How can S3 survive?!

Who still buys a S3 card? How can they still survive? Maybe cards for notebooks? But ATi is the leader in that section, right?

Before getting angry to the (d)evil, just think about who CREATED it! :mad:

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S3 didn't survive, they sold their graphics division to VIA, and are now known as Sonic Blue. After the sucess of the Diamond Rio player they decided that MP3 players would be more profitable.

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

like SIS trident 3dlab there maybe 1 that will survie in the mainstream market.There not much place between ATI nvidia they cover all market and with new produce each 6 to 9 month

The day i meet a goth queen that tell me Intel suck.I turn in a lemming to fill is need in hardware.

Reply to juin

S3 as in graphics division are now called S3Graphics http://www.s3graphics.com .Not SONIC BLUE. Recently announced SAVAGEXP and rumoured to be working on DX9 gpu known as COLUMBIA.

S3Graphics, Inc.

Inherited a long heritage of graphics chip excellence from S3, Inc. who have a distinguished record as a pioneer in the development of graphics chip technology. S3 Graphics products deliver a wide range of features and performance to serve the graphics and multimedia needs of both the home and business markets, and continue to break new boundaries in the high quality, power efficient mobile and desktop graphics product sectors.

S3 Graphics is a market leader in mobile chipset solutions, with 7 of the top 10 notebook OEMs as customers, including IBM, Sony and Toshiba.

S3 Graphics and VIA Technologies – Moving forward together to enhance performance and value in PC graphics solutions

SONICblue History

The Company was founded in 1989 as S3 Incorporated, a PC graphics company. In 1999, S3 acquired Diamond Multimedia and moved into Internet appliances, broadband communications, home networking and audio solutions. In late 2000, the Company changed its name to SONICblue, transferred its chip assets to a joint venture with VIA, closed its graphics board business and re-positioned itself to be a leader in the emerging growth market of digital media appliances and services.

Reply to overlord

Like I said, S3 sold their graphics division to VIA. Nobody into performance computing should care about VIA graphics, and noone interested in quality should even consider any VIA product.

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

And we should all hail MS, NVIDIA & INTEL. RIGHT! 3 Kings of marketing or would marketeering be more precise.

MS - Quality till next Sevice pack and charge many for the priveledge. How many security holes do they build in each release?

Nvidia - A company who replace previous generation gpu's with obsolete mx series. DX7 card's to a world looking @ DX8 and soon DX9 features. Who would've imagined paying $399 for a gaming card 3 years ago. When MS say they're charging too much for the chips in XBOX something must be wrong! HA! HA!(Sour grapes comes to mind. What goes around comes around)

INTEL - Another friend of the consumer. Trying to force RAMBUS memory down our collective throats. At what cost? What did it gain? Who care's if they were a large shareholder in said technology! Migration from pci to AGP, Socket7 to slot1/2, socket370,423 & 478. Another roadmap another $.

Software developers who are guilty of premature product releases. How many software products require patches soon after being released. Having been rushed to market due to spiralling development cost?

All have one thing in common. All leaders in Arrogance!

IBM suffered from it. So did 3DFX. APPLE still do.

Don't blame the little guys who compete with the above largely via OEM market @ ever reducing margins. Their revenue couldn't pay for R&D cost let alone the marketing for those mentioned.

Poor implementation by these OEM producers can taint peoples perception of the PARENT companies like VIA, especially when they target the budget concious and build to price. Cutting out the foundations needed for performance & stability.

S3 promised and failed to deliver on several previous hardware releases largely due to poor driver support.Thus harming consumer confidence. SAVAGE3D tainted by poor drivers, SAVAGE4 too little too late & SAVAGE2000 broken T&L unit coupled with poor support.

Driver support is king to hardware development hopefully VIA can teach those who remain in the graphics team this little titbit!

With NVIDIA, ATI & SIS making inroads into chipset market they need to.

Reply to overlord

No, VIA needs to die, you forgot to put them with the FIRST THREE! They are not the underdog, in many markets they are the ruler! The use bully tactics just like Intel and nVidia to hold back the better players like SiS. And always at THEIR arrogance, as in "Who cares about stability and compatability, as long as it's the fastest these stupid kids will by it" approach to performance chipsets, and their "who cares if it's the worst as long as it's the cheapest" approach to integrated chipsets. In this industry even making a bad name for yourself can improve sales, I still sell people used Packard Bells because the recognize the name, forgetting what they heard about it. BTW ATI is the Intel of the graphics industry, sort of, they are showing what would happen to Intel if AMD got the upper hand. That makes nVidia the VIA of the performance graphics industry BTW. Your perspective is squewed, probably from all those years of supporting AMD when VIA was the only solution. It's time to leave those dark years behind and realize that supporting AMD does NOT mean supporting VIA, SiS and ALi are still out there, and SiS is making better chipsets! And supporting the "underdog", or the smallest player to offer something good, would also leave you with SiS. Having said this, and getting back to S3 graphics, does SiS produce good graphics? Probably no better than VIA. Probably no worse either. But they do produce graphics!

Or look at Matrox as the Intel of graphics...had Intel been unable to keep up with developement. They were established a long time, highly regarded for quality, overpriced, and the most common amongst high end business class machines. Now they are almost dead.

Then there's S3. They followed VIA's scheme for a while, making a product that performed well but had many problems. They died in that market, VIA should have too.

So the "Big 3" changes over the years, but VIA will probably be #4 for quite a while, SiS will trail in sales even though the produce a better product. But when it comes to arrogance, you can put VIA at #1, ahead of Intel, because at least Intel pays for their technology (looking at Rambus, Intel's sinking ship). Want more proof that VIA outranks Intel in arrogance? While Intel publishes errata for their products, VIA denies the existance of such problems. They even (usually after years of complaints) offer patches for problems which they either claim are not their fault or don't exist!

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

At the beginning, in 1999, I hated Intel. But with their hyperthreading (a bit over-advertised), new PCI bus, and Prescott core I have new faith in them. It's a good thing that Intel isn't falling behind.

It's funny because your description of Matrox is perfectly accurate. The Parhelia is perfect for any business that doesn't want to ruin their employee's moods or eyesight, or fatigue them. There's so much debate about squinting, eye stress, and fatigue. You hear it all the time: "Don't watch TV in the dark." "Don't watch monitors for more than half an hour." "After 2 years of watching computer monitors you will probably need glasses if you don't already have them." Anyway, we know somewhat that eye sore, fatigue, and stress are not very pleasant things, if not just to the detriment of our moods. And for the moment, Matrox has a market for this because they deliver such exceptional 2D quality with their Parhelia. Based on what we've seen, I think we can say that it was designed with 2D as the main focus, and 3D as a close, but still second priority. It's kind of sad that they didn't advance in 3D more because clearly they have something to offer in that field (fragment anti-aliasing, 256-bit memory). But like you and others have said in this forum, it's a tough business in the 3D graphics market with those two hungry sharks, nVidia and ATi, devouring whole market shares up in a matter of months. It's partly because the VPU/GPU is becoming so much more important then it was in the past so not only are ATi and nVidia battling each other, they're fighting for the technological changes and the rush to make advancements. Cg is a good example of this. A lot of people may wonder, "is this some ploy of nVidia's to make a proprietary shader standard that ONLY works on nVidia cards?" The answer in my view is no. While an open source high level code would probably be better, you'd also lose the incongruity which is necessary for competition--in other words, the need for your product to stand apart from the rest of them. Technological advancement needs standards and needs to be documented, but who will set those standards? Both nVidia and ATi want to be the ones to set those standards and that's where the line between monopolistic and beneficial become thin. It's exciting, but also dangerous and fiercely competitive.

Via is a pretty good company for speed freaks and for the enthusiast market I must say. I bought my SiS board mainly because I was influenced by people here and by Via's not so friendly business practices. Hard to say where nvidia will fit into all of this. Will nvidia have more stable and fast boards or is it impossible to have both at the same time? I myself am looking forward to the KT400's that might have a built in 802.11b controller although initial reports of instability problems with the KT400 worry me.

SiS boards are lots better in terms of stability, and my 745 computer rocks. The last crash I had was 2 weeks ago and didn't require a reboot. Actually it wasn't a crash, it was just one of those times when you have to wait for Windows for about 60 seconds for it to close threads and clear its cache so it can start acting normally again. I've run seti@home almost 24/7, multitasked as much a 5 programs at once, and have had many open internet explorer browsers. I've run 3D games in 1600x1200 4x FSAA and minimized them while I browsed the web and opened Word XP. Everything seems pristine, at least compared to my old Via boards (all four of which were crash prone and testy even after BIOS upgrades). It's funny too, because I run Windows 98SE, and that's supposed to be a buggy OS. (As an aside, when you go to that web site that reports the number of crashes for OSes it's surprising to see that the numbers for Win98SE and WinXP are exactly the same.)

What I really think is curious about how I view the computer market right now is how different I am now than I was years ago. These days when I run into a hardware or software problem I know how to solve it, fairly quickly. But years ago I would have been just like anybody else, sighing in exasperation, "computers are too complicated! Why can't someone make one that doesn't crash?"

Now I know the reason.

Dell currently has a lucrative advertising campaign, designed to capitalize on the $500-1000 back-to-school 3rd quarter rebound period. The system:

Pentium 4 1.8Ghz Processor
128MB "DDR" SDRAM

I can hear you laughing.

Edit: They actually are using DDR SDRAM, I only saw the "SDRAM" part in the advertisement.Edited by cakecake on 08/17/02 11:51 AM.

Reply to cakecake

My theory on the under dog still hold the true crash people like underdog

The day i meet a goth queen that tell me Intel suck.I turn in a lemming to fill is need in hardware.

Reply to juin

People don't always like the underdog. Here in Michigan, most people stand behind U of M for sports because of their winning track record, instead of MSU, the underdog. But the real underdogs are the smaller schools. People like U of M because it's the most popular, this is called the "bandwagon effect". That's one reason why VIA has become so popular, they were "the" solution for an AMD platform for a while, and enough users "jumped on the bandwagon" that it looks popular to the newbies in the "crowd", who also get pulled in. If people like underdogs all the time, they would stand behind SiS, until ALi comes up with a better product, then they would jump over to them.

Look at "Gamers". These are not true hardware enthusiast. Most still think that AMD makes the highest performance CPU, that VIA is the only platform choice, and the the SB Live/Audigy are the only good sound solutions. Even when the 9700 is available they will buy the 4600. It's a matter of perception, with no relation to fact.

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

Yea, so true. Gamers are like that but that's why the market survives. Most computer hardware enthusiasts don't fall for advertising at all. But gamers do. Advertising is actually good as it helps the economy, but stingy people (like me) actually are not very good for the economy.

If you go to an overclocking enthusiast site, the "sponsors" of the site don't even use ad click counters. They simply post their link and survive by luck of the draw, selection, and the simple fact that they make products that no one else has. Very interesting stuff.

1° of separation between my monopoly and yours. That's business with .NET

Reply to cakecake

The worst part is that board venders and VIA have developed a co-dependance because of that. As a result, board manufacturers advertize their products as having VIA chipsets (especially Soyo) so that people think a VIA chipset is the reason to buy a certain board. That simply tightens VIA's grip!

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

Ah c'mon. Via aint that bad. Next you're gonna start bitchin' about Creative Labs. Name one major company that doesn't/wouldn't use that kind of business practices. The people that get to the top of these companies don't get there by being the most honest, loving, caring and selfless. They do so by emulating sharks and pirhanas. Thats the only way to do it.

Besides, talking 'bout VIA, at least my last two mobos (both Asus with VIA chipsets) haven't fallen over as much as one of the previous ones which was a SiS chipset board made by FIC I think or it could have been Diamond. Can't recall. It may be the generation of products that makes the difference, but I just don't like SiS cos of the bad experience.

Also, the SiS 6320 I had sucks major ass. Dunno about their newer ones. The new VIA graphics card should provide a technical challange to the GF4MX range as the price easily matches. I hope they do well with their graphics card business, cos we definitely need more competition. I don't give a sh!t how much R&D costs nVidia and, to a lesser extent, ATI (Does Matrox spend more on R&D than ATI?) but those cards are too pricey on launch and for the first half a year or so.

I'm a bomb technician. If you see me running, try to keep up.

Reply to HolyGrenade

Yep, SiS started out low end, didn't make a decent chipset until last year, etc. Before that ALi was a better choice than VIA.

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

ooooo. not my ali aladdin. no freakin way!

I'm a bomb technician. If you see me running, try to keep up.

Reply to HolyGrenade

what was the chipset that went up against the MVP3, an aladin? I had both ALi and the MVP3, I ended up using the lower performance ALi because the MVP3 was incompatable with virtually everything, suffered severe data integrety problems, and it took VIA over a year to produce software to fix it's stability issues.

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

I've had my fair share of issues with VIA aswell. Intel too for that matter, but ALI and SIS have been major pains in the backside.

I'm a bomb technician. If you see me running, try to keep up.

Reply to HolyGrenade

SiS had some kind of bad problems with their early integrated chipsets.

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

Wasn't TXPRO by PCCHIPS et al a SIS chipset? Still have this in another PC but this did not have a good rep!

We only have INTEL based boards here @ work. Can't remember how often we reboot these after constant lockups! One thing in common. They're on MS OS. Maybe the problems aren't only because of poor hardware integration?

Total stability can only be achieved using a common platform like a console. Maybe MS finally realise this and accept that even they cannot support all these variances in PC hardware.Edited by OVERLORD on 08/16/02 08:57 PM.

Reply to overlord

Actually that was an ALi chipset, prior to the better chipsets. Remember that, at the time VIA had the "VX Pro" chipset (Ugh!).

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

Sorry TXpro II aka M571 motherboard, was a SIS chipset. Many were RMA'ed as being dead on arrival!

Reply to overlord

ALi also had a TX Pro chipset, and VIA had the VX Pro/ProII

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

Back to topic:

The problem with so called market leaders is once they establish this strangle hold they end up competing effetively with themselves. Too many variations of the same theme only confuses the consumer!

3dfx tried to monopolise their IP when they dominated the market. Thankfully they failed. INTEL740 was INTEL'S mediocre attempt to establish foothold in a growing 3d market. Good job the estasblished players got their act together to scupper that threat. These cash cows can nolonger rest on their laurels.

They too often create enemies from former partners often licensing one to the detriment of the other because of the perceived threat to their market share. Nvidia P4 license comes to mind.

Colluding with partners who toe the line with sharp business practices. Remember the problems AMD had getting support from the motherboard manufacturers when establing SLOTA as an altrnative to SLOT1. Even having to sell their wares unmarked threw less sanguine channels.

Clearly an industry with close ties to prohibtion of the early 20th century!

ENRON & WORLDCOM, 2 big players in a GLOBAL market. Do you think the rest of the industry is immune to this behavior?

Edited by OVERLORD on 08/16/02 10:52 PM.

Reply to overlord

nVidia P4 licence? I didn't know they even wanted one! They certainly aren't producing any P4 chipset products.

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

I was only surmising as to the reason they would only develop for AMD and not INTEL.

There tech For NFORCE/2 utilising dual DDR memory architecture combined with P4 platform would see better bandwidth utilisation with no effective response from INTEL. Integrated circuits are what keeps corporate users happy. Fewer drivers for differing devices, minimising support outlay.

Having already collaborated with WINTEL on XBOX platform. Do you think they would remain happy just being a bit player on AMD PC platforms ignoring larger INTEL market?

Cg, Nforce and soon Nforce2 is a statement of intent.

No wonder INTEL and MS are running scared. Having pushed the buttons for so long. They don't like being dictated to!

Reply to overlord

I think they are trying to compete with two of the four kings of the gaming industry, which are VIA, Creative. The other two kings are themselves and AMD.

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

Yep! Batting on both sides with XBOX and nforce. And we already know what they do to competition like 3DFX given the chance. Snuff them out! Very predatory. I think Cg might be a vain attempt @ a GLIDE derivative to dictate the market. That's why INTEL will keep them @ arms length.

Edited by OVERLORD on 08/17/02 02:36 AM.

Reply to overlord

LOL, well, the fact that "Gamers use AMD" would make an integrated solution for "budget gamers" most popular if it supported the "Gamers" CPU, which is also a budget CPU. As for Glide, you did know that nVidia owns 3DFX, didn't you?

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

Why do you think I mentioned a defunct company like 3DFX and GLIDE when speaking about Cg & Nvidia?

MS probably turned on 3DFX because GLIDE undermined full DX monopoly on PC platform and rewarded Nvidia contract to produce chips for XBOX due to their full support of DX.

Now as Cg rears its head. MS go cold and are showing them the plank for alternative providers. This coupled with the castration of official OPENGL support in their latest releases speaks volumes.

Then again it could be a dubious ploy just so that they lower their prices!

Remember FAHRENHEIT. SGI certainly got stung there getting into bed with SATAN.

Now see how MS see it http://www.opengl.org/news/events/ [...] #first_hit

Edited by OVERLORD on 08/17/02 03:34 AM.

Reply to overlord

Ever seen the movie "Conspiracy theory"? Anyway, the reason 3DFX died is because they couldn't compete.

You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!

Reply to Crashman

Conspiracy theory! LOL

No so called Holliwood blockbuster matches reality.

Could someone in Holliwood conceive ENRON, WORLDCOM or BARING'S. Plots of such magnitude, they cripple governments. Big business is all consuming and those that blink get fried.

3DFX still would've been able to compete if they weren't so greedy!

Cutting out the bread and butter revenue from 3rd parties and trying to make cards themselves instead of concentrating on gpu production stretched them.

Products were falling behind schedule and they failed to lower their margins due to this arrogance. After all they had all this success up till then.

ATI going the other way having largely relied on corporate sales capitalised on this by sharing card manufacturing capacity. Bought ARTX and landed GAMECUBE deal.

3DFX clearly had no longterm strategy beyond PC base.

Edited by OVERLORD on 08/17/02 04:10 AM.

Reply to overlord

3DFX were so bent on vertical growth, they totally overlooked the horizontal market. I think they saw their Voodoo 1 & 2 products being sold by their name rather than the card manufacturers name, and thought the card manufacturers are irrelevant. What a pity.

I'm a bomb technician. If you see me running, try to keep up.

Reply to HolyGrenade

Yep. Choked on those hands that fed them for so many years. OEM's engaged competing tech from NVIDIA, ATI & co to pull them through. Ultimately cutting off 3DFX from established consumer market.

A sad time by all accounts. At least MATROX had the good sense to retreat to their core business and wait. Refining their product behind close doors till dust settled. But no one could wait for RAMPAGE.

Reply to overlord

Exactly. That is true to some degree, of course. nVidia has cut some ties with Intel and there are the usual rumors that AMD and nVidia are planning a merger. Think about it. AMD's graphics controller is on the processor for the hammer, and the GPU is becoming the VPU, which is soon to become its own behavioral 3D processor (or something able to do processing on its own). Soon we'll have greater integration of 3d processing and CPU regardless of where the market wants to go or not. It's no wonder this latest announcement has people wondering if AMD and nVidia are merging.

And finally, without a northbridge, what are mainboard companies making AMD mobos going to invest their R&D in?

HolyGrenade: Well said. I agree they didn't diversify enough and also bad technical implementation didn't help them either.

Overlord: Add Martha Stewart to the list. :smile: The main deal here is that we've been riding this high horse for so long. Corporate scandals in Europe are many, and the US has been pointing fingers for a while, claiming that our own CEO's have fidelity. Well apparently not... that's what's so embarassing about it.

Reply to cakecake

Well, it was sold to Via as S3Graphics and I do hope this division dies. I've bought their Viper II (Savage 2000) and they never fixed those d... drivers. I'm quite happy with my GeForce2 Ti and will never buy an S3/Diamond/SonicBlue/S3Graphics (or whatever name they create to hide from previous costumers) product again.

Reply to rrezende

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