one of the biggest selling points of the S3 Savage was the S3 texture compression, which can sometimes see be used today. it really made textures in Serious Sam and Unreal/UT pop with incredible detail. i think while the GeForce 256 introduced real time cubic environment mapping, the S3 MeTaL in Deus Ex and Unreal made particles and smoke very performance friendly even if overall performance was kinda meh. it was also usually pretty low-power so it competed well in the mobile computing market (laptops, tablets). one feature of S3 is the MacOS support for MeTaL that worked very well, and you can still see it in some iOS implementations for games. it even has a shader language (MSL) so some limited shader capabilities are available for the S3 Savage 4 for games like minecraft.
Watch out, there are also 32-bit memory bus Savage 4 cards. They usually have one memory chip (32-bit wide), or two (16-bit wide). If you want to buy blindly, always buy 4 memory chips savage 4. They have always 64-bit memory bus.
Yes agreed, we tend to be a bit too critical now when we can retrospectively compare with better stuff. I'm sure it did a solid job and brought a lot.of fun to a lot of people at the time. Its great that companies were still being so inventive at the time with things like metal too!
When I was a kid I was going to purchase my first 3d card, I was looking a the Savage 4 Pro PCI or a TNT2 M64 PCI, I ended up with the TNT2 which due to the drivers was probably the best choice, but I suspect the performance was similar and really the market the S3 was targeting, so I don't think the hardware was that bad, although I'm sure the drivers weren't as good.
Interesting video. The Savage 4 seems to perform very similar to the Voodoo Banshee and the TNT1. I also have a VIA KM266 Pro motherboard with an integrated S3 ProSavage8 but no matter what driver I tried it just was not recognized in Windows 98. Very weird.
I had trouble with getting drivers for my motherboard also. I did find some eventually, I'll check later and try and post a link to the ones I have, maybe they'll work with yours.
I've got a rather generic Savage4 GT, and after replacing the single blown cap it remains the main card for my best Slot1 PC. Faster than my Viper V550 in all games despite always being used with 32bit colours (if the games support it), and with actually wider game compatibility - I've played hours of Mechwarrior 4 using it with my Celeron 500 (Slotket on Asus P2L97). Actually had really good results playing DirectX 8/8.1 games on it. This was using the last official drivers. One thing to keep in mind - the Savage4 just doesn't scale past 500MHz CPU, at least not in any meaningful way. I see the same results in Quake II - though at 32bit colours (I run it using Metal, same for Quake 1). Running properly at most there is a 10% impact going from 16bit to 32bit.
@@66mhzbrainI was using the Diamond driver based on Detonator 3.68 with mine. Either Quake or Quake II were the outlier - over double the FPS for some reason. My TNT2 Vanta ( Fastware card with 125MHz core and memory) was also slower than the V550 (with the same Diamond driver), and it is also faster in all other games than the V550 (unless high resolution and 32bit, where both are unusable).
@@66mhzbrainI used Diamond's drivers based on Detonator 3.68 with mine. Had some artifacts in late DirectX 7/early DirectX 8/8.1 games that the Savage4 lacked.
I seem to remember that S4 Pro 32mb ones are some cut down card some OEM used so they could say their card had 32mb ram. I could be wrong but.. it's stuck in my head.
Who knows if the savage4 drivers from that time! They were optimized to run the 3dmark2000 graphic techniques! Clearly not, so those results are not 100% reliable! I have the Diamond Stealth III S540 32mb version, greetings.
I think just about everyone optimised for 3d mark for marketing reasons as that's what the reviewers used. Savage drivers were improved a lot over time and the later ones are solid I believe. 64 bit memory didnt help it either. Its an interesting.and fun card but not one to play on I think. I hope to get an extreme at some point.
i was there when the s3 virge was new and the descent 2 toted that s3 3d mode.. i was there i had my pentium mmx at 133mhz over clocked i had my s3 virge with the 4 megabytes and Rented Descent 2 when you could Rent pc games lol i was there man.. and boy was it dissapointing... sure the graphics looked..sharper.. but is 15fps really playable? ... .... needless tosay i beat descent 2 in sofrware 320x240 mode.
..i did however use the s3 virge to gimp along in unreal 1 ..running still at lower then 640x480 resolutions tho... then a voodoo came along and relieved the s3 of having to do anything other then the Desktop.
Doesn't sound like the fun it should have been😬, the savage passed me by back then apart from seeing it in magazines. I think it was around then I got my first 3d card, a used voodoo banshee which was fun.
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one of the biggest selling points of the S3 Savage was the S3 texture compression, which can sometimes see be used today. it really made textures in Serious Sam and Unreal/UT pop with incredible detail. i think while the GeForce 256 introduced real time cubic environment mapping, the S3 MeTaL in Deus Ex and Unreal made particles and smoke very performance friendly even if overall performance was kinda meh. it was also usually pretty low-power so it competed well in the mobile computing market (laptops, tablets).
one feature of S3 is the MacOS support for MeTaL that worked very well, and you can still see it in some iOS implementations for games. it even has a shader language (MSL) so some limited shader capabilities are available for the S3 Savage 4 for games like minecraft.
Cool, I read 2017 was the last time s3tc earned money. It was all pretty innovative!
Watch out, there are also 32-bit memory bus Savage 4 cards.
They usually have one memory chip (32-bit wide), or two (16-bit wide).
If you want to buy blindly, always buy 4 memory chips savage 4. They have always 64-bit memory bus.
very good gpu for the era, having decent texture quality on low resolution. Savage 4Pro was my first GPU. Ran Quake III flawless.
Yes agreed, we tend to be a bit too critical now when we can retrospectively compare with better stuff. I'm sure it did a solid job and brought a lot.of fun to a lot of people at the time. Its great that companies were still being so inventive at the time with things like metal too!
Yeah, when I was making games in the 360/PS3 era, we were still using s3tc on textures.
When I was a kid I was going to purchase my first 3d card, I was looking a the Savage 4 Pro PCI or a TNT2 M64 PCI, I ended up with the TNT2 which due to the drivers was probably the best choice, but I suspect the performance was similar and really the market the S3 was targeting, so I don't think the hardware was that bad, although I'm sure the drivers weren't as good.
Cool. I never thought of that, might have to dig out an m64 and see how it compares!
Interesting video. The Savage 4 seems to perform very similar to the Voodoo Banshee and the TNT1. I also have a VIA KM266 Pro motherboard with an integrated S3 ProSavage8 but no matter what driver I tried it just was not recognized in Windows 98. Very weird.
I had trouble with getting drivers for my motherboard also. I did find some eventually, I'll check later and try and post a link to the ones I have, maybe they'll work with yours.
@@66mhzbrain Thank you a lot!
remember to use BIGGER fonts next time you make a chart
I've got a rather generic Savage4 GT, and after replacing the single blown cap it remains the main card for my best Slot1 PC. Faster than my Viper V550 in all games despite always being used with 32bit colours (if the games support it), and with actually wider game compatibility - I've played hours of Mechwarrior 4 using it with my Celeron 500 (Slotket on Asus P2L97).
Actually had really good results playing DirectX 8/8.1 games on it. This was using the last official drivers. One thing to keep in mind - the Savage4 just doesn't scale past 500MHz CPU, at least not in any meaningful way. I see the same results in Quake II - though at 32bit colours (I run it using Metal, same for Quake 1). Running properly at most there is a 10% impact going from 16bit to 32bit.
Coolz I have a v550, I'll have to do a compare!
@@66mhzbrainI was using the Diamond driver based on Detonator 3.68 with mine. Either Quake or Quake II were the outlier - over double the FPS for some reason.
My TNT2 Vanta ( Fastware card with 125MHz core and memory) was also slower than the V550 (with the same Diamond driver), and it is also faster in all other games than the V550 (unless high resolution and 32bit, where both are unusable).
@@66mhzbrainI used Diamond's drivers based on Detonator 3.68 with mine. Had some artifacts in late DirectX 7/early DirectX 8/8.1 games that the Savage4 lacked.
I seem to remember that S4 Pro 32mb ones are some cut down card some OEM used so they could say their card had 32mb ram. I could be wrong but.. it's stuck in my head.
Cool, I'd seen some listed as pro and some not, that would make sense.
Bruv I think you forget about other S3 Savage Feature 😏✌👉 Bump Mapping 😉😉
Bump Mapping is a Matrox G400 feature, not from S3
Who knows if the savage4 drivers from that time! They were optimized to run the 3dmark2000 graphic techniques! Clearly not, so those results are not 100% reliable! I have the Diamond Stealth III S540 32mb version, greetings.
I think just about everyone optimised for 3d mark for marketing reasons as that's what the reviewers used. Savage drivers were improved a lot over time and the later ones are solid I believe. 64 bit memory didnt help it either. Its an interesting.and fun card but not one to play on I think. I hope to get an extreme at some point.
i was there when the s3 virge was new and the descent 2 toted that s3 3d mode.. i was there i had my pentium mmx at 133mhz over clocked i had my s3 virge with the 4 megabytes and Rented Descent 2 when you could Rent pc games lol i was there man.. and boy was it dissapointing... sure the graphics looked..sharper.. but is 15fps really playable? ... .... needless tosay i beat descent 2 in sofrware 320x240 mode.
..i did however use the s3 virge to gimp along in unreal 1 ..running still at lower then 640x480 resolutions tho... then a voodoo came along and relieved the s3 of having to do anything other then the Desktop.
Doesn't sound like the fun it should have been😬, the savage passed me by back then apart from seeing it in magazines. I think it was around then I got my first 3d card, a used voodoo banshee which was fun.