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S3 jumps on GPGPU bandwagon
Chrome 400 chips capable of accelerating gaming physics, as well as enhancing photos
It’s sometimes easy to forget that there are more companies than ATI and Nvidia in the graphics market, but the company that first gave us 3D acceleration, S3, is very much still around. So much so, in fact, that it’s now even developed its own GPGPU technology.
According to S3, this was the result of a ‘complete re-design of the Chrome general purpose programmable shader architecture’ in its DirectX 10.1 Chrome 400-series chips. This gives you a SIMD instruction set to calculate masses of parallel data over thousands of threads.
S3’s general manager, Dr Ken Weng, claimed that the ‘markets that can benefit from S3 Graphics GPGPU technology include High-Performance Computing (HPC), HD video transcoding/encoding, scientific, engineering, medical, imaging, physics, and many other areas.’ S3 hasn’t yet provided any information on which GPGPU languages it uses, and whether it plans to support OpenCL in the future, but we’ll give you an update if we get any more information.
To demonstrate the technology in action, S3 has released a photo-enhancing app called S3FotoPro, which uses various algorithms to adjust colours in photos, as well as reducing haze and fog and smoothing skin. The app benefits from GPGPU acceleration when used with an S3 GPU, although it can also just use your CPU. You can download S3FotoPro for free from here, if you want to try it out for yourself.
Do you own an S3 graphics chip? Do you think S3 make an impact in the GPGPU arena? Let us know your thoughts.
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Provide h.264 HD Movie acceleration for Linux and there would be a HUGE market!
Comment by Asbjorn at 8:50pm 21st October 2008
After seeing VIA get out of chipsets and Matrox scale back their card-making, going for the latest thing in integrated mass market GPUs should keep S3 going for a while.
Comment by KHenry_07 at 6:05pm 18th October 2008
If they could get a laptop or integrated gpu out the door that was at least as good as 3850 they would be laughing (assume it would be cheap ish all like S3 stuff should be) There should be minimum standards imposed on new graphics cards coming out. Hope this wont be another complete wast of time (like intel, nvidia and ati low end media gpus)
Comment by Cool_CR at 3:54am 18th October 2008
If they could get a laptop or integrated gpu out the door that was at least as good as 3850 they would be laughing (assume it would be cheap ish all like S3 stuff should be) There should be minimum standards imposed on new graphics cards coming out. Hope this wont be another complete wast of time (like intel, nvidia and ati low end media gpus)
Comment by Cool_CR at 3:54am 18th October 2008
I think its been 9 years since I last saw S3 mentioned in anything. I assumed they just went out of business.
Comment by smiffy at 6:41pm 17th October 2008
Hmmm. I haven't paid any attention so S3 since my Virge died in 1998. I suppose some businesses may make use of this, but no home users will have an S3 card.
Comment by l3v1ck at 6:10pm 17th October 2008
yep i do have an S3 Virge somewhere. an impact? nobody has them at the moment now do they? the only people that do for desktop computing are those that own VIA chips which is crap at floating point - and price here in australia dont give it a thumbs up either. its only when performance matches price where people buy it, and then people use it, and then because of use - it will make an impact. unlikely
Comment by thegreat0mi at 3:44pm 17th October 2008
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