S3 graphics. It’s a phrase one hears now and again, but on the playground of video card dickwaving, it’s never been a stiff contender. With its release of the 4300E embeddable GPU chipset, however, it brings Directx10 to its low-power, low-profile niche: when you joke about “Crysis running on a toaster,” know that S3 the company whose mission is to make it happen.
Take a look at its “power of three” description of it’s target market—”Gaming, digital signage and other multimedia intensive embedded applications.”—and you see what I mean. Digital signage with DirectX10? So it’s not so much toasters they have in mind as Blade Runner-esque LED billboards. Disappointing, for sure, but Crysis-running-on-inappropriate-platform jokes are, by their nature, versatile. We’ll be O.K.
S3′s 4300E has hardware support for the big chaps of video, such as H.264, VC-1, AVS, DivX, and MPEG-2 HD, passively-cooled clock speeds between 300MHz and 600MHz, and can use up to 256MB of RAM. It’ll play well with Blu-Ray, according to the press release, and is also expected to come in expansion card form for PCI express slots.
Will this replace my Nvidia 8800 GTX? No. But I do want to play Crysis on a cash register, and for making this a hypothetical reality, S3 must be lauded.
Press Release [S3]
