The S3 demo maps with S3TC works just fine on the GOG version of Unreal gold on windows 10. Who knew 1999 offered such incredible graphics. Thank you Phil for sharing this with us.
+PhilsComputerLab I don't remember the exact price but I do know that it was tremendously cheaper than any recognized brand card at the time. I was a teenager at the time, maybe 15 or 16 by 1998 and my mother made me pay for half my computer. Since in Mexico everything is three times as expensive I remember researching extensively for the cheapest possible computer that would allow me to play Half-Life decently (my obsession for that game was beyond measure). My final system was a PIII at 550mhz, the Savage 4 and 96 ram. Oh how I wanted the Voodoo3.
+PhilsComputerLab it was a decent card indeed. Enabling S3TC in Deus Ex made me look at the wood textures at the intro for minutes. I remember wondering how graphics could not get any better haha. But now 17 years later I think I'm still preferring Deus Ex, Half-Life and specially System Shock 2 than most new titles. Graphics do not impress me anymore for some reason.
Bought this card back in 1999 as new card in my K6-2 machine. It was a GT version (slower and with 16MB), but it clocked fairly well up to 143/143 MHz (which was sold as Savage 4 extreme version) without any additional cooling. It was a lot cheaper than TNT2 M64, i think 1/2 or 2/3 price of M64. This was my first graphics card that tought me, how to play with registry settings and so on :) Every driver was "specific", some of them had better D3D but worse opengl ICD or metald river, had to combine it for best performance. I think that there was also problem with AGP texturing which S3 disabled, but it could be enabled again. Anyway the best you can do is not to use standard S3 driver, but set of so called Rizen's tweaked driver. And there also existed a tweaking tool, looked like powerstrip, but it was developed exclusively for savage cards and offered number of advanced options. I've played unreal tournament back at the time, visual quality was better than D3D and was reasonably fast. I also tried the demo levels and it was awesome on K6-2 with 32MB RAM. It was not a popular card back at the time, but it was not that bad. Shame on S3 they could never released proper drivers... and in Windows2000/XP there was huge performance drop and non functional OpenGL and Metal, i think.
ahh man, those were the times. :) I miss it. That feeling when I turned on my old P200mmx with 128megs and s3 virge and voodoo 1 card. and played all those great games like Sports Car GT, Re-Volt, Need For Speed 4, Red Alert, Tycoon and so on. ahh... i must build some old hardware.
Having finally gotten my own Savage4 working (bitflip driver works correctly on my Asus P2L97 with DX7 installed, not on any of my newer PC), I'm finding that it gives a better experience than the Viper V550 that came with the PC - especially since 32bit colours is usable on S3 cards due to at most a 10% performance hit, instead of around 50%. Unreal Gold runs at a higher framerate than with the V550 or my Vanta (125MHz mem and core). That is only with the metal api however - the drivers and single pixel pipe do limit the performance somewhat in DX games. Fun fact: Some companies were still manufacturing Savage4 in 2001 and maybe even 2002, going off the sticker on the back of my card. Edit: Why ^that^ is important, is that the later Savage 4 cards despite being built on the cheap (certainly far lower quality than any Diamond card before or after the turn of the millenium), have a really good VGA ouput even at higher resolutions - as good as my Oxygen VX1 (which is really broken in Commander Keen4+5) and Matrox G550. They still suffer from the capacitor plague though.
The Savage 4 was the very first GPU I ever bought myself. Spent R350 on it, and used it until I got the GeForce 4Ti 4800se. Was really happy with it, and the Pentium 3. Mechwarrior 2 in DOS was my jam!
If I remember it well, almost every games that use Unreal engine at the time support MetaL renderer. There were many of them, exception went just for Harry potter games that were Direct3D only. UE1 games running S3's MetaL made Savage3D/Savage4 great alternative to 3dfx's Voodoo 3. It was frustrating how people only talked about S3 Savage4 as NVidia Riva TNT2's contender which only made it incompetent.
@@philscomputerlab The consumer halls at CeBIT '99 were a lot like Gamescom today. Guillemont and Creative where pretty close and competed for the loudest show, much to the dismay of business visitors. But I was an 18 year old kid, so I loved it. That and the free booze at the countless parties.
I remember back in 2000 using S3Tweak, an incredibly powerfull and usefull tool to overclock and tweak driver settings. Drivers were very unstable for quite some time and Windows XP drivers suck, but W9x are just fine. I had a 16 MB version and currently still have a 32 MB version.
Nice review as always, i had Savage3D and 2000. Friend got Savage4, but it was overheating a lot. Also all Savage card had compatibility problems with AGP texturing in some games (freezing). To fix that, there was made free tool working only in W9x called S3Tweak. You should try it, it has much more driver options than Powerstrip including possibility to change size of agp texturing or disable it, vsync, overclocking, texture types atd. It also support profiles for various games (can be often found in unofficial mixed modded drivers). Usually when any game freeze just disable AGP texturing and it often helps...
But I don't get upset about missing things, because you got to accept that you will never be able to cover everything, or the video never gets finished. There is always another video when you can put that in. I'll cover the S3Tweak tool in the Savage 2000 video then :)
I remember, it blew my mind, when I installed some fresh drivers on this baby and was able to play games like Quake 3 and Homeworld with 3d acceleration.
So funny to see these old cards with tiny passive heatsinks or even no cooler at all (like voodoo2). And now we got these huuuge triple slot 2kg multifan-cooler designs :D:D
This is the first 3dfx card I ever got, the bang for buck was unheard of, and from what I remember it took Voodoo 3 and Riva TNT2 to soundly beat it in terms of all aspects of performance and even then it wasnt by all that much (edit: from what I read in the comments I'm not too far off my mark in that regard) I ran this on a P2 333mhz MMX w/ 60mhz bus and 128mb ram and 2gb HDD, an average gaming PC at best even for its time, mind you I ran CFS2 and Max Payne (!!) at near full blast with this meagre setup. Probably one of the most stable systems I've ever had until recently too. Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 costs 350 bucks on Ebay, and even then requires a bit of expertise/fiddling to wring the best out of them. You can get the S3 Savage 4 for 1/10th of that price and it'll run anything that came out back then. Perfect for building a neat little retro Windows 98 all-aspect pc (For playing DOS games AND W98 games). I came over a 350 w/100 bus and 512mb ram at the recycling station, and got that up fired up tonight, needed to replace the cooling bits on the CPU cassette (ironically from an AMD 600mhz Cassette, they used the same components lol) but other than that it works like a charm, I suspect the broken cooler was the reason it was discarded in the first place. So instead of rebuilding the old 333 I got the 350 working, and no decision time was wasted ordering a used 30 dollar S3 Savage 4 on ebay and expect to have it all working within a couple of weeks.
I have a card very similar to this still. A Number Nine SR9 w/ S3 Savage4 Xtreme 166MHz core/166MHz 16MB SGRAM. Cool little card, the DDR memory makes it not too bad actually and it has AGP 4X. Has a DVI display output too.
cool review, I had an integrated ProSavage4 DDR in my first computer in 2001. I remember the disappointment when Max Payne did not start, requiring D3D8.1, the chip did not support hardware t&l. Also, I was running on 133MHz or 166MHz SD RAM first and when I upgraded to 233mhz DDR the fps gain was amazing. I played with GTA3 for a year like around 15FPS in 640x480 on minimum, then I added an fx5200 in 2003 and I felt my 1200mhz Duron became a stallion.
well, the fx5200 was the cheapest card available that I could afford at the time, and it was definitely better than the cards my friends usually had(that is gf4mx)
I know I had an s3 of some sort in my first machine it was a Packard bell. Not sure if it was on board It seemed to work well but I dont remember. I had it from 95 to 00 I played half life, tomb raider 1 through 4, and quake on it. That's about the most demanding games I played on it. The rest were ID and 3drealms games. I almost forgot I would muck with all those cgm and pc gamer monthly discs thoses were the days.
For some reason I remember S4 to have unfixable T&L issues. MDK 2 wouldn’t render right with one of the settings on. It was documented on wiki too. Sorry for being lazy here.
My motherboard would crash running Nvidia Riva TNT, so bought the Savage4 which worked great. Nvidia was at one time smaller than S3, amazing how far they come.
I cry when i remember we used to pay £299 for that tech when it first came out so many years ago. Today we pay £600 for gtx1080 - when its like 2025 i will cry again. lmao
Great review as usual :) It would be good to see a Power VR Prophet 4500 (Kyro 2) review at some point. I remember having one and it's tile based rendering technique could edge out the mighty Geforce 2 in some games. It was a great card for the time but lacked driver support and hardware T+L which ultimately killed it off :(
I remember very negative reviews of this card back in the day. Mostly the drivers were terrible, many games didn't run properly or didn't support it. Most of reviews said to stay away. Some games worked well, but not enough to justyfi the cost.
I bought one of these back in the day at a computer fair just to try it. It was £25 new because it was an old card by then. Was the 32mb version. Wish I still had it, was cool to try the extra UT textures.
those textures are pretty cool, but yes... good DOS card and that's it, also it highlights once again how bad the tnt2 m64 was, because I never regarded Savage 4 as a good card, and the m64 is barely faster, ouch...
I had this GPU back in 1999. Its main attraction was great performance with 32bit color. The drivers were crappy though and it was not compatible with Intel 440LX chipset under Windows 98 (it had conflicts with Intel AGP GART drivers which caused constant freezes). That’s why I was still using Windows 95 OSR2 until 2001 when I switched to Windows 2000. Under Windows 2000 this GPU was rock solid and outperformed Nvidia TNT2.
The first GPU I've ever had! Surprisingly, I've found about the model I had not too long ago though, funny that :) My brother sad that the QIIIArena was lagging a lot and your benchmarks confirm that :) Then I've got a MX440, then 6600GT, (VERY briefly the 6200 TurboCache which was such a pile of garbage), then GT220, then HD5670, and now the GT 740M...yea, no high end cards :( But now I also have a 98SE rig with the FX5600 Ultra Rev.2 128MB DDR, which I'm pleased with, as it supports older, better drivers as it's as good as a high-end GeForce 4 Ti. Also, some modern games have worse quality textures than the S3TC ones :P And who said old games have crappy graphics? :)
It would be good if you put texts in your videos so that the google translator would translate them into another language with a little more precision, this way you would help the retro gaming of other regions, it would even be easier to understand what you are saying, a hug from Colombia
I remember fiddling with it on one of my old Intel chips. well.. not that old, intel GMA x3100/965. also, I haven't searched too much, but have you done a review for one of the earlier ceramic AMD Athlon CPUs, i got an old pc that had one alongside a nVidia GT 6600 AGP card
Wow! Never knew that compressed textures is something good, I've always think like many did that it's something bad something that do less detail textures and this supposed to weak videocards that cannot do ultra graphics, but how was I impressed when I saw this video. It's almost HD textures and even S3 do this very good. Wow! If I knew this in 1999-2001 with my Voodoo 4 4500 :). Great Vid!
Thanks! Yes this option confused me too. For ages I thought it was bad, but then, well this was like 10 years ago, I saw in the game Call of Duty in the options and it mentions that texture compression is better quality. So I read up on it and now I know :D They could have really called this options something else. Like "sharper textures" or "larger textures" :D
In the VSync test in case of results like 72-73 FPS, you should re-check that the driver has not switched to 75Hz on its own during the game, i.e. confirm via the LCD monitor menu that the game runs in 60Hz.
Trident cards are more for DOS games than anything. I use a TGUI9440 1meg PCI card with a P166 and it runs all DOS games great, including the more demanding titles like Duke3D and GTA.
That's exactly the card I was thinking of. It's stable and well-mannered, but lordy is it SLOW. I sometimes use it on the workbench because it's usually handy. You won't notice on something as slow as a P166, but on faster systems (P2-P3 class) it actually slows down the boot-text display to where it crawls onto the screen one line at a time. The big advantage of Trident cards, and this is why I keep a few around -- is that they will tolerate a slot downgrade. You can put the VLB model in a 16bit or 8bit slot, and the 16bit model in an 8-bit slot, and they'll work just fine, because all the control lines are in the first set of pins, and the rest are used only for bandwidth. So you can put a 16bit Trident card into an 8bit XT and achieve a massive speed boost over monochrome video. I used to have an XT set up this way, fastest XT you ever saw. (Gave it away when I moved... wish I'd kept it.) BTW is that P166 socket7 ?? If so, it will probably accept up to a P233 Intel CPU, as well as K5 and K6 CPUs. (Tho the P233 has better performance than the K5, and probably better than some K6. My P233 ran rings around my K6-2 450. And the P233 is a helluva lot more stable. Those AMD CPUs were exceedingly buggy.) Will also take Winchip/Cyrix, tho those are bloody awful CPUs, basically a glorified 486. www.cpu-world.com/Sockets/Socket%207%20%28Socket7%29.html
Rez Zircon Ah yes. I opted for the trident simply because it's era correct. I don't intend to run anything newer than what's currently on it (MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows WfW3.11) so this is a pretty good match for now. I also have a Rage II+ laying around but that's a bit too much for DOS games imo. Maybe not in SVGA mode, but even a P233 will struggle with that. And indeed, it's socket 7. In ATX form factor luckily.
+Rez Zircon I saw a Trident Blade 3D pull 40 fps in Counter Strike 1.6, hardly slow for a budget late 90s card, that card is like 3x speed of the first Voodoo. But yes, the earlier cards were dog slow, but Blade3D is actually quite decent.
Back in 2001 S3 released SuperSavage for mobile markets, the 3D core of which was derived from Savage4. With this mobile variant, games that utilizes DirectX 8.1 usually fail to start, or have corrupted textures. Also, it lacks the "image filter", when upscaling games of 640x480 to a LCD of 1024x768, the image quality sucks.
I had an integrated ProSavage4 which was a bit slower than the agp Savage4. For some reason I couldn't use the s3 metal in Unreal engine games. Now when I think of it it could have been the drivers fault, but we all know how crappy s3 drivers were. However for a cheap card it produced a fairly decent performance, a TNT1, Voodoo 2, or M64 match up. It played most games back then at about 640x480 or 800x600 with decent frame rates. It was cheap and not that pretentious, you get what you pay for right? :)
i had this card diamond stealth III S540 agp version... S3 had almost to zero good driver support, same went for the S3 Savage200... ( i owned them both ) Best thing was really the S3 texture compression for amazing textures wich none of the other brands had.
I really cant get s3metal working on thinkpad t22 which has savage IX 8MB. Drivers are latest 7.15.something from 2/2001. Did the metal.dll -> unreal\system and edited unreal.ini. It just runs on software rendering.
I actually think the PCI version of the Savage4 would be a nice card for a higher end Pentium or Pentium Pro machine. the DOS compatibility is top notch and the image quality is bound to be better than the S3 Virge cards (Ive got a Virge DX , the image actually judders at anything above 800X600 , its pretty bad, for someone more used to a Matrox or ATI card). obviously the 3D performance is slower, but on a Pentium 200 or Pro , playing Unreal Tournament at high res isnt a viable option , so the card would work well there. One could add a Voodoo1 or PowerVR , and you have a fast system for games up to 1998 or so.
An S3 Savage 4 was the first AGP card I had. I remember spending a lot of time getting it to work in games like Half-Life and the like. I even managed to get somewhat newer games to be playable with heavy tweaking. The minigl driver that came with early Half-Life versions seemed to work best if memory serves. It was MUCH faster than D3D at the time. I had an 8mb version of the card, but it didn't have the LT anywhere in the name from what I can remember. I kinda wish I had the 16mb version though, because some games ran out of memory before frame rates dropped to unplayable. 32 might have been too much, but 8mb was too little. Also, the drivers I had for it had a fair number of options, I wish I remembered which version. I remember messing around with different settings to get the most out of it. Starting and closing games over and over making tweaks one at a time.
Are we sure that we need to modify the ini file? I had a S3 savage 4 16Mo, (combined with 2 voodoo 2 12Mo in SLI), I remember that I was able to make appear the metal API into the unreal config executable file list without modifying any .ini file (maybe I'm wrong, it's a long time ago).
+PhilsComputerLab thank you I've been interested in when that 8-bit texture pallet was phased out, cheers you deserve a pint! oh and I like that you chose unreal gold I thought that game had specific software for that savage card.
Ahh, Phil -- THESE are the benchmarks I was looking for! I should've known you had more S3 videos. :) What a shame that these cards couldn't keep up in performance -- the texture compression tech is frankly amazing for the time. It's also awesome to see that a card from 1999 has such flawless compatibility with (2D/VESA) in DOS games extending all the way back to early 90s. Do these cards also support the earlier S3 DOS APIs (like for Tomb Raider)? Whew.... the performance of these cards.... what are those 32MB of RAM even doing?! Hahaha. I wonder if the later released Extreme versions are any better? They seem to have about a 50mhz boost over the Pros... although the only ones I can find are with 16MB... but the 32MBs on this card doesn't seem to be doing much anyway!
It's a shame I only see this vid now :/ please beware that using P4 3GHz cpu's to benchmark those cards could distort results quite a bit, Phil! Some drivers do extensive offloading to cpu for stuff like geometry transformation and more, DirectX does some T&L trickery, and with CPUs literally 6x faster than the 500MHz Pentium IIIs cards like TNT2 Ultra's were bought for.. GPUs with drivers not offloading stuff are bound to uneven playing fields :( It gets more complicated knowing they switched up dedicated vs cpu-assistance between earlier and later driver revisions for some GPUs too.
There was an S3 Control Panel applet, AFAIR, which contained some relevant settings. BTW, who cares about 3DMark? In S3TC-enabled games Savage 4 was pretty fast.
Yes. Virge will only accelerate at 320x240. Savage was an excellent 640x480 or 800x600 card. Virge was 64-bit only and couldn't do 3d tranparencies in direct3D. Savages4 had similar image quality to the other market competitors at the time.
I know! I know that you will do this video :D Had this card in my collection, but from Diamond Multimedia ;-) Waiting for Radon 9000-s review! And sorry for my crappy english...
Because it reminds me of the time in 2011 when i had a Duron 1.2GHz and a S3 PCI card, i played the heck out of half life on that system. It just fills me with nostalgia :)
Is there some sport to this?? Im just curious because I noticed your not** comparing some of the later/last PCI cards. And you havent yet attempted the PCI to PCI-E adapter.
This is the project: www.philscomputerlab.com/p4-306---w98-se-benchmarks.html I review cards over time. Started with the Voodoo 3 and TNT2 and slowly working my way forward in graphics card history.
I think that your benchmarks are tainted by bad drivers. Because as a proud past owner of Savage 4 Pro (sadly from InnoVision because that was the only vendor available at the time at my location) we ran multiple benchmarks vs TNT2 and while S4 was slower it was not that slower. It certainly beat M64. But it was very tricky card because we had to make driver packs containing different versions of d3d, opengl icd and metal. Also AGP4X didn't work quite well on some chipsets (I think it was VIA chipsets that had that problem which is funny because in the end VIA bought graphics division of S3, I had intel 440ZX iirc and it worked well).
This is my first windows card, it ruined my childhood. I couldn't run any game in direct X mode only opengl would work... That was drivers problem, which I had no idea about and no internet at that time. I remember I have founded proper drivers after few years but that was times of Max Payne and GTA 3 so a little bit to late 😂 card had only 16mb and I think this was the reason both games didn't work and I ended up selling this shit.
How can you install Audigy LS under Win98??? On my original CD from this card i didn't find win9x drivers, only for Win2k-XP. What drivers are you using, and where it can be downloaded? Thx
At least S3 successfully made its Texture Compress technology the industrial standard for both DirectX and OpenGL.......
I'm loving the 70s porn music.
hahaha, my first thought
The S3 demo maps with S3TC works just fine on the GOG version of Unreal gold on windows 10. Who knew 1999 offered such incredible graphics. Thank you Phil for sharing this with us.
This exact card was my fist video card. Remember it ran Half-Life, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, all of them at 800*600 flawlessly.
Nice! Do you remember how much it cost? Or how much in comparison to 3dfx and Nvidia cards?
+PhilsComputerLab I don't remember the exact price but I do know that it was tremendously cheaper than any recognized brand card at the time. I was a teenager at the time, maybe 15 or 16 by 1998 and my mother made me pay for half my computer. Since in Mexico everything is three times as expensive I remember researching extensively for the cheapest possible computer that would allow me to play Half-Life decently (my obsession for that game was beyond measure). My final system was a PIII at 550mhz, the Savage 4 and 96 ram. Oh how I wanted the Voodoo3.
Thank you for sharing this! I can see how this card was awesome value. Play around with the resolution and details and it's a decent card.
+PhilsComputerLab it was a decent card indeed. Enabling S3TC in Deus Ex made me look at the wood textures at the intro for minutes. I remember wondering how graphics could not get any better haha. But now 17 years later I think I'm still preferring Deus Ex, Half-Life and specially System Shock 2 than most new titles. Graphics do not impress me anymore for some reason.
Bought this card back in 1999 as new card in my K6-2 machine. It was a GT version (slower and with 16MB), but it clocked fairly well up to 143/143 MHz (which was sold as Savage 4 extreme version) without any additional cooling. It was a lot cheaper than TNT2 M64, i think 1/2 or 2/3 price of M64. This was my first graphics card that tought me, how to play with registry settings and so on :) Every driver was "specific", some of them had better D3D but worse opengl ICD or metald river, had to combine it for best performance. I think that there was also problem with AGP texturing which S3 disabled, but it could be enabled again. Anyway the best you can do is not to use standard S3 driver, but set of so called Rizen's tweaked driver. And there also existed a tweaking tool, looked like powerstrip, but it was developed exclusively for savage cards and offered number of advanced options.
I've played unreal tournament back at the time, visual quality was better than D3D and was reasonably fast. I also tried the demo levels and it was awesome on K6-2 with 32MB RAM. It was not a popular card back at the time, but it was not that bad. Shame on S3 they could never released proper drivers... and in Windows2000/XP there was huge performance drop and non functional OpenGL and Metal, i think.
S3 Savage 32mb my first gpu...had alot Open Gl issues but still,made my childhood
ahh man, those were the times. :) I miss it. That feeling when I turned on my old P200mmx with 128megs and s3 virge and voodoo 1 card. and played all those great games like Sports Car GT, Re-Volt, Need For Speed 4, Red Alert, Tycoon and so on. ahh... i must build some old hardware.
Having finally gotten my own Savage4 working (bitflip driver works correctly on my Asus P2L97 with DX7 installed, not on any of my newer PC), I'm finding that it gives a better experience than the Viper V550 that came with the PC - especially since 32bit colours is usable on S3 cards due to at most a 10% performance hit, instead of around 50%.
Unreal Gold runs at a higher framerate than with the V550 or my Vanta (125MHz mem and core). That is only with the metal api however - the drivers and single pixel pipe do limit the performance somewhat in DX games.
Fun fact: Some companies were still manufacturing Savage4 in 2001 and maybe even 2002, going off the sticker on the back of my card.
Edit: Why ^that^ is important, is that the later Savage 4 cards despite being built on the cheap (certainly far lower quality than any Diamond card before or after the turn of the millenium), have a really good VGA ouput even at higher resolutions - as good as my Oxygen VX1 (which is really broken in Commander Keen4+5) and Matrox G550. They still suffer from the capacitor plague though.
I have an AMD Athlon with the S3 Savage 4 Xtreme 32 mb on my Windows 2000 Professional SP4 and can't complain with my old games 🙂
Man, i discovered your chanel yesterday. It's pure gold. Keep up the amazing job.
The Savage 4 was the very first GPU I ever bought myself. Spent R350 on it, and used it until I got the GeForce 4Ti 4800se.
Was really happy with it, and the Pentium 3. Mechwarrior 2 in DOS was my jam!
If I remember it well, almost every games that use Unreal engine at the time support MetaL renderer. There were many of them, exception went just for Harry potter games that were Direct3D only. UE1 games running S3's MetaL made Savage3D/Savage4 great alternative to 3dfx's Voodoo 3. It was frustrating how people only talked about S3 Savage4 as NVidia Riva TNT2's contender which only made it incompetent.
The Egypt level was running on huge screens at the Creative Labs booth at CeBIT '99. It was really impressive.
Wow that must have quite amazing back in the day!
@@philscomputerlab The consumer halls at CeBIT '99 were a lot like Gamescom today. Guillemont and Creative where pretty close and competed for the loudest show, much to the dismay of business visitors. But I was an 18 year old kid, so I loved it. That and the free booze at the countless parties.
Thanks. I just found a laptop with a Pentium 3 and S3 Savage 4 running 98SE so this was useful to now what it is capable of.
I remember back in 2000 using S3Tweak, an incredibly powerfull and usefull tool to overclock and tweak driver settings. Drivers were very unstable for quite some time and Windows XP drivers suck, but W9x are just fine. I had a 16 MB version and currently still have a 32 MB version.
Phil, your videos are superb, keep them going!
Nice review as always, i had Savage3D and 2000. Friend got Savage4, but it was overheating a lot. Also all Savage card had compatibility problems with AGP texturing in some games (freezing). To fix that, there was made free tool working only in W9x called S3Tweak. You should try it, it has much more driver options than Powerstrip including possibility to change size of agp texturing or disable it, vsync, overclocking, texture types atd. It also support profiles for various games (can be often found in unofficial mixed modded drivers). Usually when any game freeze just disable AGP texturing and it often helps...
Bugger, wish I'd known that :)
But I don't get upset about missing things, because you got to accept that you will never be able to cover everything, or the video never gets finished. There is always another video when you can put that in. I'll cover the S3Tweak tool in the Savage 2000 video then :)
I remember, it blew my mind, when I installed some fresh drivers on this baby and was able to play games like Quake 3 and Homeworld with 3d acceleration.
So funny to see these old cards with tiny passive heatsinks or even no cooler at all (like voodoo2). And now we got these huuuge triple slot 2kg multifan-cooler designs :D:D
This is the first 3dfx card I ever got, the bang for buck was unheard of, and from what I remember it took Voodoo 3 and Riva TNT2 to soundly beat it in terms of all aspects of performance and even then it wasnt by all that much (edit: from what I read in the comments I'm not too far off my mark in that regard)
I ran this on a P2 333mhz MMX w/ 60mhz bus and 128mb ram and 2gb HDD, an average gaming PC at best even for its time, mind you I ran CFS2 and Max Payne (!!) at near full blast with this meagre setup.
Probably one of the most stable systems I've ever had until recently too.
Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 costs 350 bucks on Ebay, and even then requires a bit of expertise/fiddling to wring the best out of them.
You can get the S3 Savage 4 for 1/10th of that price and it'll run anything that came out back then.
Perfect for building a neat little retro Windows 98 all-aspect pc (For playing DOS games AND W98 games).
I came over a 350 w/100 bus and 512mb ram at the recycling station, and got that up fired up tonight, needed to replace the cooling bits on the CPU cassette (ironically from an AMD 600mhz Cassette, they used the same components lol) but other than that it works like a charm, I suspect the broken cooler was the reason it was discarded in the first place.
So instead of rebuilding the old 333 I got the 350 working, and no decision time was wasted ordering a used 30 dollar S3 Savage 4 on ebay and expect to have it all working within a couple of weeks.
I have a card very similar to this still. A Number Nine SR9 w/ S3 Savage4 Xtreme 166MHz core/166MHz 16MB SGRAM. Cool little card, the DDR memory makes it not too bad actually and it has AGP 4X. Has a DVI display output too.
The texture compression technology looks absolutely fantastic.
So it does have revolutionary tech for its time.
cool review, I had an integrated ProSavage4 DDR in my first computer in 2001. I remember the disappointment when Max Payne did not start, requiring D3D8.1, the chip did not support hardware t&l. Also, I was running on 133MHz or 166MHz SD RAM first and when I upgraded to 233mhz DDR the fps gain was amazing. I played with GTA3 for a year like around 15FPS in 640x480 on minimum, then I added an fx5200 in 2003 and I felt my 1200mhz Duron became a stallion.
The fx5000 cards were terrible in directx 9 titles, radeon 9000 series ate them for breakfast :)
Yep, had the 9700pro then upgraded to 9800xt which ran rings around my friend's 6600gt. How times have changed :(
well, the fx5200 was the cheapest card available that I could afford at the time, and it was definitely better than the cards my friends usually had(that is gf4mx)
Awesome video, this graphics card would be great for an Ubuntu office desktop PC! :D
For a second, I thought this was a SiS 6326. This card even has the same, little green heatsink my Diamond Speedstar A50 uses.
I know I had an s3 of some sort in my first machine it was a Packard bell. Not sure if it was on board It seemed to work well but I dont remember. I had it from 95 to 00 I played half life, tomb raider 1 through 4, and quake on it. That's about the most demanding games I played on it. The rest were ID and 3drealms games. I almost forgot I would muck with all those cgm and pc gamer monthly discs thoses were the days.
That card is a savage.
Had the 32Mb, AGP version of this back in the day. Performance was meh in some games but it made Half Life look and run beautifully.
I remember seeing bins full of that back in 2005-2007... i mean...full of it.
Hi, Phil! Your channel is just getting better and better! I was watching it all day :)
Thank you!
I still have that driver CD in my collection. The card died years ago 😢
For some reason I remember S4 to have unfixable T&L issues. MDK 2 wouldn’t render right with one of the settings on. It was documented on wiki too. Sorry for being lazy here.
I like these old systems, it reminds me of my childhood computer which had a core 2 duo e8400, leadtek winfast a340 128mb agp, and 3gb ram.
Wow, that Egypt level really look amazing
My motherboard would crash running Nvidia Riva TNT, so bought the Savage4 which worked great. Nvidia was at one time smaller than S3, amazing how far they come.
I cry when i remember we used to pay £299 for that tech when it first came out so many years ago. Today we pay £600 for gtx1080 - when its like 2025 i will cry again.
lmao
Hello, halfway into the future, US$ 2000 for a GTX 3090 🤧🤧
Great review as usual :) It would be good to see a Power VR Prophet 4500 (Kyro 2) review at some point. I remember having one and it's tile based rendering technique could edge out the mighty Geforce 2 in some games. It was a great card for the time but lacked driver support and hardware T+L which ultimately killed it off :(
i still own one of the fastest agp cards ati radeon x1950 pro
I remember very negative reviews of this card back in the day. Mostly the drivers were terrible, many games didn't run properly or didn't support it. Most of reviews said to stay away. Some games worked well, but not enough to justyfi the cost.
Yes that is one benefit of doing reviews in 2016, you can use mostly working drivers :)
I bought one of these back in the day at a computer fair just to try it. It was £25 new because it was an old card by then. Was the 32mb version. Wish I still had it, was cool to try the extra UT textures.
I know this is late but I found a newer version of the drivers. DriversCollection has version 4.12.01.8228-8.20.33 from October 2000. Hope this helps.
Wow thanks for the video, I always thought the S3 was crap other then DOS, but those textures look really good in Unreal.
It was a savage all right a savage on your pocketbook rim shot
I had one of these
This channel is such a huge overdose down memory lane!
I looked in my parts bin. I have one of these, I'd completely forgotten about.
those textures are pretty cool, but yes... good DOS card and that's it, also it highlights once again how bad the tnt2 m64 was, because I never regarded Savage 4 as a good card, and the m64 is barely faster, ouch...
I had this GPU back in 1999. Its main attraction was great performance with 32bit color. The drivers were crappy though and it was not compatible with Intel 440LX chipset under Windows 98 (it had conflicts with Intel AGP GART drivers which caused constant freezes). That’s why I was still using Windows 95 OSR2 until 2001 when I switched to Windows 2000. Under Windows 2000 this GPU was rock solid and outperformed Nvidia TNT2.
OR you can right-click on the driver's .inf file and select Install...
The first GPU I've ever had!
Surprisingly, I've found about the model I had not too long ago though, funny that :)
My brother sad that the QIIIArena was lagging a lot and your benchmarks confirm that :)
Then I've got a MX440, then 6600GT, (VERY briefly the 6200 TurboCache which was such a pile of garbage), then GT220, then HD5670, and now the GT 740M...yea, no high end cards :(
But now I also have a 98SE rig with the FX5600 Ultra Rev.2 128MB DDR, which I'm pleased with, as it supports older, better drivers as it's as good as a high-end GeForce 4 Ti.
Also, some modern games have worse quality textures than the S3TC ones :P And who said old games have crappy graphics? :)
I've had this one and played Unreal on it back in the days...
It would be good if you put texts in your videos so that the google translator would translate them into another language with a little more precision, this way you would help the retro gaming of other regions, it would even be easier to understand what you are saying, a hug from Colombia
I have a S3 something card but I get a weird black bar on the right side in dos and dos games Windows 95 works fine.
So this is the origin of this mysterious S3TC setting i see in some drivers.. interesting.
Yes, that's it! Cool, right? Well, I find it cool :D
I remember fiddling with it on one of my old Intel chips. well.. not that old, intel GMA x3100/965. also, I haven't searched too much, but have you done a review for one of the earlier ceramic AMD Athlon CPUs, i got an old pc that had one alongside a nVidia GT 6600 AGP card
XP 3200+ is the only Athlon I reviewed so far :/
Wow! Never knew that compressed textures is something good, I've always think like many did that it's something bad something that do less detail textures and this supposed to weak videocards that cannot do ultra graphics, but how was I impressed when I saw this video. It's almost HD textures and even S3 do this very good. Wow! If I knew this in 1999-2001 with my Voodoo 4 4500 :). Great Vid!
Thanks! Yes this option confused me too. For ages I thought it was bad, but then, well this was like 10 years ago, I saw in the game Call of Duty in the options and it mentions that texture compression is better quality. So I read up on it and now I know :D
They could have really called this options something else. Like "sharper textures" or "larger textures" :D
In the VSync test in case of results like 72-73 FPS, you should re-check that the driver has not switched to 75Hz on its own during the game, i.e. confirm via the LCD monitor menu that the game runs in 60Hz.
Had an S3 Trio in my P233 -- was a big speed boost over a Trident.
If you want to benchmark a REALLY slow card... Trident AGP is hard to beat. :)
Trident cards are more for DOS games than anything. I use a TGUI9440 1meg PCI card with a P166 and it runs all DOS games great, including the more demanding titles like Duke3D and GTA.
That's exactly the card I was thinking of. It's stable and well-mannered, but lordy is it SLOW. I sometimes use it on the workbench because it's usually handy. You won't notice on something as slow as a P166, but on faster systems (P2-P3 class) it actually slows down the boot-text display to where it crawls onto the screen one line at a time.
The big advantage of Trident cards, and this is why I keep a few around -- is that they will tolerate a slot downgrade. You can put the VLB model in a 16bit or 8bit slot, and the 16bit model in an 8-bit slot, and they'll work just fine, because all the control lines are in the first set of pins, and the rest are used only for bandwidth. So you can put a 16bit Trident card into an 8bit XT and achieve a massive speed boost over monochrome video. I used to have an XT set up this way, fastest XT you ever saw. (Gave it away when I moved... wish I'd kept it.)
BTW is that P166 socket7 ?? If so, it will probably accept up to a P233 Intel CPU, as well as K5 and K6 CPUs. (Tho the P233 has better performance than the K5, and probably better than some K6. My P233 ran rings around my K6-2 450. And the P233 is a helluva lot more stable. Those AMD CPUs were exceedingly buggy.) Will also take Winchip/Cyrix, tho those are bloody awful CPUs, basically a glorified 486.
www.cpu-world.com/Sockets/Socket%207%20%28Socket7%29.html
Rez Zircon
Ah yes. I opted for the trident simply because it's era correct. I don't intend to run anything newer than what's currently on it (MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows WfW3.11) so this is a pretty good match for now. I also have a Rage II+ laying around but that's a bit too much for DOS games imo. Maybe not in SVGA mode, but even a P233 will struggle with that.
And indeed, it's socket 7. In ATX form factor luckily.
+Rez Zircon I saw a Trident Blade 3D pull 40 fps in Counter Strike 1.6, hardly slow for a budget late 90s card, that card is like 3x speed of the first Voodoo. But yes, the earlier cards were dog slow, but Blade3D is actually quite decent.
+nelizmaster 2D SVGA games run very well even on a P100 , 3D ones will not, but an old 2D trident can bottleneck even hi res 2D.
Back in 2001 S3 released SuperSavage for mobile markets, the 3D core of which was derived from Savage4. With this mobile variant, games that utilizes DirectX 8.1 usually fail to start, or have corrupted textures. Also, it lacks the "image filter", when upscaling games of 640x480 to a LCD of 1024x768, the image quality sucks.
You should do a review of some Trident and Cirrus Logic cards just to show people how it was during the early and mid 90s :)
the first vga that i literally throwed in the thrash.
I wonder how would Quake 3 run on it.
I had an integrated ProSavage4 which was a bit slower than the agp Savage4. For some reason I couldn't use the s3 metal in Unreal engine games. Now when I think of it it could have been the drivers fault, but we all know how crappy s3 drivers were. However for a cheap card it produced a fairly decent performance, a TNT1, Voodoo 2, or M64 match up. It played most games back then at about 640x480 or 800x600 with decent frame rates. It was cheap and not that pretentious, you get what you pay for right? :)
That was my first PC's first VGA card in the summer of 1999. with a celaron 366 Mhz CPU, 64 MB ram.
It was ok.
I have the same ATG one!!!! $20 from ebay new, works awesome on my pentium 3, many games work well.
Nice :)
i had this card diamond stealth III S540 agp version... S3 had almost to zero good driver support, same went for the S3 Savage200... ( i owned them both ) Best thing was really the S3 texture compression for amazing textures wich none of the other brands had.
I had this card as a kid...had tough time running Thief the dark project.....
I really cant get s3metal working on thinkpad t22 which has savage IX 8MB. Drivers are latest 7.15.something from 2/2001. Did the metal.dll -> unreal\system and edited unreal.ini. It just runs on software rendering.
I actually think the PCI version of the Savage4 would be a nice card for a higher end Pentium or Pentium Pro machine.
the DOS compatibility is top notch and the image quality is bound to be better than the S3 Virge cards (Ive got a Virge DX , the image actually judders at anything above 800X600 , its pretty bad, for someone more used to a Matrox or ATI card).
obviously the 3D performance is slower, but on a Pentium 200 or Pro , playing Unreal Tournament at high res isnt a viable option , so the card would work well there. One could add a Voodoo1 or PowerVR , and you have a fast system for games up to 1998 or so.
Yea that's a good way to look at it.
you should do a video of 3dfx 4500
oh dear ! I just got one but with only 8mb or memory... what have I done !!!
That was my first GPU... My first PC.
An S3 Savage 4 was the first AGP card I had. I remember spending a lot of time getting it to work in games like Half-Life and the like. I even managed to get somewhat newer games to be playable with heavy tweaking. The minigl driver that came with early Half-Life versions seemed to work best if memory serves. It was MUCH faster than D3D at the time.
I had an 8mb version of the card, but it didn't have the LT anywhere in the name from what I can remember. I kinda wish I had the 16mb version though, because some games ran out of memory before frame rates dropped to unplayable. 32 might have been too much, but 8mb was too little.
Also, the drivers I had for it had a fair number of options, I wish I remembered which version. I remember messing around with different settings to get the most out of it. Starting and closing games over and over making tweaks one at a time.
same here. had the 32 mb tho
Are we sure that we need to modify the ini file?
I had a S3 savage 4 16Mo, (combined with 2 voodoo 2 12Mo in SLI), I remember that I was able to make appear the metal API into the unreal config executable file list without modifying any .ini file (maybe I'm wrong, it's a long time ago).
Who are you talking to and what is the context? I don't remember modifying any INI files?
Thanks for the Final Fantasy 7 8 bit texture support test on that demo awesome game and that looked amazing verses the software version.
I plan on doing this test with all cards in the future. At some point newer cards won't work with it.
+PhilsComputerLab thank you I've been interested in when that 8-bit texture pallet was phased out, cheers you deserve a pint! oh and I like that you chose unreal gold I thought that game had specific software for that savage card.
Yea without that DLL file it wouldn't work. UT has Metal support out of the box though.
+PhilsComputerLab yes it most certainly does good find.
Ahh, Phil -- THESE are the benchmarks I was looking for! I should've known you had more S3 videos. :) What a shame that these cards couldn't keep up in performance -- the texture compression tech is frankly amazing for the time. It's also awesome to see that a card from 1999 has such flawless compatibility with (2D/VESA) in DOS games extending all the way back to early 90s. Do these cards also support the earlier S3 DOS APIs (like for Tomb Raider)? Whew.... the performance of these cards.... what are those 32MB of RAM even doing?! Hahaha. I wonder if the later released Extreme versions are any better? They seem to have about a 50mhz boost over the Pros... although the only ones I can find are with 16MB... but the 32MBs on this card doesn't seem to be doing much anyway!
It's a shame I only see this vid now :/ please beware that using P4 3GHz cpu's to benchmark those cards could distort results quite a bit, Phil!
Some drivers do extensive offloading to cpu for stuff like geometry transformation and more, DirectX does some T&L trickery, and with CPUs literally 6x faster than the 500MHz Pentium IIIs cards like TNT2 Ultra's were bought for.. GPUs with drivers not offloading stuff are bound to uneven playing fields :(
It gets more complicated knowing they switched up dedicated vs cpu-assistance between earlier and later driver revisions for some GPUs too.
There was an S3 Control Panel applet, AFAIR, which contained some relevant settings. BTW, who cares about 3DMark? In S3TC-enabled games Savage 4 was pretty fast.
Oh yeah, had that and similar cards in my early 2000's Linux machines.
At least the Savage4 actually accelerated whereas the older S3 VIRGE was a 3D decelerator, Is it true?
Yes. Virge will only accelerate at 320x240. Savage was an excellent 640x480 or 800x600 card. Virge was 64-bit only and couldn't do 3d tranparencies in direct3D. Savages4 had similar image quality to the other market competitors at the time.
Damn...this is a hardware nostalgia...!!! Nice review as usual...!!!..B-)
I know! I know that you will do this video :D
Had this card in my collection, but from Diamond Multimedia ;-)
Waiting for Radon 9000-s review!
And sorry for my crappy english...
All good :) Radeon 9000, that will be a while, but will definitely review the ATI 9000 cards :)
I have a Radeon 9000 PRO and is faster than 9250 and have 275/550 clocks.
These are very very fast cards. Not sure were I draw the line for Windows 98. Also not sure if I have that card. Got a 9700 though :)
Yea XP is much better suited for such a card...
You can install linux from dvd drive very easy. DVD drives are very cheap today.
I played Fifa 2000 and NFS Porshe Unleashed on this card. After that I put TNT 2 and I got few fps more...
s3 dominated consumer market with packard bell in the 90's with their s3 virge series, wonder what happend to them
I found a savage 4lt by accident by unassembling scrap, taking out the heasink by prying i found out what i did, it broke my heart
Please do Nvidia Riva TNT2 M64. I had that on my Socket 7 AMD K6-2 back in the day and got extreme performance out of it.
I've done a review on the TNT2 and the M64 is included in the charts in this video.
This is one of my favorite videos :)
Interesting, can ask why?
Because it reminds me of the time in 2011 when i had a Duron 1.2GHz and a S3 PCI card, i played the heck out of half life on that system. It just fills me with nostalgia :)
Ok :)
Had this card... In the very few games that supported the S3TC, it it made the Voodoo3 card I replaced it with feel like a downgrade :(
oldunreal has alot of resources for unreal last i checked, almost want to bench some old games just for the hell of it.. heh..
Is there some sport to this?? Im just curious because I noticed your not** comparing some of the later/last PCI cards. And you havent yet attempted the PCI to PCI-E adapter.
This is the project: www.philscomputerlab.com/p4-306---w98-se-benchmarks.html
I review cards over time. Started with the Voodoo 3 and TNT2 and slowly working my way forward in graphics card history.
i had one of these at the time it was ok this was the first video card i bought also
I wonder if pair this with the pci voodoo card would make the ultimate dos and windows gaming machine
Ha, not sure about "ultimate", but very nice for sure.
Glide wrapper? You did a build pc video on this. Would a GF3 Ti500 suffice?
I doubt it to be honest. It has to be a DX9 card for nGlide anyway.
I think that your benchmarks are tainted by bad drivers. Because as a proud past owner of Savage 4 Pro (sadly from InnoVision because that was the only vendor available at the time at my location) we ran multiple benchmarks vs TNT2 and while S4 was slower it was not that slower. It certainly beat M64. But it was very tricky card because we had to make driver packs containing different versions of d3d, opengl icd and metal. Also AGP4X didn't work quite well on some chipsets (I think it was VIA chipsets that had that problem which is funny because in the end VIA bought graphics division of S3, I had intel 440ZX iirc and it worked well).
What about the TNT2? Can you test that with Win3.x and DOS? You did say it was compatible.
I've already reviewed the TNT2. Win 3.x doesn't interest me the slightest, sorry.
can run crysis?
Intel i740 is where it's all at :-P
Not far from where all those Atari ET game carts were buried ;)
I managed to salvage one :-P
I own a I740 aswell. Maybe one day I'll use it again.
A shit card. The demo from intel wash nice .but the card it's nothing .
This is my first windows card, it ruined my childhood. I couldn't run any game in direct X mode only opengl would work... That was drivers problem, which I had no idea about and no internet at that time. I remember I have founded proper drivers after few years but that was times of Max Payne and GTA 3 so a little bit to late 😂 card had only 16mb and I think this was the reason both games didn't work and I ended up selling this shit.
hey Phil. I don't remember original Unreal to have an Unreal Tournament style main menu. is this special to the Unreal gold version?
Yes that's because of the Gold version. It has a newer UI.
Thanks!
How can you install Audigy LS under Win98??? On my original CD from this card i didn't find win9x drivers, only for Win2k-XP. What drivers are you using, and where it can be downloaded? Thx
Check the Creative site...
Obviously, this is completely unrelated to the much later Mac OS Metal API.
You should use a 80-cable Ultra ATA IDE data Bus, for better performance, great specs on the system tho
I'm not?
It looks like a 40-cable bus
Well, pretty sure it's a 80 pin :D
Oh good then
It´s a Intel i440BX with 82371AB PIIX4 southbridge. No UATA66 dude. I love this hardware so much that I remember the exact chipset number!
Can anyone give me a download link for Windows 85 software that can open Zip files? I can't find a download link for PKZip