The SAVAGE 2000, built on a hybrid 0.18/0.22 micron manufacturing process, is a 12-million transistor 3D accelerator from S3 with circuitry for hardware transformation and lighting. Viper II is the graphics board that is based on the SAVAGE 2000, which is default clocked at 125 MHz. The 32 megabytes of on-board 6ns Samsung single data rate SDRAM is divided between only four pieces of memory chips (two front, two back), allowing for a low profile PCB design. Notable is the absence of an active cooling system for SAVAGE 2000. For stable operation at 166 MHz SDRAM, it was found necessary to affix a fan atop the heatsink. This article deals with two visual issues: an apparent lack in depth buffer precision and a relatively minor problem with Trilinear filter when multi-texturing. This is followed by some benchmarks and comments on S3 Texture Compression.
A depth buffer stores depth information about how "deep" each visible pixel is in the scene. In the case of the SAVAGE 2000, it appears that the depth values that are stored do not have the precision that is needed to resolve pixels with minute differences in depth values, as is the case with intersecting polygons.