You'll be lucky to find their DX9 tech...

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-11, 09:11:

You'll be lucky to find their DX9 tech...

So I suppose they are really rare. It'd not be bad to have a S3 card into a "modern" config. 😀

I had a S3 Chrome 4xx GT,
if you can find two of them you can also run them in SLI

They not so bad at all.

Interesting! If I'll find one I might build a machine for that. There's something nice to know S3 brand still is running nowdays in a modern card, I didn't even know they lasted that long. I always thought they ended up in the half 2005 or around that. Lately I've found a Socket 775 board for Pentium4/D having a VIA P4M890 chipset I didn't know existed too.

They suffer a lot from micro-stutter.

386SX wrote on 2020-09-11, 07:52:

Hi,

lately I found out that existed a PCI-Express S3 based card (the Chrome 540 GTX) that I never heard about it together with later Directx 11 on-board iGPU like the 640 and 645 series. Do anyone have/had those and can say something about it? I understand they probably were not fast but still impressive to see the S3 name together with PCI-E or Dx11 tech.. are they rare gpu nowdays?
Thanks

Hello,

I just found your post. I have a VIA mini ITX motherboard with the Zhaoxin/VIA Joint Venture Quad Core 2.0Ghz CPU. It has the 645/640 iGPU. Really expensive board........................................................... An AMD Sempron 3850 1.3Ghz Quad performs better and it's cheaper.

It works fine for browsing, Youtube and Netflix and older games. However, I had to pair it with a Matrox C420 PCI-E card because I use the machine for Photoshop 2021 to draw my storyboards. I also do animated cartoons using ToonBoom. I have 3 displays and a 21 inch display drawing tablet.

This build has enough power for this type of work, but you will lag like hell if you try to watch Netflix while working, mainly because the Matrox C420. It performs as if you don't have the display drivers installed.

I have more powerful computers but I just spend too much time procrastinating and gaming... so I chose the Via Quad because it has the power to allow me to work but not do anything else while I am using these programs.

I also leave this thing on 24/7 when I go to bed. I leave Star Trek playing in the background. =D

The iGPU has DirectX 11 support but doesn't work well with Photoshop 2021. I think the DirectX 11 is just there for Windows 10 GUI acceleration and transparency support. However, I had to install Windows 7 because for some reason, everytime I installed the iGPU drivers, the system would hang and crash.

So.... Playing older games is fine. Star Wars Pod Episode I racer runs about 30 FPS steady. Lord of the Rings online runs fine on low settings 1920x1080 resolution. I would assume games like Half Life 2 and Halo would do very well. Let me know if you would like me to test a couple of games. I have also played Fallout 3 and GTA San Andreas with both the iGPU and the Matrox but not much else.....

The Matrox C420 outperforms the iGPU by a lot. However, the 645/640 is better than the Matrox M-Series graphics cards (Only DirectX 9 support). Yes I have played games with those cards. I am a Matrox fan.