheme, has Z and stencil performances greater than its colour fill-rate (no doubt useful in Doom 3), and pure fixed function Transformation performance is reasonably high. However, when everything is put together, only in a few of our gaming tests does the S18 manage to meet it peers performances at the moment, and the most likely reason for that is also highlighted by some of the specific tests undertaken earlier: Shaders.
Both ATI and NVIDIA have been concentrating a lot of their efforts into their shader performances, as well as evangelising the use of programmable shaders to developers and the developers, in turn, have now responded such that many of the titles now rely heavily on good shader performances. Whilst, barring any last minute reworks from another spin of the chip, the Vertex and Pixel Shader ALU structures are now set in stone for the S18 chip, S3 can still work on the software side with their drivers. General optimisation, as well as shader compiler optimisers can increase the rendering performance by ensuring that the pipelines on the graphics chip are kept as active as possible, without leaving "bubbles" in the pipeline where execution units are left waiting for another task. This is probably the area that S3 needs to concentrate on most for now.
Of course, another element to the competition is that of pricing. Even if S3 manage increase the performance via software updates, S18 is going to need to be priced very attractively in order for people to be tempted. However, with a 130nm chip this may be fairly costly for them and its not as though there aren't options for S3's competition as, for example, X600 PRO's RV380 core is completely interchangeable with their cheaper RV370 core and ATI could easily supply these in the X600 PRO SKU (in fact they already do with the All-In-Wonder X600 PRO); S18's use of BGA memories, where others can use cheaper TSOP in this market space, is also going to be costlier. ATI and NVIDIA also have the economies of scale on their side which can inevitably bring cost benefits - from chip/board yields, to component pricing - however S3 volumes are likely to be much, much lower hence they may not be able to enjoy such benefits of scale as much. On the whole it would be surprising to hear that S3's operating margins on these products would be close to either ATI or NVIDIA's contemporary boards - fortunately VIA, S3's owner, still has a fairly healthy chipset business, so regardless of the profits of S3's graphics boards, the technology platform is likely to be needed for integrated platforms as some point in time.
S3's graphics business model also had some issues in the DeltaChrome series due to the fact that S3 only supplied their components to board vendors, and making the vendors themselves manufacture the boards - this is an issue for vendors that do not have their own production facilities, instead sub-contracting out, as the manufacturing runs generally have to be fairly large which can be a big investment for a vendor when the product is comparatively risky in the first place. However, S3 have now undertaken manufacturing of the boards themselves such that board vendors do not need quite as large an investment - S3 are now also directly selling these boards themselves with their new online "GStore".
Overall it is pleasing to see that graphics vendors other than ATI and NVIDIA can make a modern graphics chip that is capable of rendering modern graphics, although there is still some work to be done as far as performance is concerned. This article was, of course, a performance preview on a board / chip that is not presently in full production so there can be changes to the hardware and software that may end up affecting the final production versions performance, hopefully in a positive manner.
Our thanks to Club 3D for supplying us with the board on test here. Club 3D will be bringing a range of GammaChrome based products to the European market when S3 enters into mass production.
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