Kevin VanOrd

Last week we had the opportunity to sit down with James Kim from the offices at S3 Graphics for a peek at the company’s newest line of video cards—specifically, the Chrome S27.

Not that anyone expected S3 to be making further inroads into the graphics card market. They've been most well-known for integrated chip solutions, particularly in VIA motherboards. Their most prominent product to date was the Savage series, which set a standard for Direct X texture compression and implemented the industry's first hardware alpha-blended sub-picture blending. Unfortunately, sub-par 3D performance blocked S3 from garnering a decent portion of the market, and S3 has been essentially a non-player in standalone cards.

S3 hopes to change all this with their new Chrome cards. The Chrome chips are not geared towards the high-performance gamer. Rather, they are budget cards geared towards the lower end of the market. Our direct comparisons are with similar-equipped and similar-priced cards from ATI and nVidia: the Radeon X1300 series and the GeForce 6600 series. If you’re currently searching for a high-end card for your speedy rig, you’ll want to keep squarely focused on the big two. However, if you’re money-conscious or looking for a budget card for your secondary PC, the S3 offerings are surprisingly reliable options.

By The Numbers

Let’s first take a look at the specifications. We’ll be specifically looking at the Chrome S27 cards, which come in both 128 MB and 256 MB varieties. We did not have a chance to test the S25 cards, although they are obviously aimed at users with an extremely limited budget and land in the $60-$70 range. Let's take a look at the specifications of the Chrome S27 and its main competitors.

The numbers alone make the comparisons seem awkward. After all, with twice the memory bandwidth and higher clock speeds, the card looks good on paper. It's not as fast as it looks, however, although the smart folks at S3 know this, and priced the product competitively, knowing that the S27 does not perform like a mid-market graphics solution.

The following benchmark information was provided by S3 Graphics. Amped IGO is not a hardware site, nor are we equipped with full testing facilities. We ask all our readers to consider this when reviewing the provided specifications. We can't offer a final grade or recommendation; we're consumers, not experts. We encourage our readers to research a variety of sources before choosing the right product for them. However, the limited testing we did manage and online benchmark comparisons published on Futuremark’s ORB generally support the provided data. Let’s start with 3DMark 05.

It means nothing without real-world numbers, however. The following figures provided by S3, and garnered from the web, should provide a rough estimate of card performance in these titles.

S3 is taking a big chance by not supporting Pixel Shader 3 technology, assuming that a budget card need only support Pixel Shader 2. Our other worry regards how to compare apples to apples in this scenario, since the Chrome series direct competitors generally feature lower clock speeds and on paper would seem to be technologically inferior. S3’s answer, of course, is the low price point, although it remains to be seen whether the strategy will pay off. Without enough information on real-world gaming performance, we can only speculate at the Chrome series’ consistency.