S3 Graphics – the No.1 graphics company of the mid nineties and a partly-owned subsidiary of VIA Technologies these days – announces tomorrow its first design win for the DeltaChrome graphics processors with DirectX 9.0 support. Club 3D, a well-known company to adopt promising technologies, will sell some new S3 products in the European Union.

“We are very pleased with Club 3D’s selection of our DeltaChrome graphics processor,” said Nadeem Mohammad, Product Marketing Manager, S3Graphics.

Club-3D’s first DeltaChrome graphics card will feature 256MB DDR SDRAM memory, D-Sub, DVI and TV-Out connectors. It will be based on the most powerful and feature-rich version of DeltaChrome graphics processors – the F1 – with 8 rendering pipelines with one TMU per each, Advanced Pixel and Vertex Shaders beyond DirectX 9.0 specs, some memory bandwidth saving technologies, multi-display capabilitie, 400MHz RAMDAC integrated, integrated TV-Out controller, TMDS transmitter and so on, support for 480p / 720p / 1080i / 1080p HDTV resolutions via component (YPbPr) output, 480i standard TV output via S-video and composite output, programmable video engine and AGP 8x support.

Besides the flagship F1, S3 Graphics is also expected to offer DeltaChrome S8, DeltaChrome S4, Delta Chrome M128 and some other products at different price-points.

Unfortunately for VIA and S3, the DeltaChrome products will appear on the market a year after the announcement nearly 1.5 years after the first DirectX 9.0 supporting graphics card – ATI RADEON 9700 PRO – started to sell.

Performance and driver quality of S3 DeltaChrome products is something analysts are extremely curious about. As we know from the past, products with buggy drivers, low performance and image quality are not adopted widely on the market. Another concern for S3 is the shady future of the DeltaChrome part – particularly S3’s ability to release PCI Express x16-supporting GPUs.

The DeltaChrome-based Club 3D graphics card will be available online and from leading retailers in Europe early next year for an estimated retail price of 155 Euro for the model with 256MB of DDR SDRAM memory.