3D Blaster Savage4(+)
Creative Labs

What we were shown:

The Savage4+ board we were shown was running at full core speed of 125Mhz (atleast that’s how I understood it) on a PentiumII 350Mhz system with 256Mb’s of RAM. First we were shown some special levels of Unreal using a modified Unreal patch supporting S3’s S3TC (texture compression) features, and sure this was impressive. The first level was a small map featuring over 200Mb’s of textures (not one texture was used twice!), it was supposed too look like an alley or a backyard full of graffiti.

When using the sniper-rifle you could zoom in on a wall and see the tiny details of the wooden surface of a fence sprayed with graffiti. We we’re also shown the texture intensive Egypt and Gallery special levels of Unreal running perfectly fluid.

There is a reason that the machine was equipped with a full 256Mb’s of RAM, the S3TC techdemos, even though the texture compressions helps (thanks to Russel Schultz for pointing this out), relies heavily on AGP texturing and needs LOTS of RAM to run fluidly, if you have too little RAM the computer has to start using the harddisk to swap and this will slow the game down greatly.
This makes me very skeptic towards the PCI version of the Savage4, because the much slower PCI bus wont be able to provide the card with textures fast enough and I would only recommend this card if you are in desperate need of a 3D Card offering 32Bit rendering and can’t afford an AGP system.

Creative also showed us the nVidia demo with the skyscrapers and the bee on the Savage4+ card, and indeed the card ran it, even though it was a bit slower than the TNT2.
So when it comes to performance the TNT2 is definitely the faster of the two, but if you look at the image quality I think that the Savage4 has a little extra to offer because of the S3TC.

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