S3 jumps on GPGPU bandwagon

Posted at: 2:08pm 17th October 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Chrome 400 chips capable of accelerating gaming physics, as well as enhancing photos

It’s sometimes easy to forget that there are more companies than ATI and Nvidia in the graphics market, but the company that first gave us 3D acceleration, S3, is very much still around. So much so, in fact, that it’s now even developed its own GPGPU technology.

According to S3, this was the result of a ‘complete re-design of the Chrome general purpose programmable shader architecture’ in its DirectX 10.1 Chrome 400-series chips. This gives you a SIMD instruction set to calculate masses of parallel data over thousands of threads.

S3’s general manager, Dr Ken Weng, claimed that the ‘markets that can benefit from S3 Graphics GPGPU technology include High-Performance Computing (HPC), HD video transcoding/encoding, scientific, engineering, medical, imaging, physics, and many other areas.’ S3 hasn’t yet provided any information on which GPGPU languages it uses, and whether it plans to support OpenCL in the future, but we’ll give you an update if we get any more information.

To demonstrate the technology in action, S3 has released a photo-enhancing app called S3FotoPro, which uses various algorithms to adjust colours in photos, as well as reducing haze and fog and smoothing skin. The app benefits from GPGPU acceleration when used with an S3 GPU, although it can also just use your CPU. You can download S3FotoPro for free from here, if you want to try it out for yourself.

Do you own an S3 graphics chip? Do you think S3 make an impact in the GPGPU arena? Let us know your thoughts.