S3 Dual-GPU Card Competes with ATI Eyefinity
VIA Technologies plans to offer an alternative to AMD's ATI Eyefinity technology.
VIA Technologies said that it's sporting a few products at the Digital Signage Expo 2010 trade show held next week at the Las Vegas Convention Center. One of the products mentioned is the company's upcoming S3 Graphics Chrome 5400E x2, a dual-GPU graphics card aimed to take on AMD's ATI Eyefinity technology.
"The S3 Graphics 5400E x2 is a highly integrated and flexible video card that features dual graphics and multimedia processors," the company said. "Boasting extreme hardware acceleration of the latest HD video codecs, the S3 Graphics 5400E x2 uses S3 Graphics' PanoChrome technology to provide up to four independent HD video streams at resolutions of 1080p on up to eight displays, employing a variety of display modes and configurations."
The company's press release provided a few more details, indicating that the card provides built-in Genlock support for synchronized source timing, and support for Span, Extended, and Clone view configurations. The hardware-accelerated HD video codecs include H.264, VC-1 and WMV-HD. Unfortunately, there's no real hardware-based info such as its core clock speed and on-board memory amount.
VIA said that it will offer a taste of the dual-GPU graphics card during the show, and will eventually provide samples to ODM customers in the USA sometime Q2 2010 or later. More information about what VIA is bringing to the trade show next week can be seen here.
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New boy in a game, Nvidia will get some competition. They better hurry up with that Fermi, we will see what it is capable of. Of course ATI is in the lead in my opinion.
New in the game? S3 have been around for years.
S3 is ancient actually. They are well known for budget solutions that "work" vs. "rock". Expect to see this in the sub $100 range.
I find it interesting to see S3 and Nvidia countering eyefinity by using dual cards rather than one card with 3+ outputs.
It looks like S3 are just releasing it as a single card albeit with two GPUs capable of running 4 displays each as opposed to any extra cards. I suppose technically, a single ATi 5xxx GPU can handle 6 displays... but would you want it to in the case of the lower models?
In the end though, S3 look to be positioning this as a video solution and not for gaming. I'd find it very hard to believe that S3 could turn out a powerful gaming card. Additionally, as far as I can see, the 5400E is a 65nm embedded solution. Regardless of the fact that it's DX10.1-compliant, it's got up to 512MB of 1.7GHz GDDR3 on a 64-bit bus so it's definitely not suited to large data loads. Even if it was, say, a 1GB dual GPU card, it'd still only have a 64-bit bus, a bandwidth of no more than 27.6GB/s (half of my 4830) and I'd hardly say that's suited to gaming. I suppose we'll see if it'll work with these multiple HD streams that they're talking about.
Couldn't find a link to the x2 but I did find the original...
http://www.s3graphics.com/en/produ [...] eriesId=17
This will not last long
New boy in a game, Nvidia will get some competition. They better hurry up with that Fermi, we will see what it is capable of. Of course ATI is in the lead in my opinion.
It will be years before via could offer serious competition in graphics if they even wanted to try to move up to gaming quality graphics solutions. Nvidia didn't even bat an eye at this news.
S3's last serious graphics card was the Savage 2000 which had a non-functional TnL engine, and was a real letdown considering how well the Savage4 did in comparison. Personally, I don't class any of the -Chrome series as serious releases.
If anything, this card looks to compete with Matrox.