Conclusion

The graphics card on the new GammaChrome S18 processor from S3 Graphics didn’t succeed very well in our today’s tests because of the pretty flawed driver and, probably, because of the imperfect design of the card PCB. As a result, the device was quite unstable ?many games would freeze the system soon after their launch. We also saw the display mode reset to 640x480@4bit in 2D applications a few times.

The performance of our GammaChrome sample turned to be higher than that of the RADEON X300, but lower than that of the RADEON X600 PRO. In some cases the new card was faster than the X600 PRO, though. The value solution from S3 performed well in the video tests, ensuring a low CPU load even during playback of files in the WMV HD format. So, the GammaChrome S18 Pro has a high potential, and that’s nice.

As you may see from our benchmark results, the GammaChrome solution appeared relatively unstable. A graphics card turned out incompatible with a number of games, so it can hardly win the hearts of many users this way, no matter how technologically advanced it may be. I am pretty sure that the graphics cards manufacturers would rather prefer to wait until S3 Graphics finalizes this product before the GammaChrome comes to shops. It is of course possible that the problems are only peculiar to our sample of the card, and that the mass production solutions will run better and faster, but we can’t yet reject our suspicions about the imperfect drivers.

It was almost the same with the previous GPU, called DeltaChrome, but the defects of DeltaChrome-based graphics cards were not corrected and they haven’t become widely available in retail. So, if the S3 Graphics developer team does wish a long and happy life to their creation, they have to solve the stability issues as soon as possible. Otherwise, this promising graphics processor is going to follow the fate of its predecessor, which would be a pity...