S3 introduces DirectX 10.1 GPUs

Posted at: 4:47am 15th February 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Chrome 400 series of GPUs feature unified shaders and DirectX 10.1 support

With stiff competition in the motherboard chipset business, it looks as though VIA is now seriously exploring other avenues. Not only has it announced a brand new processor architecture, but it's now also decided to join AMD at the DirectX 10.1 GPU party.

VIA has just announced the S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series of GPUs, which feature a proprietary unified shader architecture and new DirectX 10.1 features such as Global Illumination with support for Shader Model 4.1. S3 has also now moved over to multi-sampling anti-aliasing, which needed doing as S3's previous chips used super-sampling AA, which looks very pretty, but requires much more horsepower than multi-sampling AA. The new GPUs will also be fabricated on a 65nm process, and will support PCI-E 2.0.

As with the Isaiah processor architecture, one of the GPU's main features is its energy-efficiency, and S3 claims that it has a 'remarkably power-efficient, low heat package.' Along with its HD video features, which include H.264 hardware acceleration, S3 reckons the new GPUs could 'provide an ideal platform for silent, fanless solutions in HD multimedia home systems.'

However, nothing has been said about 3D performance yet, which suggests that the Chrome 400 GPUs aren't going to be competing in the high-end GPU arena, particularly as they only have a tight 64-bit memory interface.