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 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.
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.
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.
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...
@@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.
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!
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
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 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 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? :)
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 bought one of those for a much cheaper price then a m64 back in early 99, and it's probably the worst computer hardware buy I ever made. It was a creative PCB and they had drivers you could download from their site. the latest driver from the s3 website had serious compatibility and performance issues with direct3d games the creative driver was much better in direct3d but had no opengl icd in it. so every time I would like to play a direct3d game I would install the creative driver and every time I wanted to an opengl game I had to use the s3 driver. On top of that the I tested the metal api and it had deep frame drops every couple of seconds in both drivers. And on top of that I remember reading that the s3tc has adverse affects on image quality and only in the last couple of graphic card generations thare is a real advancement in texture compression technology that doesn't degrade image quality.
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.
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.
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 remember that card from a review in PC Format 1999 , the card wasnt very fast. Is there any chance that your going to look at a Sis6326 , its a real stinker but it flooded the market in South Africa, every OEM manufacturer had one just so they could stick a "supports 3d" sticker on the case XD
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
Phil, I detect both a German and an Australian accent...are you originally from Germany or Austria and moved to Australia? Maybe you've answered this before and I missed it, if so I apologize.
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.
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.
howdy, me some issues living i computer by. another pc case of motherboard on graphic driver no. so, motherboard in incomplete material have. graphic driver of model & name the knowing i didnt.
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
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 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.
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.
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
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).
I guess it became completely and utterly obsolete when S3TC became available on all other cards. I play Unreal on my modern rig with S3TC textures installed from Oldunreal.com.
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.
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 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...
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 :)
Really weird they didn't implement vsync / swap_control for OpenGL. It is easy thing to implement usually, I usually played with vsync enabled on 75Hz to help a bit with tearing.
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.
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!
is it me or is there a small but noticeable bit of reverb/echo on your voice in this video? i have gone and checked other videos just to double check that it wasn't my headphones or sound settings and found it's only this video i'm hearing said audio weirdness.
Small? The room has echo in spades :/ Not much I can do at this point. Tiled floor, bare walls. Still working on some sort of voice recording area for my main microphone, but for "live builds" like this one I don't think there is much I can do :(
Great video, but I don't understand why you used Unreal (in your other video) instead of UT to show what texture compression can do. UT has an official S3TC pack with textures well integrated into the game - unlike all the third-party crap which look horrendous in any game I've seen.
I noticed in 3D Mark is says "CPU optimization." I understand why they did such things back in the day, but man, if you do that now, you'll have a huge stink over it.
Hi Phil! Great video! I've purchased a Savage 4 and I wonder how I could get the Unreal Tournament second CD. I only have a 1 CD version. Is there a legal way to get it or is it free? Thank you! ^_^
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.
So did the Savage 4 have the same Stochastic dithering that the Savage 3D had? Cos as a result of that 16-bit looked pretty much as good as 32-bit in most games and ran significantly faster for it. I seem to recall they'd dropped it by the time of the Savage 2000 (which was but one of the issues with that card) but not sure about the Savage 4 ....
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.
