In Sharky Extreme's
first look at the technology behind S3's Savage4 chip three weeks ago, we saw the foundation for a very AGP accelerated part. Here's a look at the 3D specifications of the Savage4 Pro chip, which is the part that Diamond selected for their Stealth card:
- Single-Pass Multi-Texturing Support
- True Color Rendering
- S3TC Texture Compression
- Single-Cycle Trilinear Filtering
- Bump Mapping
- Full Scene Anti-Aliasing
- Anisotropic Filtering
- Vertex Buffers
- 8-Bit Stencil Buffer
- Full Triangle Setup Engine
- Support for all DX6 Blending Modes
- Specular Lighting and Diffuse Shading
- W Buffer
- W Fog
- 32-Bit Z-Buffering
- MPEG-2 Video Textures
- Sprite Anti-Aliasing
- Palletized Textures
- Perspective Correction
- Vertex and Table Fog
- Triangle Strips and Fans
- Reflection Mapping
- Texture Morphing
- Shadows
- Procedural Textures
- Atmospheric Effects
The featureset of the Savage4 is impressive, leaving nothing to chance when it comes to supporting future technology. Sharky Extreme's staff was particularly impressed to see the Savage4's ability to offer Single-Cycle Trilinear Filtering, as well as support for Bump Mapping and Anisotropic Filtering included in the mix.
We also felt that the Savage4's 300MHz RAMDAC controller and support for a minimum amount of 16MB of SDRAM or SGRAM would fit the bill nicely for the gamer on a low-budget who's still looking to run with the big dogs in 1999.
