VIA has already announced its Savage XP/AlphaChrome graphics processors in June, however, right after the announcement decided to redesign the chip as there were a lot of problems with it. Now it is September, almost three month after the announcement and we still have no graphics cards based on the GPUs from VIA/S3 Graphics, hence, here is just another “paper launch”, when the device is announced, but its shipments have not begun yet and are not going to in the nearest future. It is ridiculous, but according to this web-site, the company may launch another “paper” graphics chip this year. The highly anticipated code-named Columbia GPU is set to be sampled and possibly introduced in the fourth quarter 2002.

The Columbia graphics processor has 8 rendering pipelines with 1 TMU per each, supports DirectX 9.0 functions, including Pixel Shaders 2.0 and Vertex Shaders 2.0. The chip is targeted to run at 300 - 400MHz and is going to be manufactured using TSMC’s 0.13 micron technology. I believe the GPU is more likely to work at 300 or 340MHz rather than at 360 to 400MHz due to the fact that VIA has no experience in creating such complex chips. Unofficial sources claim that graphics cards based on the upcoming GPU will be able to achieve about 11000 – 15000 points in 3DMark 2001SE benchmark. Although it is impossible to predict real-world application’s performance based on 3DMark score only, but even knowing that ATI’s RADEON 9700 PRO reaches about 12000 marks, I doubt S3/VIA will be able to beat them not only in benchmarks, but in the real games as well.

Keeping in mind that even NVIDIA’s NV30 is delayed due to the problems with 0.13 micron manufacturing technologies, and TSMC apparently changed the design rules, it is very unlikely that Columbia will appear earlier than in February or even March 2003. Talking about the long-term plans of the company it should be pointed out that they plan to reveal their Columbia 2 graphics core by the year 2004.

The one thing I should stress is that graphics cores developed by VIA and SiS are proposed for integration in their upcoming North-Bridges. The discrete GPU market-share narrows and there is very little space there for only two or three companies. Integrated chipset market grows significantly and since VIA and SiS are already quite strong players there, they simply have to introduce more advanced integrated solutions. As a result, do not expect their discrete GPUs to beat the products from ATI or NVIDIA.