| History of S3 |
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| Written by Stefan | |||||
| Sunday, 13 February 2005 02:34 | |||||
Page 1 of 2 Founding & high time of S3 (1989 to 1995)S3 Inc. was the unchallenged market leader for many years, with a market share of about 80%. Absolutely dominating. This success originated from the fact that S3 brought new technologies to the market first. For example the Trio family was the standard for many PCs for several years.S3 was founded in January 1989, in June 1991 it already brought the first single chip "GUI Accelerator" to the market.In the year 1992 the first 32 bit graphic chip followed. In March 1993 S3 brought the first PCI graphic chip and later that year the first 64 bit graphic chip. These chips were all only capable of 2D graphics and they had an outreaching price/performance ratio. The slow comedown (1995 to early/middle 2000)On November 13th S3 also jumped on the the moving off "3D train" with its ViRGE family. A year later that family was expanded with new chips. But this first 3D chips from S3 weren't really usable for 3D acceleration.But the other competitors didn't do better: ATI's 3D Rage series suffered the same problems as the ViRGE chips and Tseng Labs had no 3D chip at all.But than a new company called 3D-FX (later 3dfx) entered the market: Its Voodoo accelerators initiated a revolution. 3D games became reality, the performance of the voodoo chips was far above of all other vendors. Only nVidia could put up some resistance in1997 and 1998 with its RIVA 128 family (the result of the battle between 3D-FX and nVidia is well-known). And this situation became a problem for S3: 3D acceleration was suddenly "in", a must-have feature. So many OEM customers vanished, the market share shrunk, the profits dropped down. S3 couldn't bring a competitive 3D chip before middle 1998: Savage 3D. With S3TC it developed a revolutionary textur compression which is standard for every graphic chip nowadays and was integrated by Microsoft in DirectX as DXTn compression.Nevertheless, Savage 3D was too late, the competitors with Voodoo 2 and RIVA TNT just too strong. Early 1999 S3 released Savage 4 to the market, but the competitors hadn't slept either and against Matrox G400, Voodoo 3000 and RIVA TNT 2 the Savage 2000. This chip had the first DirectX 7 hardware T&L unit and was meant to be an competitor of nVidia's successful GeForce 256 (also with T&L). But there were severe problems with that chip: The planned clock speeds couldn't be reached and bugs in the hardware lead to a non-functional T&L unit. Furthermore the availability delayed till end of 1999 - the chip was a flop! Another cause for this was the decision of S3 to buy the graphics card manufacturer (among many other products) Diamond Multimedia and to sell Savage 2000 exclusively as Diamond Viper II. A similar decision of 3dfx (the buying of STB Systems and exclusive distribution of the Voodoo family beginning with 3000) was complicit in its comedown. After that, the emergency brake was applied: The exit from the graphic business was announced! The FireGL division of Diamond Multimedia (emerged from the German company SPEA which was bought some time before by Diamond) was sold to ATI and S3 Graphics, the outsourced graphics division, was transfered to a new joint-venture with VIA Technologies. Instead S3 Inc. concentrated on multimedia products,which it could offer because of Diamond Multimedia. To emphasize this new orientation, the name of the company was changed to "Sonic Blue". The RIO players for example were a successful product of Sonic Blue. But some years later Sonic Blue went bankrupt anyway and the other company parts were sold, too.
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