The PR staff and executive branch of S3 is comprised of some of the nicest and most sincere people in the industry. It's disappointing to us to find that the Savage3D hasn't flourished in sales as well as you'd have expected from one of the first .25 micron chips to hit the market. A large reason for the sales drought occurred when Diamond dropped the Savage3D after deciding that their lineup was packed full with the Voodoo2, TNT, and Banshee already locked in for production. Adding to the Diamond disaster, S3 openly lamented the fact that they had miscalculated on the public's demand for large feature specifications regardless or effectiveness. The biggest error came in the form of the Savage3D's maximum limit of 8MB of on card memory. Consumers saw other parts coming down in the pipeline with 16MB of on card memory and perceived this to be a large disadvantage for the Savage3D, regardless of what the truth might have been.

Thankfully for S3, 1999 holds optimism for a company that brought the words "texture compression" to the forefront of the industry. Primed for launch is the enhanced "Savage 2" or "Savage3D 2" chip, along with a host of improvements.

Based on the previous generation of technology the Savage 2 looks to build upon the former part's strengths and eliminate its weaknesses. Full 32bpp final color rendering support, larger maximum SGRAM capacities, a higher clock speed and enhanced texture compression support highlight the new part's features. Also, it's rumored that full multi-texturing support via a 2nd TMU has been added to the Savage 2 in order to keep up with S3's competition.

Believe it or not, the best part of the equation is that the Savage 2 will actually cost less than the Savage3D did at its launch. This is due to the high yields that S3's preexisting .25 manufacturing process has begun to turn out over the past month, along with the optimization of the entire process. Thanks to the price drop, S3 is confident that they (like nVidia and ATi) will just be able to walk all over tier 1 system integrators by offering a Savage 2 for placement directly on certain mainbaords. Even a mobile notebook variant of the Savage 2 will be thrown out on the market, which sounds fantastic to us since it supports hardware DVD accleration as well as 3D acceleration.

Expect to see the Savage 2 come to market sometime in late Q1/99.