As you've seen from the earlier charts, the Xtreme is no speed demon. It's faster than its predecessor but it still lags some way behind a nippier Voodoo3 2000 or TNT2. What you've got to decide is whether you're a 'professional' gamer or just someone that likes to be immersed in eye candy albeit for a speed penalty. Eye candy, is something that any Savage 4 chip is very capable of rendering.

S3's architecture is most widely known for its S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) feature, which allows the use of very large textures (up to 2048 x 2048) which are compressed using proprietary S3 methods and end up looking like this:

Screen shots taken from Unreal
Top: Savage4 with S3TC large textures (2048 x 2048)
Bottom: Other card with 256 x 256 texture size limitation

Looks good enough to eat. And when (being the key word) the technique is applied the obvious visual clarity and purity is visible. Photorealism instead of 256x256 textures is certainly the way to go (at least in the future). One day you'll be able to scribble (by spraying bullets from a mini-gun) your name on a wall in a first person shooter and it'll look like the image on top as opposed to the one on the bottom (see below) where texture size is limited to 256x256x8. With S3TC enabled games, textured surfaces look less blurry at up to 2048x2048 and can show off more level of detail (via triple buffering the speed hit is lessened).

Screen shots taken from Unreal
Top: Savage4 with S3TC large textures (2048 x 2048)
Bottom: Other card with 256 x 256 texture size limitation