S3's DeltaChrome S8 Preview!

Post by **Illuminati** » Thu Dec 18, 2003 11:09 am

Well, the time has come where the NDA has lifted for the DeltaChrome S8 graphics card made by S3 Graphics.

You'll have to read the review to see our full thoughts... but I will go ahead and say that we were definately impressed with this pre-production version of the DeltaChrome S8. Hopefully we will have another major graphics card manufacturer to give consumers another option!

http://www.legitreviews.com/Reviews/del ... ew_1.shtml

Post by **Apoptosis** » Thu Dec 18, 2003 12:15 pm

A new kid is on the block and it looks good for being pre-release!

It all depends on how the drivers turn out! I hope S3's driver team can nail them down. Always good to see an up and coming product!

I also wanted to note our testing was pretty light and this is because we only have had the card since Monday and ATI CAT 3.10's came out the day before the review was to be posted!

Any other thoughts going on out there? Other stuff you want to see looked at by us? Let us know we got the card and the tools!

-NK

Shameless · Post by **Shameless** » Thu Dec 18, 2003 2:48 pm

Hey guys,

VIA/S3 is targeting HDTV with this card, and the HTPC people (like me!) are *very* interested in the HDTV output and how well the card de-interlaces and other image enhancements. (de-blocking, etc).

Also any subjective impressions of the S-Video and composite output might also be interesting to some.

Driver wise, do you know if it does DirectX Video Acceleration or what the direct show filter support/options are like?

Thanks in advance.

Shameless.

Post by **Apoptosis** » Thu Dec 18, 2003 3:01 pm

Shameless,

Since we have had the card for less than a week we have not had a chance to utilize many of the HDTV features that are present on this card. We will of course address this and let you know more as we figure it all out. New technology brings a bunch of new stuff to learn ;)

Post by **Illuminati** » Thu Dec 18, 2003 3:02 pm

The S3 DeltaChrome is a full-fledged DX9.0 graphics card. so it supports DX9 specs and a few more... like the Chromotion feature mentioned in our review.

I'm not sure if this answers your question, so if it doesn't, please explain further.

It is very possible for us to test s-video and composite outputs in the future. That is something we will consider.

Thanks for the post!

Shameless · Post by **Shameless** » Thu Dec 18, 2003 5:25 pm

Wow, thanks for the quick reply guys.

Apoptosis: I understand the 'newness' of this technology. I was very pleased to see a site tackle this card, since it's HDTV feature set looks very promising. Also good to read that you will be examining these features as time goes on. I'm not going to get too impatient since the card is not available for purchase (yet).

Illuminati: Yes, exactly, it is those extra chromotion features that VIA pushes in the press releases. Basically HTPC wise the need is to capture, process, and output audio/video. Currently options for getting the video to a HD output device CAN be complex and expensive. Skipping adapters/converters/transcoders needed for other (Read ATI, NVidia) cards and keeping my game performance is win win. Also note that this card claims 1080p output, where others only go as far as 720p or 1080i.

People often run image inhancement software (descaler, FFDSHOW, etc) during the process phase for DVD and video file playback and Chromotion looks like it wants to replace that and off load the compuational work from the CPU to the GPU (yeah!). This is big for HDTV people in that pushing around and decoding the HDTV data strea is taxing to even a high end machine, so that doesn't leave much headroom for other processing.

One aspect of this offloading is DirectX Video Acceleration. It is used in Direct Show (not Direct 3D) to help push those video bits around and, again, take a load of the CPU. If you take a look at the properties page for the directshow renderer filter for the card (say in Zoomplayer or Graphedit (comes with DX_SDK)) then it should say if it supports it or not. I'm sure you contacts at S3 would know as well, fnord.

Anyhow thanks for the preview of the card, and I lookforward to future discoveries. If you have any questions on the above, feel free to msg me and I'll do my best to give you some more context on the situation.

Shameless.

Post by **Illuminati** » Fri Dec 19, 2003 10:12 am

Shameless,

Thanks for the explaination! I will do my best to look into this.

Oh... and welcome to our forum!