Savage 3D

Savage was a product-line of PC graphics chipsets designed by S3.

At the 1998 E3 Expo S3 introduced the first Savage product, Savage3D. Compared to its ViRGE-derived predecessor (Trio3D), Savage3D was a technological leap forward. Its innovative feature-set included the following:

Unfortunately for S3, deliveries of the Savage3D were hampered by poor manufacturing yields. Only one major board-vendor, Hercules, made any real effort to ship a Savage3D product. S3's yield problems forced Hercules to hand pick usable chips from the silicon wafers. Combined with poor drivers and the chip's lack of multitexturing support, the Savage3D failed in the market.

In early 1999, S3 retired the Savage3D and released the Savage4 family. Many of the Savage3D's limitations were addressed by the Savage 4 chipset.

Savage4 was an evolution of Savage 3D technology in many ways. S3 refined the chip, fixing hardware bugs and streamlining the chip for both cost reduction and performance. They added single-pass multi-texturing, meaning the board could sample 2 textures per pixel in one pass (not one clock cycle) through the rendering engine instead of halving its texture fillrate in dual-textured games like Savage 3D. Savage4 supported the then-new AGP 4X although at the older 3.3 voltage specification. It was manufactured on a 250 nm process, like Savage 3D. The graphics core was clocked at 125 MHz, with the board's SDRAM clocked at either 125 MHz or 143 MHz (Savage4 Pro). They could be equipped with 8-32 MiB memory. And while an integrated TV encoder was dropped, the DVD acceleration was commendable, and the chip supported an early version of the DVI interface for LCDs.

A "LT" suffixed part featured reduced power consumption and was, like ATI's Rage LT series, intended for laptops. Nevertheless, this ended up in several AGP cards such as Number Nine's S3 Savage4 8MB part (pictured).

The Savage4 gained numerous design-wins with board-vendors, including Diamond Multimedia (Stealth III S540) and Creative Labs. The Savage4 series' single cycle trilinear filtering and S3TC texture compression created a 3D card with exceptional image quality. However, 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. Drivers were again an issue with S3's product; holding back overall performance and causing compatibility issues with software and hardware.

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