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S3 SAVAGE3D vs S3 SAVAGE4

"S3 Savage3D vs S3 Savage4 review testing the Diamond Stealth III S540 Savage4 to the Hercules Beast Savage3D. System used for testing was a AMD Duron 750Mhz and Jetway 663AS Pro. Software used was PC Player Direct3D, Quake 2, Quake 3 Arena and Wintune 1997."

I've always wondered what the difference in performance would be between the 2 different Savage chipsets. The Savage3D was plagued by poor driver support through out it's life. The Savage4 also started out with poor drivers but they have been improved alot since then and it's now one of the better budget video card. To avoid cpu limiting the performance of the video cards the tests are conducted on an AMD Duron 750mhz.

GENERAL SYSTEM INFORMATION

PROCESSOR	AMD DURON 750 MHZ
VIDEO CARD	DIAMOND STEALTH III S540 SAVAGE4 PRO 32MB
	HERCULES TERMINATOR BEAST SAVAGE3D 16MB
S3 SAVAGE4 DRIVER	V395_WIN9X_ME_82033
S3 SAVAGE3D DRIVER	TBSTWIN9X102
MOTHERBOARD	JETWAY 663AS PRO VIA KT-133 REV 1.2
MEMORY	128MB PC-100 SDRAM
OPERATING SYSTEM	WINDOWS 98 SE
DIRECTX VERSION	v8.0a

WINTUNE 97

800x600x16

	91
	117

800x600x32

	55
	58

HERCULES SAVAGE3D DIAMOND SAVAGE4 PRO

COMMENT - "At 16bit the Savage4 takes an early lead, it's 26mps clear of the Savage3D. At 32bit the Savage3D fights back and comes within 3mps of the Savage4."

PC PLAYER DIRECT3D

640x480x16

	92
	87

640x480x32

	82
	72

1024x768x16

	55
	51

1024x768x32

	40
	41

HERCULES SAVAGE3D DIAMOND SAVAGE4 PRO

BENCHMARK SETTINGS
Direct3D HAL
Gourad Shading Model
Solid Model
Textures Enabled
Fog Enabled
Dithering Enabled
Antialiasing Enabled
Bilinear Texturing Enabled
Transparent Textures Enabled
Perspective Enabled

COMMENT - "Wow what's this we see, at 640x480x16bit the Savage3D takes the lead by a small margin of 5fps. At 640x480x32bit this lead grows to 10fps, this result was unexpected. Are the Direct3D drivers of the Savage3D better than the Savage4? At 1024x768x16bit once again the Savage3D is beating the Savage4. At 1024x768x32bit it's too close to call. I have to mention the image quality of the Savage3D, it's very poor which probably indicates that the drivers are optimised for speed rather than image quality. No such image quality problems with the Savage4, it's image quality is excellent as always."

QUAKE 2

640x480x16

	47
	77

640x480x32

	33
	70

1024x768x16

	21
	35

1024x768x32

	12
	31

HERCULES SAVAGE3D DIAMOND SAVAGE4 PRO

BENCHMARK SETTINGS
3dnow OpenGL Driver
Demo1.dm2 benchmark
Fullscreen enabled
Texture Quality Full
8Bit Textures Disabled
Sync Every Frame Disabled

COMMENT - "With Quake 2 the Savage4 takes a huge lead of 30fps at 640x480x16bit. At 640x480x32bit the Savage4 is twice as fast as the Savage3D. With Quake 2 the Savage4 is playable (30fps minimum) at all resolutions tested. However the Savage3D is only really playable at low resolutions, at higher resolutions it's frame rate falls below 30ps which is unplayable."

QUAKE III ARENA

FASTEST

	47
	97

NORMAL

	30
	55

HIGH QUALITY

	N/A
	24

HERCULES SAVAGE3D DIAMOND SAVAGE4 PRO

COMMENT - "The performance of the Savage video cards are pretty much the same like with Quake 2. The Savage4 takes a huge 50fps lead over the Savage3D at the fastest setting and 25fps at the normal setting. The Savage3D refused to run Quake 3 at high quality so only Savage4 results are available."

BENCHMARK SETTINGS
Default GLdriver
GL Extensions on
Fullscreen on
Demo001 Benchmark

FASTEST QUALITY
512x384 Video Mode
16Bit Colour Depth
16Bit Texture Quality
Vertex Lighting
Geometic Detail Low
Texture Detail 50%
Bilinear Texture Filtering

NORMAL QUALITY
640x480 Video Mode
16Bit Colour Depth
16Bit Texture Quality
Lightmap Lighting
Geometic Detail Medium
Texture Detail 75%
Bilinear Texture Filtering

HIGH QUALITY
800x600 Video Mode
32Bit Colour Depth
32Bit Texture Quality
Lightmap Lighting
High Geometic Detail
Full Texture Detail
Trilinear Texture Filtering

CONCLUSION - "The Savage4 clearly beat the Savage3D which is to be expected. S3 had high hopes for the Savage3D when it was first released, it was plagued with poor driver support and it never recovered. The Savage4 also had poor drivers when it was released but S3 worked very hard and the latest drivers are stable and the performance is very good. 55fps on Quake 3 at 640x480x16bit with max settings is impressive for a budget card. It's not a Geforce beater but for light gaming it's just great, lets not forget that it does 32bit and has S3TC."