S3, who recently chose to go AWOL from this year's E3, are very well represented at the Computex '99 show. Clearly they are touting their Savage 4 chipset as the 'next big thing' in terms of 2D/3D acceleration for OEMs. What about the gamer?

Yes, Trident was showing off their 'ace', the Blade3D. We saw Motorhead (Gremlin's 3D racing game) running on a demo system at some 30 frames per second. The only problem is, we've not ever seen the game run at less than 60 frames per second on any other hardware. A 3D 'decelerator'? Probably…. In its defense, the chipset is going to be dirt-cheap (but we still won't be buying it).

SiS was also showing off their new .25micron 128-bit SiS300 2D/3D accelerator, which is 'supposedly' (we've heard otherwise from Intel) able to take advantage of AGP 4X and provides 64MB local frame buffer memory support via the 128-bit interface. Don't expect to see this in any new PC that costs above $1000 though (3D Winmark scores were around the 800 mark). Even though the chipset is being targeted at the low-end, Digital Flat Panel support will be included. The chipset will go into production later this month and sell for $25 in quantities of 10,000. The majority of graphics board manufacturers in Taiwan are expected to do a SiS300 based product.

Hitting rock bottom now… Intel's 752 chipset ($19.50 in quantities of 10,000) was extremely visible. Most motherboard manufacturers had an 810 motherboard, which harbors an embedded version of the chipset in question.