iXBT heeft de primeur met een review van de S3 Savage4 powered Diamond Stealth III S540. De Savage4 heeft maar 1 rendering pipeline en ondersteund dus geen multi-texturing, wat duidelijk naar voren komt in de Quake II benchmarks: de framerate van de Savage4 is bijna 2 maal zo laag als die van de TNT2 en Voodoo3. 2D performance blijft ook achter bij de TNT2, V3 en Rage128. 2D image quality blijkt ook matig te zijn:
Now let's consider the performance of this card in 2D-graphics. As far as the image quality is concerned, Diamond Stealth III S450 is lagging far behind compared to all the graphics cards we have tested recently. We would position it a bit behind Riva TNT because at 1280x1024 the picture appears oppressively washed out though RAMDAC frequency is 300MHz. However, it is quite possible that those of you who have a 15" or 17" monitor won't regard it as a serious drawback because the resolution equal to 1024x768 and up is simply not needed in this case. [break]3D beeldkwaliteit blijkt, dankzij S3 Texture Compression (een unieke feature van de Savage4), wel erg goed te zijn:[/break] Frankly speaking, we were expecting the graphics cards on Savage4 to appear pretty soon since their terrific image quality had been the talk of the town. Besides, not so long ago S3 made several announcements about extremely high performance of this chipset. As is known, Savage3D and Savage4 can operate with compressed textures, in other words they are compressing and decompressing them "on fly". This allows to get a very high quality image - even a photographic one, containing larger textures - without any tangible speed reduction. As a result the 3D-scene quality increases greatly from the point of its visual perception.
De review van iXBT is behoorlijk uitgebreid, met veel info, benchmarks en screenshots. Check it out.
