'Blazing quick' is not usually the term that springs to mind about S3 for gamers but S3 is touting the Savage 2000+ as a 'blazing quick' chip. How would a 700 MegaTexels per second fill rate and hardware Transformation & Lighting grab you (more on T&L later)? Impressive, when compared to today's fastest 366Mtexels (a Voodoo3 3500) fill rate- that's nearly double. The specs responsible for this should come via a 200MHz graphics clock and 64MB of memory clocked at 200MHz also.
Both parts will sport a speedy 350MHz RAMDAC and full AGP 4X support for the i820 (Camino). The 'vanilla' Savage 2000 will also sport 64MB of memory with a reduced 166MHz frequency with its graphics clock being set to 150MHz. The 64MB of memory should be in the same ballpark of next generation parts from competitors such as NVIDIA and 3dfx, although 3dfx is rumored to have more than 64MB for their high-end part. This amount of memory may indeed give way to 1600x1200 gaming (we hope), which has to date been a tad on the slow side, to put it mildly. S3 feels that its Savage 2000 3D engine can cope with the resolution in terms of frame rate, whilst keeping image quality at a high level with triple buffering, 32-bit per pixel color depth, 32-bit Z-Buffer and with 32MB left over for textures.
One of the reasons that the Savage 4 fell short at the high-end gaming spectrum was because the technology itself was limited by a 64-bit memory interface. This meant that 640x480 and 800x600 resolutions were the 'real' ceiling for fast frame rates. 1024x768 and beyond was too slow for our liking and that of many a Quake 2/3 player. For Savage 2000, S3 has sensibly upped their technology to 128-bit, a very good move indeed.