Clearly the Savage4 offers everything its predecessor came up short in, particularly in the departments of raw power and high-end features. Particular examples of this lie in a few of the features listed above, namely the Ramdac speed, Max Frame Buffer Size, and Single-Cycle Trilinear Filtering categories.

By upping these specific parameters dramatically, S3 has guaranteed that the Savage4 will not only be acceptable by visual quality mavens and performance hounds alike, they've also staved off the Savage4's eventual obsolescence by a stronger margin.

The Savage4 will be the first chip that ships to retail that includes upward compatibility with Intel's upcoming AGP 4X specification. This shouldn't surprise Sharky Extreme readers who follow our daily news, as we announced months ago that S3 had become a full fledged Intel AGP 4X validation partner, which virtually guaranteed that they'd be first to market with a part that met the spec.