"New" playa in da gfx market... beats Radeon 9700

S3/VIA Columbia (now Delta Chrome):

(from The Inquirer)

"The chip will be clocked at 300MHz+ for the graphics processor and 300MHz+ for memory, and will use plain DDR."

"S3 believes that the Columbia "will perform in the 20K+ range for 3DMark2001SE" and outscore even the Radeon 9700 Pro from ATI, and close to the NV30 from Nvidia."

"The cards will not use any kind of tile based rendering but will be optimised for "far more than hierarchical z". The firm calls it an Advanced Deferred Rendering feature and claims it will improve efficiency of the card. Advanced Deferred Rendering can do many things as well as front to back and back to front Z-culling."

And the price?

"Delta Chrome retail boards should be available in Q2 starting from $90."

I\'ll believe it when I see it...

[§ôµÏG®ïñD]

Soungs great.. Hopefully it\'ll drive down ati and nvidia. More competition means less prices and better cards. If it\'s anybetter then ATI card, i\'d buy it..

but i find most S3 cards are crappy. I\'ve got a S3 Verge and S3 Trio64 card sitting around. I use them for backups when flashing new cards. Incase something goes wrong i can use a pci card to flash new agp cards etc..  Get returns on badly flashed AGP cards quite alot.

[nO-One]

This is just like when Kyro said they\'d beat the Ti500 or when Trident said they\'d beat anything ever made. Their products aren\'t bad, but nowhere near as powerful as ATi\'s and nVidia\'s offerings. And they simply don\'t have the same brand recognition as the other two giants.

Still, I hope they\'ll make it, another big player can only be a good thing.

I saw what was planned for the specs of this thing, and every single spec is lower than a 9700 or GF FX.  I\'ll see if I can dig the article up.

I hope they can manage to do what they claim tho... even if they just match or make it slightly slower.   $90?  That\'d be heaven for a card of that performance.  And it\'ll force nVidia and ATI to really lower the price of their card.


EDIT:  Here we go.

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/s3_deltachrome/page2.asp

It\'s a long read, but well worth it if your interested in seeing what kind of competition this will be.

ST Micro Electronics said they\'d beat Ti500 with Kyro? Mmmmmm.. that sounds a bit Sus. And Trident was supposed to be a cheaper Ti4200, not a power performer. More power to them, I say!