X-bit labs

S3 Chrome S27 Graphics Processor Review: Worthy Performance for Its Class? (page 23)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 12/29/2005 | 12:11 PM ]

Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark03

The new graphics card from S3 has a surprisingly high performance score in 3DMark03, stopping a little short of the 7000 points mark. The GeForce 6600 GDDR2 scores 6468 points, which is smaller than the Chrome S27’s score. But let’s get a more detailed view of the results.

The absolute victory in the “pure speed” mode and the defeat in the “eye candy” mode are logical enough: high fill rate is important in the former, while in the latter case the Chrome S27 is hamstringed by its resource-consuming super-sampling.

The S27 has only 4 texture-mapping units and 4 raster operators and does not support any kind of Z-buffer acceleration technology like NVIDIA’s UltraShadow II, yet it is victorious in the second test, too. The GeForce 6600 GDDR2 isn’t much slower, though. Anyway, the Chrome S27 is as fast as the RADEON X1300 PRO even at the “eye-candy” settings. The record-breaking GPU frequency helps the new card a lot here.