VIA-owned S3 Graphics crashes the GPGPU party

We know the past couple years haven't been kind to VIA-owned S3 Graphics -- market share has declined, and NVIDIA and ATI keep introducing fancy new technologies, making it tough to keep up. That said, we're inspired by S3's ardent attempts to stay relevant in an industry that won't easily make room for small competitors. The latest case in point: the company has released a photo-editing app to demonstrate the newly-programmed GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) functionalities of its DirectX 10.1 Chrome 400 line of discrete graphics cards. S3 claims its hard work has produced an HPC environment that can be used to reduce processing time for scientific and other applications from days to seconds -- we'll believe it when we see it, but you've gotta admire the tenacity.

[Via CustomPC]

[bob sakamano @ Oct 17th 2008 3:47PM]

looks pretty nice... for me to poop on

[cesium @ Oct 17th 2008 3:54PM]

youre funny

[Lediur @ Oct 17th 2008 4:17PM]

Is this the literal meaning of the word 'threadshit'?

[Lowest Ranked @ Oct 17th 2008 6:08PM]

Nah, just pureshit.

[Michael B @ Oct 17th 2008 7:31PM]

Right

[Quicksilver4648 @ Oct 17th 2008 10:49PM]

New meaning to "when shit hits the fan"?

[chewbie @ Oct 17th 2008 3:54PM]

In the 10 years dealt with fixing people's computers I've learnt that anything VIA or S3 when it comes to graphics drivers = crap.
Avoid like the plague!

[tom @ Oct 17th 2008 4:04PM]

@chewbie

+1, totally agree.

I was building a cheap P4 a few years back with an AIO motherboard with VIA graphics. Their drivers are piece o' crap. Drivers updates post on a monthly basis with each driver giving different features and dropping few existing features.

[Justin @ Oct 17th 2008 3:58PM]

I'm sorry, but S3/Via's division can't write a driver to save their lives. I can't speak to their hardware, because I've never seen a driver work well.

With ATi or nVidia writing drivers, the Chrome hardware might be semi-decent--but S3's graphic drivers are so horrible that it's almost unspeakable.

[KarlW @ Oct 17th 2008 3:59PM]

If I were in charge of S3, I'd move to focus on mobile graphics cards. Power efficiency is a strong point for VIA processors, and the mobile graphics market is much less developed than the desktop graphics market (although neither is easy to break in to).

A DX10.1-compliant, low-power, fair performance graphics chip would certainly go down well in the mobile market. Integrate it with VIA's x86 chipset, and you've got some real market presence in the power efficiency arena.

It's hard to compete against the triumvirate of Intel, AMD and Nvidia (even AMD's former fabrication division is having a hard time keeping up!). The best way to compete is to work on your strongest product segment - for VIA, that's power efficiency.

[Xenoterranos @ Oct 17th 2008 4:03PM]

Wow, that's pretty sad that the first 3 comments covered pretty much every possible complaint. To contribute, I'd venture to guess that as long as it can run Aero and Bookworm, S3 still has a market. They just need to make it cheaper than the difference between a motherboard w/ and w/o built in graphics. It'd be kind of pointless to forgo a built-in gpu for a slot-hogging gpu of the same power and specs. (oh, and of course, it should probably be slightly better than a built in gpu).

[Canoo @ Oct 17th 2008 4:10PM]

lol, I love how they have the fan wire looped around that cap because there is excess slack.

[Oli D @ Oct 17th 2008 5:32PM]

Its a new technology, in wrapping the wire you achieve cyclic quantum through-current which increases performance!
Its a bolt on configuration, they charge $10 per loop.

[Joseph @ Oct 17th 2008 6:08PM]

First thing I noticed on the pic.

[Valicore @ Oct 18th 2008 3:04PM]

Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Jesus, if that's the best they can do for a publicity shot of a gpu that is supposed to change things up, they're screwed. Wrap the GD fan wire around a cap? They deserve to fail...

[Justin @ Oct 17th 2008 4:17PM]

You know, I wish there was a forum where we could talk to S3/Via engineers and employees, and ask them flat-out what's happening there. I mean, where are the people designing this stuff? Where are the software engineers writing the drivers for this?

I'd really like to drag them out into public. There are horrible drivers, and then there are S3 drivers.

[Scott Beckstead @ Oct 17th 2008 4:35PM]

You know I do believe all of you missed the whole point of that article. They have given up on competing with ati and nvidia and are using the s3 graphics chips as co-processors to speed up scientific and matrix processing applications. I used to work for a company that did this. we put a co-processor in an original PC and ran UNIX on it. I ported X-windows to it in 1986 and it ran pretty good. We also made a render farm for the 3d guys in Mac IIs using a PPC chip and an AMD 29000 chip co-processor board. So that being said I think maybe S3 may have found a niche they can do some good in.

[MoFoQ @ Oct 17th 2008 4:38PM]

there was...except they "let" go of the only person who maintained the forum/customer support.

go figure

[fieldcar @ Oct 17th 2008 4:49PM]

You guys haven't dealt with bad drivers until you've seen capture cards done by netpromax.
http://www.surveillance-video.com/need8vi12ree1.html?productid=need8vi12ree1&channelid=FROOG
These guys expect you to install the drivers manually (as if "DeviceID" or an installer was too new of a concept for determining what is what on the board) Not only are the drivers blind to the DeviceID, but they are completely incompatable without a very specific pentium 4 motherboard chipset and only the radeon 7000 series. My parents spent $500 or so on this complete POS, and I cant get the damn thing working for the life of me. Its insane that they expect someone to actually buy the card as a standalone product, because its obviously engineered for their very specific security camera workstation pc's that they build. You gotta love this too, it friggin restarts the pc when you click the X to exit the security cam software... Luckily I tore that POS feature out with resource hacker...

I wanna break something now.

[Joseph @ Oct 17th 2008 6:11PM]

you guys haven't seen bad drivers until you try to run a ISA 2400 baud modem in DOS and you didn't set the jumpers right. I'm tellin you!

[Valicore @ Oct 18th 2008 3:12PM]

Oh no, DMA conflicts, resource conflicts... horrors of my childhood.

[filpaul @ Oct 17th 2008 5:09PM]

Wow, I haven't seen a ribbon cable like that in ages!

[Takashi @ Oct 17th 2008 6:20PM]

I have the feeling that the fan and dissipater are simply there to hide the fact that they are actually still clearing out the stock of their 1998-era S3 ViRGE chips.

[ssrat_ @ Oct 17th 2008 6:56PM]

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt here, sine this is not meant in anyway to be a gaming card.

The problem is of course that both ATI/Nvdia have no intention of leaving that market alone so they HAVE to
release the card with excellent drivers and a very good performance.

[fuma @ Oct 17th 2008 7:03PM]

AWWW.. look at that little fan, it's sooo cute!

[kellsarah @ Oct 17th 2008 7:49PM]

Head over to S3's site and check out the price on these. You can get an ATi HD 4650 for the same price and it will blow this out of the water.

[Valicore @ Oct 18th 2008 3:03PM]

I thought S3 went out of business! They used to have their headquarters in Santa Clara, but disappeared. I remember when I was like 10 and S3 stuff was the shit!

[JeffDM @ Oct 19th 2008 1:41PM]

I don't trust these guys either. I've not been happy with Via products in the past. A single Via product has the maintenance issues of 3 to 10 of many other company's products.