Introduction

"Insistence on Perfection" is fully demonstrated through A-Trend manufacturing process and their ISO 9002 approved factory of 25,000 sq. meter. After having delivered 2 million pcs. of mainboards, 3.5 million pcs. of VGA cards and 2.1 million pcs. of sound cards, A-Trend has proven to the whole world that they are capable to built innovative products and this is exactly what they did with their ATC3970A Savage S4 graphic card. While most of the other manufacturers chosen to bid on the TNT2 graphic chipset, A-Trend decided to go for the Savage S4 chipset. Was it a good decision? That's what we'll try to find out in the suite of this review.

The features

The A-Trend ATC3970A uses the Savage S4 Pro core and is therefore clocked at 110Mhz while its memory is clocked at 125Mhz. Lets remember that there are two versions of the Savage S4 Pro core outhere and they are the S4 Pro running @110Mhz and the S4 Pro+ running at 125Mhz.

The Savage S4 graphic chipset uses the ST3C texture compression. Licensed by Microsoft as a standard in DirectX? 6.0 APIs, S3 Texture Compression allows software developers to compress their texture data by one-fourth to one-sixth its normal size while maintaining the image quality of the original artwork. When used in conjunction with AGP, S3TC provides for texture amounts that were previously unheard of. Now, instead of a texture budget of 2, 4 or 8 megabytes (MB) of memory, software developers can put over 200 MB of 24-bit textures in one 3D scene on a PC with 64 MB of system memory.

The comparisons below show the largest textures possible with and without S3TC. All screens are running at 1024x768x16-bit screen mode. (256x256 is the largest texture size Voodoo 2 can handle; SLI is required for 1024x768 screen resolution.)

2048x2048x24-bit with S3TC on Savage3D	256x256x8-bit on 3Dfx Voodoo 2 SLI

In addition, by compressing textures, S3TC:

• Improves sustained fill rates when texturing from system memory by removing the read bandwidth bottleneck that often limits achievable fill rates.
  
  
• Maximizes effective bandwidth so that more data can be shipped across the AGP bus, increasing performance.
  
  
• Frees sufficient memory to allow for triple buffering, boosting overall achievable fill rate by about 30% when texture data is stored in the local frame buffer.
  
  
• Improves image quality by allowing for higher resolution images to be stored in the same memory footprint.

Product Brief: 128-bit graphics engine with dual rendering pipeline Full 4X AGP, including sideband addressing and execute mode 32MB 125MHz SDRAM 140 million pixels/sec sustained, trilinear filtered 32-bit true color rendering Floating point triangle setup, 8 million triangles/sec. S3TC Texture Compression 300 Mhz RAMDAC with gamma correction 1920x1400 @ 75Hz Resolution Flat panel desktop monitor support Optimized DVD Playback (motion compensation) Complete API support for Direct 3D, DirectDraw, DirectShow and OpenGL LCD





The software bundle

The software bundle coming with this graphic card is including : the video drivers, DirectX 6, Cyberling CD Wizard, VCD Power Player, Power DVD and a readme file. Unfortunately, no games are included with this software bundle.




Continued on the next page with: The performance tests results




	ATC3970A Savage 4 Pro Overwhelming 32MB 4X AGP Graphics Performance
Specifications
New Generation Graphics Engine	S3 Savage 4 Pro 3D chipset Dual 128-bit processing pipeline 300MHz RAMDAC with gamma correction
AGP 4X Implementation	Up to 4 times the speed of AGP baseline Delivers up to 1GB/s peak bandwidth
Ultimate 3D Performance	140 million pixel/sec trilinear fill rate 8 million triangles/sec setup engine Provides the highest performance by S3 Texture Compression (S3TC)
Advanced 3D Rendering Features	Single-Pass multiple textures Anisotrophic filtering Single cycle trilinear filtering Hardware bump mapping 32-bit true color rendering Specular lighting and diffuse shading Full scene anti-aliasing 24-bit Z-Buffering Sprite anti-aliasing, reflection mapping, texture morphing, shadows, procedural textures and atmospheric effects
2D Acceleration Features	Highly optimized 128-bit graphics engine Full featured 2D engine for acceleration of BitBLT, rectangle fill,line draw, polygon fill, panning/scrolling and hardware cursor 8, 16, and 32 bpp mode acceleration
High Speed Memory Bus	32MB 125MHz SDRAM 2MB to 32MB frame buffer
Full Software Support	Direct 3D, DirectDraw, DirectShow OpenGL for Windows 9X and NT Windows 9X, Windows NT, and OSR2
VIDEO FEATURES
24/30 frames per second MPEG-2/DVD video playback supported by Hardware Motion Compensation 60MHz VESA VIP video port for DVD decoders and digitizers Support multiple video windows