Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/244
Hercules Terminator BEAST Supercharged S3 Savage 3D
by Ga'ash Soffer on February 5, 1999 4:59 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
A Brief History
In a frantic effort to make a come back after a series of dismal attempts at over hyping the ViRGE chipset, S3 decided it was time for a change. Shortly after the former Operation 3Dfx's April fools announcement of a killer 3 inch S3 chipset capable of 1600x1200 Quake2 rendering at well over 100fps, S3 announced their real next generation product, the S3 Savage 3D. Whether or not Operation 3Dfx's announcement inspired S3 or not is a different story, but it was real, S3 had announced a new product which wasn't even remotely based on the ViRGE chipset design. Being the first 0.25 micron based 3D accelerator released, the Savage3D boasts a 100-125 million tri-linear filtered pixel/sec fill-rate (depending on clock speed), new Microsoft endorsed texture compression method, 32bit rendering and more... the Savage3D was sure to please.
Why didn't it? First of all, the driver support and the quality of the S3 Savage3D boards was a major concern. Also, most of the boards used poor S3 reference drivers and came with low quality SDRAM which restricted clock speed of the chipset. How can I tell? Well, the Savage3D board barely gets hot at all, and yet the boards could only run at 110mhz reliably. Anything above this speed would lead to excessive image tearing, missing polygons, and eventually a crash. This isn't to say that textures weren't missing during normal operations, but that was due to the poor drivers.
The Hercules Terminator BEAST Supercharged
Running at 120mhz and backed up by constant driver updates, the Hercules Terminator BEAST Supercharged is sure to please. After all, Hercules, being the first chipset manufacturer to release a Savage3D based solution should have enough experience with the board by now... Does the BEAST please though? Find out...
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Features
S3 Savage3D 0.25 Micron Chipset
AGP 2x support
Single Cycle Tri-linear filtering
2048x2048 texture size
32bit rendering
16-24bit Z-buffer
S3TC texture compression
120Mhz Core Clock and RAM timing
TV-out
S3TC Texture Compression
This Microsoft backed texture compression scheme (which is officially part of DX6) deserves a discussion. What exactly is S3TC, and why is it so good? S3TC is a texture compression methology which compresses every 16 or 24bit RGB set into 4bits. How exactly S3 does this I am not quite sure, but chances are that they implement some sort of algorithm which uses the 4bit data to modify the previous pixel in order to get the new pixel. (Note: this is just a guess.) Regardless of the actual algorithm used, S3TC decompression is very fast. Not only is decompression very fast, S3TC has a 4:1,6:1, or 8:1 compression ratio (uncompressed:compressed). These high compression ratios allow the Savage3D to pack larger more detailed textures into the same amount of memory space. Not only does S3TC allow more detailed textures without compromising bandwidth, S3TC can also be used to conserve bandwidth, and to effectively give AGP 2x over 2GB/sec bandwidth, faster than virtually any current architecture.
What about the image quality?
The Image quality with S3 texture compression is excellent. Not only are the differences between polygons mapped with compressed/uncompressed textures not noticeable, S3 texture compression allows developers to bump up the texture size without experiencing a big drop in bandwidth; which effectively makes polygons mapped with high resolution S3TC compressed textures look much better than low-resolution un-compressed equivalents.
So S3TC IS GOOD!
Yes, as a matter of fact, S3TC is very good. S3TC can be used to improve performance or improve image quality. It is virtually a win win situation, especially since the image quality is maintained well.
TV-out
The Terminator BEAST features good TV-out capabilities, especially considering the board costs always under $100 (According to Hercules). I, personally, do not care much for TV-out; however, for those of you looking for TV-out capabilities at a low-cost, the Terminator BEAST deserves attention.
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Installation
After having some troubles (I didn't bother to experiment much) and eventually returning the first Terminator BEAST Supercharged which made it to me; the installation of the second board was flawless. The problems I experienced with the first board (which according to Hercules worked flawlessly) were perhaps due to an outdated motherboard BIOS, or perhaps due to the fact that the plug & play system hadn't been initialized properly. Hercules recommended that I boot the system up without a video card (until 1 sustained followed by 3 short beeps would be heard) and then install the board. I did this upon the arrival of the Terminator BEAST (as well as flashing the BIOS with the latest update 1/25/99), and the installation went very well. There were no quirks and the manual documented the installation well.
Manual
While the manual documented the installation well, this does not mean the manual was well made. Since Hercules decided to save time and package every board with the same universal manual, finding the information you need is a painstaking task.
Drivers
I wish I could say that the Terminator Beast drivers are top quality; however, they leave a lot to be desired. First of all, the OpenGL ICD is not nearly as optimized as offerings from nVidia and the likes. (the MiniGL does work well in OpenGL games, such as Quake2) Secondly, the Vsync-off tearing is still very evident. Don't expect to be able to play games with Vsync-off, it won't happen. As far as I could tell, the black textured problem (which happened in other Savage3D based solutions; where small objects which are far away from the viewer are black) had vanished; however, the Terminator's drivers had an annoying anomaly that whenever I closed a DOS window or quite a program such as Quake2, the screen flashed. Now these flashes don't detract from the performance of the board, and they don't give anyone seizures as far as I could tell; but they are an unnecessary nuisance. Also, Quake2 refused to run at 1024x768*32bit color, and Quake2 exited abruptly many times after a resolution change. D3D games, such as Forsaken, had no apparent problems.
As far as tweaking is concerned, the Hercules drivers shine. The screen shot below gives you but a glimpse of what is available.
The abundance of tweaking options are a plus; thought I would have liked to see higher stability with the drivers. The Hercumeter allows you to overclock the video RAM and clock, even though it only states memory speed. The Beast's RAM and clock are "locked-in", e.g. they run at the same speed.
There are also optimize schemes included with the drivers which allow you to select whether or not you would like to optimize for GameGauge, 3D Winbench, etc. Personally, I didn't notice a difference while running some of the GameGauge games.
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Performance
The Hercules Terminator BEAST Supercharged was tested on a Pentium II/400, Abit BX6 motherboard, 64MB RAM, 5.1GIG WD Caviar.
Quake2 was conducted using version 3.19 w/no sound
D3D benchmarks will be posted as soon as I find a quality real world (game) D3D benchmark which contains a significant number of polygons per scene (but not too much for the game to be CPU limited), multitextured polygons, and stable D3D support. Having said that, note that D3D performance of Savage3D based solutions should be significantly faster than OpenGL performance due to driver maturity.
The Terminator BEAST runs @120mhz opposed to the 110mhz of the AOpen PA70. The results show that at 640x480 the clock speed really makes a difference.
Already we see the weakness of the OpenGL driver (MiniGL) for the Savage3D board. The Hercules Terminator BEAST's expected performance should be around the 46fps range. The lackluster performance increase over the 10mhz slower part (Aopen PA70) can almost solely be attributed to driver weakness.
NOTE: The Hercules Terminator BEAST Supercharged used the OpenGL ICD for this test because the MiniGL driver was slower (27.5fps).
Now our previous hunch that the Savage3D is being limited by drivers is substantiated with even more data. The MiniGL driver w/the Hercules BEAST performs the same as with the AOpen PA70. The only reason I can think of that the OpenGL ICD is faster than the MiniGL driver is that it does not implement as many per-pixel features which take extra processing. (Edge AA comes to mind; the OpenGL ICD is significantly slower at 640x480 and 800x600)
Note that all of these performance numbers are taken with Vsync off. While Vsync off is "ok" for the 3dfx Banshee and Hercules Dynamite TNT, the Savage3D boards cannot function with Vsync-off, i.e. the resulting image "tearage" (is that a word?) is unbearable. NOTE: 32bit color tests had random failures and I have concluded that quake2 @32bit color is not an option with this board. D3D games will work at 32bit color.
Conclusion
From a pure performance stand-point, the Terminator BEAST isn't an exciting solution. The performance is sub-par in OpenGL. D3D performance should be around Banshee speeds (guestimate); however, there isn't anything to be excited about, since the drivers are unstable and the TNT boards (which can be had for around $30 more)
Performance: 80%
Quality: 65%
Documentation: 75%
Value: 85%
Overall Impression: 75%