S3 Inc.

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Graphics card with S3 P86C805 chip (Miro Crystal 8S)
Graphics card with S3 trio chip

The company S3 Inc. (abbreviated S3, NASDAQ SIII ) was a long-standing highly successful developer and producer of graphics chips for PC - graphics cards . Until the mid-1990s, S3 was the market leader in the graphics chip market. With the advent of 3D-capable graphics chips (especially with 3dfx ), this supremacy came to an end, as it was not possible to offer powerful chips for this trend in time.

history

S3 was founded in 1989 in Fremont , California .

The company gained notoriety through the use of the S3 ViRGE , S3 Trio and S3 Vision chipsets by numerous board manufacturers. The first slump in profits became apparent when the trend towards hardware-accelerated 3D began with the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics graphics chip from 3dfx and later with the Riva 128 from Nvidia , which S3 could no longer follow quickly enough to survive in the long term. Although the Savage series (Savage 3D, Savage 4 and Savage 2000) were still quite good graphics chips developed and sold, there were significant driver problems, the graphics performance was not up to the top products, and ultimately there were always delays the availability.

In spite of everything, S3 developed pioneering technologies such as the S3TC compression system for textures, which was ultimately even incorporated into Microsoft's DirectX standard .

In 1999, S3 merged with the graphics card manufacturer Diamond Multimedia in order to market its own graphics chips exclusively on its own graphics cards. The first (and last) product was the Diamond Viper II with the S3 Savage 2000 chip. However, this had serious design flaws, u. a. the integrated T&L unit didn't work as expected, so it couldn't compete with Nvidia's GeForce 256 .

As a result of this failure, S3 was renamed SonicBlue (NASDAQ SBLU ) in 2000 . The company then mainly sold Rio products, which also come from Diamond Multimedia. The Supra - Modem -line was stopped for lack of revenues, and the FireGL product line of ATI sold. The FireGL development was never based on S3 products, but used high-performance graphics semiconductors from IBM in order to be among the market leaders for Windows- based professional middle-class and high-end OpenGL accelerators.

The graphics chip division was spun off in 2001 and re-established as S3 Graphics as a joint venture with VIA Technologies . The company first began integrating Savage 4 graphics cores into VIA chipsets. The result of this work are various integrated chipsets from VIA such as the Apollo ProMedia 133 or the Twister K series for AMD CPUs.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b 25 years of IT-BUSINESS: The virtual hardware museum - Part 2; S3: From the Porsche graphic to the patent club , IT business from June 17, 2016; Accessed September 24, 2018
  2. ^ Fusion perfect: S3 and Diamond Multimedia , Golem.de from September 30, 1999; Accessed September 24, 2018
  3. ↑ S3 is now called Sonicblue , ComputerBase from November 2, 2000; Accessed September 24, 2018
  4. ↑ S3 is now SONICblue , Heise online from November 1, 2000; Accessed September 24, 2018
  5. ^ Never again Diamond graphics cards , ComputerBase from August 3, 2000; Accessed September 24, 2018
  6. ^ VIA buys S3 graphics department , ComputerBase from April 11, 2000; Accessed September 24, 2018