S3 Incorporated says it has designed the fastest 3D accelerator available for the $99-129 retail PC graphics market.

The new Savage4 Xtreme 166 features significantly increased 166MHz memory and engine clock speeds, as well as higher performing OpenGL software drivers. Analysts at Mercury Research say initial testing of a sample Xtreme 166 accelerator shows at least a 21% performance increase over existing Savage4 accelerators.

S3 says Diamond Multimedia will be the first company to bring its Savage4 Xtreme-based products to market with its Stealth III S540 Xtreme graphics accelerator, featuring 32MB of memory, complete S3 texture compression support, advanced AGP technology and Diamond's exclusive InControl Tools 99.

Savage4 Xtreme-based products are expected to be on retail shelves in early September. For more information about S3 and its products, go to www.S3.com .