Talk:S3 Savage

Hey, thanks for adding the chipset tables. It needed that. S3 is getting serious about market share again, so the company deserves more work on the write-up. This is still a great and distinguised company, even if it was sold off to VIA. One of the few high tech startups to still have descendant products around 15 years after launch. Timharwoodx 10:33, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Repeated info
After this line "Motherboard integrated chipsets" the info about being sold and the integration into motherboard chipsets is repeated almost verbatim.

SuperSavage?
Anybody have any information they can add about the S3 SuperSavage? Appears to have been the integrated video of choice for certain Toshiba Satellite laptops. [Specifically, Toshiba Satellite 2400-S251 contains S3 SuperSavage/IXC 1179]


 * It's a hybrid Savage4 / Savage2000. They added an extra TMU per pipe for the Savage4-based 3D engine while using the Savage2000 2D processor. I imagine Savage2000 was more than slightly borked (the card never did work very well) so they just tweaked the Savage4.

Savage/MX & IX information missing
Read over the article 3 times and haven't been able to find any reference to a chip I very commonly see: a Savage/MX. Not a Savage 4/MX, not a SuperSavage/MX (that I've never even heard of), but simply "S3 Graphics Savage/MX". It's a notebook chip as indicated in the first few lines of a SuperSavage article here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/736 - but this Wikipedia page has left me with more questions than answers.

Clearly the Savage/MX I have is not an "integrated GPU" as part of the northbridge. The chipset in the PC is an Intel AGP chipset, and the Savage/MX connects via AGP 2x. It also has 8mb of dedicated graphics memory. What I wanted to know was what kind of capabilities it supported in those few 8mb of memory. I've had it running Quake II in OpenGL mode, but won't go full-screen (presumably due to video memory which is a bit... counterintuitive, since full-screen means it doesn't have to draw the desktop as well). Would be nice to know more hardware specs on the thing, but according to this page, it never existed... (since I don't have a Wikipedia "account", I can be found at fb.com/falconfour) 98.192.167.92 (talk) 09:48, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

32-bit color performance
This section claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Savage#Savage4 "by continuing with a bandwidth-constraining 64-bit memory bus, S3 guaranteed this graphics card would never be a performance part under 32-bit color."

Yet reviews from the time and bechmarks show very good 32-bit rendering performance with minimal loss in speed (typically less than 10%) compared to 16-bit mode. The bandwidth issue might apply to 32-bit 2D GUI acceleration at high resolutions, but the Savage4 GPU line seems to have been relatively well respected for its 2D performance as well.

See: https://www.anandtech.com/show/291/17 " The Savage4 is by far the best solution for 32-bit color rendering, even outpacing the TNT2 in terms of performance under Quake 2 at 32-bit rendering." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kool kitty89 (talk • contribs) 04:47, 23 January 2020 (UTC)