Anand heeft een preview van de S3 Savage4 op z'n site gelegd. De specs van de Savage4 staan er frisjes bij en met de support van o.a. Diamond en Creative zal-ie ongetwijfeld succesvoller worden dan z'n geflopte broertje. Vooral S3 Texture Compression is een erg prettige feature:
S3's 6:1 compression ratio provided for by the S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) technology allows for the seamless integration of compression technology, with no noticeable visual penalty, due to its full support in Microsoft's DirectX 6.0. S3TC isn't something S3 cooked up on the side, it is a fully licensable and readily available compression algorithm that is supported in DirectX 6.0, it's about time a company realized that proprietary isn't the way to go to make your presence known in the market. Just to get a vague idea of the capabilities of S3TC, while the Voodoo2 is limited to texture sizes of 256 x 256 bytes, a S3TC texture is limited to 2048 x 2048 byte textures.
