S3 Graphics
More info
- Creator
- Dado Banatao, Ronald Yara
- Released
- 1989
- Type
- Graphics chips
The graphics chip maker inside nearly every budget PC of the 1990s, which left behind the texture compression games still use.
S3 was founded in California in 1989 and got in early with 2D accelerators that made Windows tolerably fast; the 86C911 of 1991 and later the Trio64 became default parts for PC makers. The ViRGE of 1995 was one of the first consumer 3D chips, and frequently slower than rendering in software, which earned it the nickname "3D decelerator".
The Savage3D of 1998 lost the war to 3dfx, Nvidia and ATI, but it brought S3TC, a texture compression scheme Microsoft licensed into DirectX as DXTC. The format became the standard and survives in every GPU. The graphics business ended up in a joint venture with VIA, and in 2011 HTC bought it, mostly for the patents.