S3 Drivers
As with the other vendors S3 offer a range of driver option panels in order to control the various display and graphics settings available on the board. The options are available as separate tabs under the "Advanced" options from the Display Properties control panel, or available from a launch icon in the system tray.
The full range of driver control panels are as follows:
The first three controls include the "S3Info Plus" panel, giving information on the graphics board and driver versions, "S3Colour Plus", giving colour controls and allowing different schemes to be created and saved, and the "S3Refresh Lock" allowing users to override the default refresh rate settings.
The "S3Display" panel allows control of the screen size and positioning of each of the output devices connected to the graphics board. The "S3Rotate" utility provides the controls for display rotation round 90o ,180o or 270o - this can operate on independent displays and the rotation is a hardware function and operates fully with 2D, 3D and video operations. The "S3Gamma Plus" tab allows controls for the gamma, brightness and contrast settings.
The "S3Chromo" tab allows control over over video playback with "Artistic License Effects" which are allows somewhat similar functionality to ATI's SmartShaders on video files, whilst the deblocking filters are intended to smooth away highly visible block compression artefacts.
The final two panels are the important panels for offering controls over the 3D functionality that can be applied outside of an application panel and there is a tab for the two major graphics API's under Windows: Direct3D and OpenGL. The options are split into three levels which the user can choose to display: Default (green), Medium (yellow) and Advanced (Red). When an option is selected a drop down box with the available options becomes available with the settings that are applicable to that option. At present there are far fewer options available for OpenGL than for DirectX, but whether that is just representative of where S3 are putting their primary development efforts at the moment we don't know, but it would certainly make sense given the number of DirectX titles in relation to the number of OpenGL titles.
Its would appear that these control panels are also undergoing a little refresh as the latest drivers at the time of writing as the Direct3D and OpenGL panels have been updated from the previous drivers, but the others are yet to be brought in line.
In terms of driver compatibility we didn't come across any serious issues with the latest set of drivers and general compatibility with the current applications we tested was fine, at least on the system used in this test.
