page_title: S3 Savage
section_title: Savage 2000
hierarchical_section_title: S3 Savage / Graphics Processors / Savage 2000
caption_attribution_description: Diamond Viper II Z200.
context_page_description: Savage was a product-line of PC graphics chipsets designed by S3.
context_section_description: During 1999, Diamond and S3 merged and the Savage 2000 GPU was the first product from the combined companies. The final graphics card was released late that year as the Diamond Viper II Z200. 
  The GPU consisted of roughly 12 million transistors, approximately half the number of transistors of the NVIDIA GeForce 256. Despite this low level of complexity, it was marketed as being similar to NVIDIA's GeForce 256 series. Savage 2000 supported S3's S3TC texture compression, a hardware transform and lighting engine named "S3TL", and was equipped with a "QuadTexture Engine" capable of a single quad-textured pixel per clock or 2 dual-textured pixels per clock. The 3D engine had texture fill-rate potentially equivalent to GeForce 256 at the same clock speed. At the end of 1999, the Savage 2000 and the GeForce 256 were the only computer game oriented cards with hardware T&L. S3 engineers claimed that the S3TL engine had feature parity with GeForce 256, and that it could render 2.5 million lit and clipped triangles/second. However, S3TL shipped completely non-functional, primarily because initial drivers were Direct3D 6-based (Direct3D 7 was the first release with HW T&L support). Savage 2000 was an AGP 2X/4X card and had an internal 350 MHz RAMDAC. The Diamond Viper II Z200 had 32 MB SDR SDRAM.
  The initial pre-release specifications had called for a 175 MHz core clock rate, with a resulting 700 million texels/second fillrate.  The final card shipped 50 MHz slower, at 125 MHz, resulting in a fill-rate of 500 MTexels/second (only slightly ahead of GeForce 256).  With respect to RAM, the card shipped with 166 MHz SDRAM clocked at 155 MHz. The end result in benchmarks showed the card performing ahead of the prior generation of cards (Matrox G400, ATI Rage Fury MAXX, NVIDIA RIVA TNT2, 3dfx Voodoo3) but it did not always keep up with the GeForce 256. The drivers were discovered to be buggy as well, with issues with numerous game titles. 
  Diamond eventually released drivers with S3TL support in OpenGL and Direct3D. Unfortunately S3TL does not function properly. It causes missing textures, errors in geometry and models, and minimal performance benefits. Whether the issues are a result of poor drivers or defective hardware is unknown.
  Seemingly unwilling to invest the time and effort required to set up a structured internal driver development team, S3's graphics division was sold to VIA for $321 million. S3 would regroup in later years and create the Chrome series.
caption: Diamond's Viper II Z200
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