S3 Savage4

Written by - on 07 November 2009. Posted in Savage 4

The Savage 4 2D/3D video chip was released by S3 in 1999. This chip was supposed to be a cheap alternative to RivaTNT. And he succeeded. The low price and good image quality, as well as decent speed, made it the favorite of all those who in 1998 chose Savage3D as a cheap accelerator for their system. What's new in the chip?

First of all, it's excellent image quality. The image looks the way it should. 128 bit memory architecture. Support up to 32MB SDRAM/SGRAM. A pipelined processor that facilitates the work of the CPU. One pass trilinear filtering. 300MHz RAMDAC.

Specifications S3 Savage4

type	2D/3D
Technology	0.25 Micron
Throughput	8 mPolys/sec
Fillrate	140 mPix./sec
API	DirectX 6.0/OpenGL/S3 Metal
OpenGL	ICD
RAMDAC	300
Memory	Up to 32 Mb SGRAM/SDRAM
Z-Buffer	16-bit integer, 24-bit FPU
Max 3D resolution	1600x1200x16 1280x1024x32
32-bit rendering	YES

Finally, S3 made a chip with good rendering quality, which cannot be said about 2D. 2D was just bad - brakes in high resolutions and a bad picture. Apparently, it was calculated that you would work at 800x600 and play at 1280x1024. This is also because the chip was designed to work in high 3D resolutions, however, it was really possible to play only at resolutions up to 1024x768. Thanks to texture compression, cards based on this chip showed excellent results when working with large textures.

The chip has a high-quality engine for working with video. Due to this, many Savage4 cards came with a TV-out. The chip is available in three versions - Savage 4GT, Savage 4Pro, Savage 4Pro+, Savage4 Extreme. All these versions differed in operating frequencies