S3 Savage4 Preview

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Final Words

The problems AnandTech experienced with the original Savage3D seemed to be completely absent from the quick 4 hour experience Diamond let us have in the lab, definitely a promising sign. It seems as if S3's design has finally matured to the point where a release makes sense, and if Diamond is willing to put their name behind the product, it should be a noticeable improvement over S3's last attempt at a rise to 3D power.

The 2D image quality of Diamond's Savage4 preview board was greater than most TNT boards, however it was still not up to par with Matrox's G200 and definitely not up to par with Number 9's Revolution IV. Luckily, for those 2D image quality fanatics out there with larger monitors that are very sensitive to quality variations at higher refresh rates, Number 9, the 2D quality king, has announced that they'll be working on their own Savage4 product so you may want to keep your eyes open for them as well.

As you can probably guess, the Savage4 isn't going to be 1999's "Voodoo3-killer" rather, it will be what Intel's i740 was during its quick rise to fame, a standard raising product that will make the low cost market smile at the beauty $100 can buy. Although Diamond officially quoted AnandTech a sub $150 price for the Savage4, you can expect actual prices to be much lower than $150 if the Savage4 is going to succeed.

Should you choose a Savage4 over something like a Voodoo2 while the performance difference between the two isn't that great? A year ago the answer would have been a bit on the shaky side, however the time has come to move on from PCI 3D accelerators and S3's Savage4, with its AGP 4X support and S3 Texture Compression feature make it a more desirable solution in the long run. The Savage4 isn't the best performer, but it isn't the worst performer, it should provide gamers that pursue it with a luscious batch of eye candy that will make even the most performance hungry gamers turn heads, that's the beauty of S3TC. The only consideration left now is whether or not game developers will begin to truly harness the power of S3TC, let's hope, for S3's sake, that games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena do more than just list themselves as supporting S3TC.