S3 Savage 4 - That Other 90s 3D Accelerator

[@philscomputerlab]

Great video, well done!

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Thanks for watching! I'm glad the video has been well received, makes the effort of making it worth it!

[@Nightykk]

Had one of these cards in my first 'real' gaming computer - although I believe it might've been a chip on the motherboard, been ages. It worked great - Right up until Alien vs. Predator 2 hit, which required Hardware T&L. It ran the game fine.. technically. But, half the screen would at times just be pitch black, depending on where you looked. I couldn't have been very old at the time, but I remember my grandpa taking me to a hardware store downtown, when downtown still had such, and got me my very first dedicated graphics card - Geforce 2 MX 400 - Now, that thing sure kicked ass - at the time.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

It's funny to think back to how many "brick walls", you'd run into back then as new standards and features came out that your current card couldn't support. A far cry from today, and forced a few upgrades along the way! The Savage 4 seems to have held on for some time though!

[@hitechfl]

Thanks for sharing an awesome memory with an obviously awesome grandfather.

[@livefreeprintguns]

I had a BOATLOAD of S3 ViRGe's I found while dumpster diving in the late 90's... in fact one of my computers I built was entire from the dumpster of a local electronic surplus place, even a 17" NEC monitor! The side was cracked, but nothing a bumper sticker couldn't cover. 😆

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Haha amazing. I love it when you are able to find stuff that is destined for the dump, and can give it a new life. Dubious sticker fixing included!

[@lordterra1377]

Virge was the de-accelerater. LOL

[@wrmusic8736]

For all their faults S3 gave us texture compression algorithm that is an industry standard on PC and every console to this very day.

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

2:40 I would say that the first truly good combined 2D/3D 3dfx card was the Voodoo Banshee in mid-1998.

[@Revenant_Knight]

Name checks out... ; )

[@ATomRileyA]

Yeah loved my banshee went from a ati rage II to that and it was a world of difference :) I seem to remember it was pretty affordable as i must have bought it with my paper round money that i saved up, try doing that with a modern GFX card haha :)

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Oh I knew I'd cause a reaction with that comment as I wrote the script haha. The Banshee is a mighty fine card, no doubt. I just like the V3 a lot :)

[@RuruFIN]

TNT was released few months earlier ;)

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

@@RuruFIN the TNT1 was released in 15 June 1998 and the Voodoo Banshee in 22 June 1998, according to Wikipedia.

[@januszmirowski779]

I had it!

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

Interesting video! In 1999 no gamer wanted a S3 Savage... everyone wanted 3dfx Voodoo's and TNT's.

[@livefreeprintguns]

Oh man, RivaTNT... there's a word I haven't heard in forever

[@AngelDemonn]

True, but then again I had Savage4 GT and was very happy with it. Didn't had the money for Voodoo or TNT

[@warre1]

Until October came with GeForce 256 which changed the game.

[@livefreeprintguns]

@@warre1 Yah... 3dfx dominated until the GeForce line of graphics cards were launched.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

I wasn't even aware of it, to be fair until much later. I jumped from Voodoo 1 to TNT (if I can recall). But taking the card at face value today, it's really fun to mess around with, and could be a primary card in any retro PC of the era.

[@SUCRA]

Metal is such an interesting topic to explore. S3 took the competitors for a good run of their money, clearly. I think it was somewhat common for system makers to include a savage4 video card in their systems, which if you knew how to explore the capabilities, seems to be great fun. Great video, I'm glad you didn't miss a single Metal reference to Metal.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

100% accuracy in Metal coverage is the top priority at Rik's Random Retro. Thanks for watching!

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

16:20 - the results in Unreal Tournament are not fair because the game runs in Glide with higher visual details than in Direct3D and OpenGL. Only in Glide it runs with detail textures and fog turned on, and because of this the Voodoo has to calculate a lot more than the other cards. The Voodoo 3 would have run 30% faster in Direct3D or if details textures and fog would have been turned off in Glide too, just like it is in Direct3D and OpenGL.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Fair points! I'm not a benchmarking expert and sort of just threw a yolo approach to it, figured it'd at least make a somewhat interesting comparison. Good info for future videos!

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

@@RiksRandomRetro the video and benchmarks were great. Back in 1999-2000 all the magazines used UT for testing video cards and all made this mistake running the Voodoo’s with higher visual details in Glide against the other cards in Direct3D with lower details. Unfortunately the producers of UT made the game this way, with detail textures and fog turned on only in Glide and off in Direct3D/OpenGL as far as I know because some non-3dfx cards had problems with those two visual effects. Detail textures and fog do not appear as options in the menu and can be turned off or on only by using the preferences command in the console (~).

[@SandsOfArrakis]

I still have a Diamond Viper 2 Z200 here in a box at home. It has a S3 Savage 2000 chip with 32 mb of RAM. UT99 flew with it.Sadly the card lacked support for many other games. And it was the last card that I've bought before switching to ATI and Nvidia. It did have another nice feature though. Hardware acceleration when watching DVD's. Made a total difference. Instead of watching movies which skipped, they now ran fluently on the same computer.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

The Savage 2000 was such a lost opportunity. I have never messed with one myself, but knowing the poor support and missing features it's a real bummer it wasn't better. Rushed products never seem to work out in anyone's favor sadly.

[@thepcenthusiastchannel2300]

The Savage 4 and Savage 2000 are two cards I had back then. I collected cards even back then. My first personal computer (that was all mine and not a family unit) was a Pentium 120MHz (non-MMX) with a S3 Trio 64 video card, a Voodoo 3D accelerator as well as a SB Pro compatible sound card. Back then it was quite common for people with Voodoo cards to pair them with S3 cards, only the lucky ones paired them with ATi All-In-Wonder cards. Spent most of my evenings on the 3Dfx forums, Anandtech forums, HardOCP, and Toms back then. Your video is bringing back old memories. Love it :)

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Awesome combo! Likewise I ran (integrated S3) a similar combo, and it was an amazing time to be PC gaming. I always find it fascinating when a company or product is everywhere and then disappears. But we do have those memories, thanks for watching!

[@js-123]

Well, the Savage is doing much higher res textures, which also don't come for free and the Voodoo couldn't even do if it wanted to, so I think the comparison with "the best you could get with each card", which this video does, is fair.

[@drzeissler]

S4 has nice S3TC textures that 3dfx only supported on V4/5 S4 can make use of special setting in Revil2 (palette change) S4 had lot's of texture glitches on some D3D games, perhaps I used a wrong driver.

[@Audfile]

I had the S3 Savage. It was gutless but had the first texture compression technology and looked way better than 3DFX.

[@stuuser0]

Nice one Rik, keep up the excellent work!

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Thanks for watching! I'm glad people are enjoying this video, as it took a bit of work haha. But the positive responses make it worth it :)

[@lemagreengreen]

The only time I saw a Savage 4 back then was someone at a lanparty (showing my age) who had one and from memory it ran Quake 3 perfectly well, I think it was pretty good value compared to other options at the time. I know it had its own S3 API etc but I doubt many people really got a chance to see what it could do, everything else around this time mostly got ignored because of TNT2 and Geforce.

[@Just_a_Lad]

Yep I had integrated ProSavage4 and Quake3 played decent

[@BurritoVampire]

You earned my sub once I saw the graphs in Works. That's dedication to the retro gods. Nice job!

[@RiksRandomRetro]

I used to play with the graphs in Works for hours by myself. Now, some odd 25 years later I get to use it for my hobby, in a semi-useful way. Finally! Thanks for subbing, haha

[@tobylifers3390]

I watched the whole thing; very interesting. Thanks Rik!

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Thanks for watching! Glad you enjoyed it.

[@CMDRSweeper]

Lovely touch with the graphs fitting the period within Microsoft Works... That is what I can call attention to detail!

[@RiksRandomRetro]

I finally found a good use for the graphing function in Works, after playing with it for no reason 25 years ago for so many hours making pie charts!

[@ecu4321]

metal api is now synonimous with apple's own gaming api. how times have passed so rapidly

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Yeah poor Metal (original), it never had a chance to shine. But at least we can tinker with it now!

[@rnbpl]

i owned this card as a kid and i remember having 3 different versions of this cards driver that worked with different games, and having to swap them around depending on what i wanted to play.

[@nix123ism]

I have 2 x S3 chrome S27 cards that are later cards from the reviewed model, they are pretty rare and i was quite impressed with the image quality and even 3d performance, they can run farcry fine and they have a verion of sli/crossfire so you can install 2 x cards and get better performance, its pretty rare to even see them mentioned .......

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Oh fascinating! I don't think I've even heard of that sort of setup. Thanks for mentioning them, because that's really interesting.

[@abcfgh-z8k]

If you ever want to sell them, let me know =)

[@lonewolfniko3525]

This S3 Savage4 runs very nice Rik, i liked it 🙂 i have this "nice to have it" feeling

[@OdinPerez]

Amazing video, this is the content i relax to after a long day

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Thanks! Very happy people are enjoying the video, makes it worth it to make them!

[@OdinPerez]

@@RiksRandomRetro for sure! Don’t stop making these, it’s awesome stuff and your approach to it all is just excellent !

[@MonochromeWench]

S3TC being quite good and Microsoft Standardizing it in Direct3D as DXTC meant that it was used throughout the 2000s and is still commonly used today. You could be sure any Direct3d9 GPU supported it so it was used everywhere, often in the form of dds texture files

[@beagsx3]

I had this card in my old pentium 3 pc. Great little card

[@Funkymix18]

Interesting. I didn’t even know this card existed. Back in the day I only heard of the s3 virge, nvidia riva tnt and voodoo3. Thanks for the video!

[@user-kd1ho7gm7i]

One thing to notice is that the Savage4 costed almost half the price of the competition's. Given it's more than decent performance (as long as you stay 800x600) and features, I believe the card deserves more love. I own both Extreme and Pro, love them both. Best review out there.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Yeah it's easy to just look at raw numbers and scoff at the Savage 4, but everywhere I looked in print material the price was so much lower. When you put that into perspective, it's one heck of a card! I'm going to try and find a working Xtreme for sure. Thanks for watching!

[@PixelPipes]

This is an EXCELLENT video, and the kind of thing close to my heart. I hadn't seen that S3 Savage4 demo before, so that's pretty cool! What's neat about cards like these is that they're always unique and interesting compared to the same ol' popular cards of the time. It's awesome to see these high effort videos from you Rik when time permits!

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Thanks for the kind words, and for watching! It was a bit of a slog to make the video, but I'm happy with how it turned out. That's enough to motivate more content! I now have a soft spot for this card/chip after messing with it. Taken by itself it's a great retro card these days, and the unique features do make it even more special. Especially compared to the common ones like you mentioned.

[@remiandrewerner6372]

s3 savage 4 ftw!

[@pc-sound-legacy]

Great retrospective of this underdog card! S3TC really was impressive in comparison to the blurry 3dfx style we used to know.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Thanks for watching! It's really a fun card to mess with today, and has a few surprising features for sure.

[@rimreq299]

my first S3 card was a S3 Trio3D/2X, it couldnt do 3D games like Quake 2 at the time though, so years later I upgraded to a TNT2 Vanta

[@brendaneph]

Nice overview. My Savage4 has a permanent place in my SS7 rig. A good allrounder that pairs nicely with a 3dfx card.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Thanks for watching! Yeah I'm going to find a place to put this card into good use, it's a really cool one with plenty of things going for it.

[@MarkTheMorose]

One of my old motherboards (socket A) has ProSavage 8 graphics; by this time, S3 had been bought by VIA, and I understand that the Savage lived/lives on in VIA's chipsets as UniChrome and later variants.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Oh interesting. I could definitely see that, companies rarely want their investment to simply fade away fully. Makes sense it'd be merged into other things and kept being used for other purposes.

[@khoifoto]

I used to have this card. This brings back so many good memories.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

It's really an awesome card! It slipped me by completely back then, but after digging into it now, I've been nothing but impressed.

[@johnclemens1338]

As you alluded to in the video, the impression was S3's earlier 3D acceleration was minimal (ahem, s3 virge) and often slower than software rendering given how rapidly CPU speed was advancing at the time... leading to a reputation of them being 3d DE-cellerators. . So they had a lot of negative sentiment to overcome in the enthusiast crowd where they were already playing catch-up. It was such an interesting time in video card evolution, watching 3dfx struggle to go from early 3d to quality 2d/3d combined, nvidia struggle to get image quality up on both 2d and 3d, and ATI, Trident, S3, Number Nine and Matrox all struggle to go from passable (ATI, S3, Trident) or class-leading (Number Nine, Matrox) 2d and try to figure out 3d.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

When you go back and look at it, it's not hard to see why the card wasn't as popular coming off that unfortunate S3 reputation. And the competition was savage (no pun intended, well maybe some), so it was hard to make it. Taken today though, it's a really fun card to mess with!

[@Crazy_Borg]

Great card, it was in every OEM PC out there back in the day. When you bought an of-the-shelf PC in 1999/2000, it was this card in it 99% of the time. So it got the best drivers and most game compatibility of the S3 cards. I skipped straight from a Savage 3D to a Savage 2000. Its really sad that most S3 Metal games only run with graphical glitches on the Savage 2000, but at least the better OpenGL performance made up for it. But man all those cards got expensive...

[@DanielCardei]

What an awesome throwback in memory lane with this S3 card

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Thanks for watching! I do love that late 90s era both from the games I was playing, but also how much the video cards were changing.

[@rapideye85]

The Savage 4 was a really great card for its time that actually accelerated games. I remember still having a S3 Virge DX 4mb while a friend had a Savage 4 - and it kicked the crud out of mine - he was able to play all of the games during its time...but that s3 Virge could only do 320x240/200 well but the Savage 4 could do 640x480 well in D3d with better transparency support. I eventually got a RIVA TNT and then a Voodoo 2. No more gaming issues

[@jbaroli]

I've had a 16 mb version back in 2000. It served well during that time. Now, being a retro PC lover, I have a 32 mb one doing its work in a ss7 k6-2 500. You can mod some features with s3tweak and powerstrip.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Awesome! Yeah, after messing with it now, I'd definitely like to find a more permanent home in a machine as well. Seems like a great card for a wide range of setups.

[@honshitsu]

Had one from Diamond, great little card for Quake3, UT99 etc!

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Awesome! It's quite a card that easily gets overshadowed by all the others from the era. But it's very fun as a retro card these days.

[@reidster87]

It was interesting to see S3 in the context of discrete desktop PC 3D graphics. I bought a Toshiba Satellite laptop in 2001 which had the S3 Savage IX GPU. It was a continuation of the Savage 4 with reduced clocks and 8MB of SDRAM on the same package. It was a decent performer considering it was in a budget laptop.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

That's awesome. I saw some mentions of there being laptop integrated varieties so that's very cool. I'd imagine these days, that'd make one heck of a sweet retro laptop!

[@cherrbear8236]

Love that you used Microsoft Works. Now that’s truly Retro!

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Finally I can use all those graphing functions for something "useful". I'd spend hours just making fake pie charts in Works back on my Windows 95 computer in the day. A dream come true!

[@polly_jean3122]

Really great video, Rik, great way to spend 20 minutes. Pretty sure I was only exposed to Riva TNT2 during this era via our family's gateway tower in 1999; I remember being 13 years old in the brick and mortar gateway store and explaining to my mom what a video card was and why we really, really needed the best one that they offered 😆

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Thanks for watching! The eternal struggle to get your parents to pay for any upgrade, which you absolutely needed... I was trying to get my dad to buy Windows 95 when it came out but he was unconvinced, hah.

[@Svein-Frode]

Fun video!

[@memitim171]

I had one of these because I was too poor to buy a TNT2, I remember being very happy with it, it was a good card that never gave me any trouble unlike some others I could mention, I kept it until the Geforce 2 came out and hardware T&L started to become standard.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Compared to the competitors it may have come up a bit short, but taken by itself it was a really nice card, feels like a good option back in the day. And a great choice as a retro card!

[@supermario8416]

What are the GPU and memory frequencies of your Savage 4 ?

[@RiksRandomRetro]

I thought about putting all the clocks in, but wanted to keep it a bit higher level than going into it. But now I'm wondering if I should have! Either way my pro card runs at 125/125, if I recall right. Although it could have been 125/143 as well. It's right smack in the middle of the pack of the other cards, with a lot of them being considerably faster, no doubt.

[@sIDsleeper]

Fond memories of this card. Damn thing ran Vice City (barely, altough the fog cheat improved things) except it lacked the shader support, and did not draw the mission markers.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Oh wow, that's pushing it a bit haha. It's always fun to think back to the compromises we were willing to suffer through to play a game. It was expensive to upgrade, and if I game "ran", that was usually enough haha.

[@mbwoods2001]

I had a savage4 32meg card in my 1st pc, a pentium3-500. Having seen other pc's with 16meg tnt(or maybe tnt2) graphics, i thought this pc with 32meg graphics memory was a tnt2, but as soon as i got home only to realise it wasnt a tnt2 card but a savage4!! Later on, i upgraded to a geforce 2ti.

[@TurboMMaster]

S3 Trio was my very first video card. Never had another one made by S3, and I don't recall much about them in press back in late 90's. It's almost like nobody cared about S3 once 3dfx took over.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Sadly I think so, yes. The competition was just crazy at that time and if you weren't keeping up with the cutting edge stuff, consumers just weren't interested. They ran out of runway and faded away slowly.

[@balthron]

Looking at retro reviews for the Savage 4, I see an experience that is radically different from the one I had back in the day. I bought a creative Savage 4 card (I don't know the specific model) for my Celeron 333mhz rig back in 99 and I had a terrible time with the drivers. The driver that came with the CD had severe graphical anomalys in most games and very poor performance overall. The creative site had a newer driver then ran D3D games reasonably well, but had no opengl or metal support. The other driver I tried was the S3 reference driver from their website. That driver had opengl support but no metal and had severe artifacts in most D3D games. During the year and a half I used the card I had to juggle 3 drivers depending on witch game I wanted to play. and their ware a few games that didn't work well with any of the drivers.

[@dyslectische]

S3 savage 2000. That one with a broken t&l . Well some have t&l working with a drive hack and it work but not always. But if it work the card run just fine and even performance like a geforce 1 sdr

[@Tre_Selor]

I had that same card in my Compaq! It's strange to think that S3 tech actually lived on well after the S3 being licensed by Nintendo in use for the Gamecube and Wii.

[@HandFromCoffin]

I clearly remember having a TNT2 and I think I usually used 16bit color as 32bit slowed down a bit much. If I'm remembering correctly it wasn't until I got a GeForce DDR that I started using 32bit.

[@xPLAYnOfficial]

I wonder if this would serve as an interesting card to use in tandem with a Voodoo card since S3 cards are known for having some of the nicest video output of the time.

[@zabique]

my first pc had it paired with celeron 433 and 32mb ram :D it was great card

[@nopadelik9286]

This video reminded me of another competitor in early 3d accelerating graphics chips even tho it came out two or three years later .. i'm talking about the Power VR Kyro II. I only remember one Hercules card actually getting sold with it. Would be interesting to see a video about the Kyro II, it failed back in the day, and i don't know/remember why as it performed quite okay compared to the other available options back then.

[@primus711]

PoweVR had a few cards kyro2 was the last desktop card

[@RiksRandomRetro]

I do want to slowly explore some of the other standards/cards from that era. I mostly ran the "standard" ones myself, going from Voodoo to a TNT, so I find the alternatives very fascinating. The Kyro cards are on my list to pick up eventually for sure!

[@dabombinablemi6188]

I have yet to get my example working under Windows 98. The drivers just don't want to cooperate in Windows 9x. Had no problems under 2K and XP however. Which is a shame as I was intending to compare it to the Oxygen VX1 and Viper V550. That being said, I have never tried it on my 440BX and 440LX boards as neither were working at the time. Only ever tried it on my Via 694X, KT133E and KT600 boards

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Oh interesting, that's a bummer it won't work. I fortunately didn't have a single problem with running it on this machine, so I probably just assumed it ran easy, with no hassle. But I've definitely run into other weird compatibility problems on other card/MB combos. Hopefully you get it going!

[@dabombinablemi6188]

@@RiksRandomRetro The driver issues seem to be partially the particular make and model. My Diamond S540 works with all drivers unlike my generic card (unbranded Savage 4 GT). However the S540's VGA connector is faulty (monochrome red) and I don't have a hot enough soldering iron (yet) to swap the VGA from my dead generic GF2 MX"400"

[@dabombinablemi6188]

@@RiksRandomRetro Found out that it works under 98SE on my Asus P2L97 with the bit flip drivers+DX7. Not ideal as I had intended for the PC to run 95OSR2, but it runs games flawlessly, and Unreal+UT with Metal run better than on the PC's OG Viper V550 (playable @ 640x480 32bit colour). At the same time however I did install a Celeron 500 via slotket so maybe that helped somehow.

[@mariushmedias]

I had bad experience with Savage series ... has an S3 Trio 64 on my first PC (AMD K6-2 333 Mhz with PC Chips Elpina M577 board) and upgraded to S3 Savage 3D and within a weak it failed on me, somehow bios got corrupted... shop owner offered free upgrade to S3 Savage 4 and that also kicked the bucket after another week with same issue (only working in 2D / Windows) , and the owner gave up and gave me a more expensive nVidia Vanta with 8 MB of memory for no extra charge.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Oh dang, that's too bad! I feel I've heard of the card that might have been underwhelming, but not that they failed outright. But I suppose any piece of tech has a chance of failing, but that's some bad luck!

[@LeeMc007]

Nice video Rik, I have a few savage 4's I got with a bunch of IBM 300GL's, I was really surprised by the decent performance and I do remember them from the time but I think they really burnt their bridges with people after the very poor Virge cards(good 2d tho), I certainly just saw the Savage cards and the S3 branding was an instant put off, I'd not seen the demo's before I'll have to have a look at those, S3TC was a brilliant tech and morphed into DXTC eventually and used right up to present day from what I read.

[@LeeMc007]

Sorry, nearly forgot these🤘👅🤘

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Thanks for watching! Likewise I wasn't that interested in them back when, but they are actually very decent performers. Especially looking at the whole retro GPU landscape, they can be a good addition to a retro computer of the era. Something a bit different!

[@tobylifers3390]

I have so many 2D S3 cards in my spare cards box!

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Haha, yeah I think that's common for us interested in this hobby!

[@J.Wick.]

Interesting! Growing up in the early/mid 90s I was dead set on getting a Voodoo 2..Never did, however my first 3D card was an STB Velocity 128 AGP (Riva 128) Was a decent card for about 2 years lol...After that, an ATI Rage of some sort. It was PCI, but still fairly decent despite it. Things moved so much faster then. Glad it's not like that anymore from a thrift perspective. But man it was an exciting time! Cheers.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Yeah it's nuts to think back to how many standards were competing, and the amount of different options you had. Sounds like you had a great progression of cards though, with I'm sure some awesome gaming along the way. Thanks for watching!

[@bryancozort2068]

It's crazy to think the low end intel graphics in my 6 year old 350.00 lap top blow all of these retro cards out of the water with a pentium silver cpu and run all these Ole games flawless.

[@Vanessinha91Pucca]

I remember i had this card but a 34mb version back in my P3

[@BadManiac]

The best named graphics card of all time was a Savage card. the HERCULES TERMINATOR BEAST SAVAGE 3D. Savage 1 not Savage 4, but still.

[@dabombinablemi6188]

You should compare the card at 32bit colours vs the TNT2 Ultra. It isn't actually that unfair of a comparison. As long as you keep in mind that the Savage4 will barely scale past 500MHz CPU. You should see at most around a 10% drop in performance switching to 32bit mode, unlike the TNT2 series as a whole...40-50% performance drop is the norm. Recently bought a second card (which happens to be from the same manufacturer as my first, just the "Pro" version instead of "GT"), and with how well it does when paired with my Celeron 500 in my SE440BX-2 (no more driver issues), I wanted much the same for my K6-2 500. Though I myself will be doing before and after comparisons with the Fastware TNT2 Vanta that is currently paired with the K6-2. In 3DMark99 my Savage4 GT scored 4101 3DMarks at 800x600 16bit colours with a Pentium III 650. However it is relatively heavy on CPU compared to later 3DMark versions (and the Intel SE440BX-2 performance wise is dead middle of the pack) so it is more accurate when benchmarking older AGP cards on mid to late generation Socket 7 or Socket 478 PC.

[@huberthans4312]

S3TC Textures became a standard in Direct3D and OpenGL > That is far from "Narrow" Support.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Yep! I even mention that very thing in the video directly, at least how it was adopted by other standards later. I was mostly referring to the explicit S3TC support before it was merged into other APIs later.

[@stepkka]

Metal API? Does it have anything to do with Apple’s Metal API?

[@techkev140]

Your card had a Compaq part number on it, so an OEM and it was built by Diamond MultiMedia, under their Stealth brand. A brand that was easily going down hill at that time. I had a Diamond Viper V770 (32MB not the Ultra model, but it could clock as high) based on the nVidia TNT2. Diamond and S3 both disappeared sometime after these cards. Interestingly i believe they did a joint venture and the Diamond Viper 2 using a Savage 2000 chipset was born. I think the Savage line was probably good for OEM system builders but not so much outside that. The S3 Dirge, oops, Virge probably put many nails in an early coffin despite market dominance. The real S3 Savage legacy is... S3TC (S3 texture compression) that Savage introduced. Microsoft adopted it for Direct3D and it ended up in OpenGL. 3Dfx stood out, they didn't use it and they went for expensive high bandwidth memory instead. They suffered as 32bit colo(u)r cards like GeForce and Radeon took the lead against 16bit color Glide games. The 60fps mantra (nor nVidia) didn't saved them.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

It's a fascinating card, with a fascinating history from... well a fascinating company. So many cards and companies there were remnants of the 90s battle for card supremacy. But that makes them neat to mess with today at least!

[@jamespriest7328]

I had a s3 savage with 2mb of vram

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Fascinating! That's quite low, assuming it was some sort of workstation or server model with that low amount of ram. I'm assuming the chipset was later coopted as a budget card to get more money out of the platform.

[@jamespriest7328]

@@RiksRandomRetro it sucked but it is how I played most of my first 3d games like from 94 or 95 on my home pc. We we're kinda poor yeah lol.

[@jamespriest7328]

@@RiksRandomRetro sorry I think it had 4mb now that I think about it more. I played midtown madness on it played more like 10 fps if I was lucky lol. I had a 585 133 with 32mb of ram. It was 2 or 4mb of vram but not 100% sure on the vram.

[@JasonGrimard-z9v]

The biggest problem i had with the savage4 back in the day were the poor drivers. They held the chip back worse than the hardware i a lot of games.

[@RetroScorp]

Nice Video, took me back in time. 👍👍 The Q2 bench results are looking like the Savage4 and the TNT2 were benchmarked in 32-bit color mode. In 16-bit the TNT2 should reach around 80/90 fps and the Savage4 around 70+. The Savage4 was finally a nice product for its price, at least in my opinion. But it was overlooked back then. Because S3's reputation in terms of 3D was not good - Virge was slow, Savage3D release was despite of its potential a bit of a disaster (hardware incompatibilities with super socket 7, driver issues). The release reviews of the Savage 4 showed the good progress, but the card had still some driver/speed issues in some games (like speed only bit above a TNT1) at release. Because of the development I thought they will get it completely right with the Savage 2000, but that chip resulted in a loss of the next competitor.😭

[@RiksRandomRetro]

I could have sworn I had set it to 16-bit, but I also don't want to say 100%. It'd definitely explain the results better, I'll check! And it really is a cool card, but sadly overshadowed by the competitors. And to be fair it was just slightly behind the curve, from what I've seen. At the very least as a retro card now, taken by itself it's quite good. Thanks for watching!

[@MrRobertCortese]

I think the S3 Virge was so bad that nobody was interested in the Savage when it came out.

[@retrowikid]

The S3 Savage 4 was not a great card back in the day (1998-1999) and I still would not consider it great as a retro option even now. It is a mediocre desing on many accounts. First, it is not a voodoo. Then, it is not a great Direc3D or OpenGL card either, although the most common failure of S3 cards is due to very poor drivers that hits you when you least expect it. This can go from a non-working game, to a poor performing game or one that shows massive glitches. This is why you can rarely enjoy the S3 Savage 4. I also have to present some of the slightly good aspects of S3 Savage cards. First, they were much better than the horrible Trident Blade 3D cards. Yep, I saw such a "wonder" and that was an eye-opener. The S3 Savage 4 card was slightly better than the similar SiS 300 cards. The part were the Savage 4 shines is when you use S3TC, or S3 texture compression. This is what Microsoft used for some of its DXTC modes and it worked very well. In terms of hardware, there is a major hint on why S3 developed texture compression. The card had a below average performance on its video ram interface, frequently placing it under the infamous Riva TNT2 M64 chipset (the "I got a Riva TNT 2 card!" realization followed by a lot of regret). While multi-texturing support was alright, the card suffered slightly more than the M64 also when using 32-bit rendering. It is true that 32-bit rendering was your last concern when you were frequently coping with 20fps when playing Quake 3 in 1024x768 resolution, but such was life. In short: do not buy such a card unless you can't find anything else. An old Radeon 7000 from 2001, just a bit newer than the Savage 4 and the flawed S3 Savage 2000 follow-up, is much better and there are plentiful ATI cards on the market. And, to answer you question: The "Savage" is as fearsome as the Intel "Extreme" Graphics a few years down the line, or the Trident "Blade" solutions. A funny-sounding compromise when you are on a very low budget and you got to have a 3D graphics card. Nothing to write home about!

[@danielmartin7547]

please clean the PCB of your cards. Thanks.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Haha, I thought I had, but when you smack a lens 10 inches away and record at 4k everything shows up! But I'll try and keep them cleaner for the next video, thanks for watching!

[@homelessEh]

i do wish via would do something more with their s3 acquisition.

[@homelessEh]

i had a s3 virge with the 4mb back when it was "new" and got to witness the first ever 3d Decelerator. in descent 2 when you enabled the s3's "Deceleration" you gained some dithering and lost 1/2 the frame rate... it lived on WAY longer then it should have if it wasn't for the Voodoo1 and Voodoo2 keeping it on life support it would have met a demise sooner.. still have a s3 savage 4 in agp laying around..

[@homelessEh]

later found out there was a mod one could do to make the old s3 virge's image quality brighter. something about a redundant resistor or replacing a resistor with a lower something to do with a non sensical part on the card that just overall makes the image darker.. then the competators of the time..altho maybe that was a trio