S3 Savage 4

The end of the 90s saw some pretty crazy competition in the 3D accelerator market. 3Dfx was riding high, but started showing cracks in their dominance. nVidia was cranking out new generations of cards at a near alarming rate, each iteration providing major laps. ATI had a broad product suite and other players like Matrox were still trying to keep up.

S3 then, having been a major player in the 2D card market for a long time, with some lukewarm attempts at 3D, didn’t want to be left out. They had already had previous cards capable of accelerated 3D graphics but it all came together finally with the Savage 4 chipset.

Sporting Direct3D, OpenGL, and their proprietary Metal API support, it wasn’t a bad card at all. Coupled together with the unique higher resolution textures availble in some games, it had a lot of things going for it. Sadly S3 was already behind the curve of their main competitors and weren’t able to keep up, eventually being chopped up and sold off. The Savage 4 is still a card well worth looking at today, which is exactly what I did in my latest video!