S3-VIA to return in high-end 3D?
Very few of us use S3 based videocards nowadays. There are almost no drivers or new produsts.
During the last year this company was in very critical condition: in spring they announced that
S3-Graphics will be bought by VIA Technologies and in summer`2000 both companies were dealing
with aquisition process. A bit earlier, in late 1999 a group of hardware developers left S3, leaving
the company without an R&D team.
Fortunately, some of S3 or VIA developers managed to stay calm enough to work on the
next-generation of 3D graphics chips and it seems like we`ve got a strong rival for NV30 and
RADEON2 or 3 called VIA Columbia (named after Columbus, who discovered America; maybe
Columbia will do something amazing with 3D graphics, who knows?) Samples are expected in Q4 2001 and specs are something like this:
