S3 Challenges ATI, NVidia in Mobile Graphics

DeltaChromeX9m promises capable high-end mobile graphics, and could later power the desktop.

Tom Mainelli, PCWorld.com

Savvy mobile users who want top-notch graphics in their next notebook may find the best offering comes not from graphics giants ATI or NVidia, but the lesser-known S3 Graphics.

The company, a joint venture of SonicBlue and Via Technologies, has announced a mobile graphics processor called the DeltaChromeX9m, which an industry analyst says could be tops in its class.

The new processor "is about as good as you can get" in a mobile graphics chip, says Peter Glaskowsky, editor of Microprocessor Report. "This chip is capable of running any of the software you would want to run on a notebook, even fairly bleeding-edge games," he says.

The DeltaChromeX9m should outperform current mobile offerings from both NVidia and ATI, Glaskowsky says. And it should also be competitive with upcoming mobile versions of each company's top current desktop graphics processing units. Currently those are ATI's well-reviewed Radeon 9700 chip and NVidia's still unreleased GeForceFX GPU.

The bad news: You won't be able to buy a notebook with S3's new chip until late this year.

"Notebook design is a painfully long process," says Young Kwon, senior product marketing manager for S3 Graphics. It's a six- to nine-month design cycle, so if all goes well, DeltaChromeX9m notebooks should appear by year-end. That's about the same time units with the new ATI and NVidia chips should ship, he says.

Great Graphics, Low Power

MDR's Glaskowsky expects the DeltaChromeX9m will offer excellent graphics performance because of its eight-pipeline graphics engine, which other graphics vendors do not yet offer in a mobile part.

"The other guys haven't done it because they have [traditionally] cut pipelines to lower power consumption. S3 has figured out how to do it and keep power down," he says.

The eight-pipeline design enables the DeltaChromeX9m to render about 2.4 billion pixels per second, he says. "That is extraordinary for a laptop chip."

The DeltaChromeX9m also fully supports Microsoft's DirectX 9 multimedia technology, which is so new that few applications yet use it, he says.

The first handful of programs that use DirectX 9's advanced features will appear in the first half of this year, but most won't arrive until much later, even into 2004, Glaskowsy says. Currently, only ATI's Radeon 9700 can take full advantage of DirectX 9.

Another DeltaChromeX9m feature sure to garner notice is its integrated Hi-Def TV encoder. The technology can send 1080 progressive lines of resolution to a high-definition display.

Finally, the S3 chip offers a technology geared toward notebook PCs with Tablet PC capabilities. These hybrid products, which let you rotate the display from a standard laptop configuration into a tablet setup, generally use software to rotate the on-screen images.

The drawback is the software can degrade performance or cause loss of graphics features, even after you finish the rotation, S3's Kwon says. The DeltaChromeX9m does the rotation in hardware instead of software, so you can keep viewing the screen as you rotate it and suffer no performance loss, he says.

Boosting Competition

Despite a relatively low profile, S3 has successfully produced graphics chips for notebooks for years, Kwon says. He estimates the company trails only Intel in sales of mobile integrated graphics, and ATI for mobile discrete graphics. (The DeltaChromeX9m will ship in both discrete and integrated configurations.)

While the desktop graphics market puts a premium on flashy new technologies, mobile chips traditionally focus on higher quality and stability, he says. NVidia's entry into the mobile market showed that people are interested in more powerful mobile graphics, and S3 expects DeltaChromeX9m to prove that a good mobile graphics chip can have flash and stability, he says.

Analyst Glaskowsky says the chip looks like a potential winner for S3. "It should garner a respectable share of the business, and if you view it as the first in a new generation of chips it is quite good," he says.

In a unique move, the company plans to use the DeltaChromeX9 core to challenge NVidia and ATI in the mid- to high-level desktop graphics game, too. Most graphics chips start on the desktop and migrate to mobile with changes, but Kwon says S3 will offer the graphics core of its mobile chip to desktop graphics card vendors. Cards based on the technology should appear before midyear, and will sell in the $100 range.

It's just the start of what S3 hopes will be a successful reentry into the desktop graphics market, he says. The company competed in the market until 1997, when it shifted its focus solely to mobile.

The company plans to launch early next year another new graphics chip--code-named Destination--with "the latest exotic technologies," he says. That chip will challenge ATI and NVidia at the top end of the market, where graphics boards sell for $300 to $400.

NVidia's delayed release of its GeForceFX chip has primed graphics card vendors for another graphics chip option, Kwon says.

That may be true, but Glaskowsy notes that S3's lack of brand awareness could hurt them as they challenge NVidia and ATI. That said, vendors like having more chip choices, he says. And that means consumers get more options, too.