While I’ve heard of S3 Graphics in the past, I really don’t know a lot about the company. Still being quite a young lad back in the mid 90s when S3 was ruling supreme, I was just at school and accepting hand me down computers from my dad.
Reading through the reviewers guide that was sent, a lot of familiar names did pop up; models like Trio, ViRGE and Savage were all terms I heard mentioned previously. In 1996 S3 owned over 50% of the 3D graphics market share. The thing is, looking over the guide it’s quite depressing on a whole to see a company that dealt with some of the biggest names in the game and have some of the most power 3D graphics cards on the market to now be something that people only remember as a distant memory.
S3 hasn’t stopped releasing graphics cards, but we just don’t seem to hear much about them anymore. Hopefully that’s going to change with the release of the Chrome 430 GT.
It’s a low-end card that seems to be capable of taking on the big boys at NVIDIA and AMD.
