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Lately, S3 Graphics issues Chrome 500 Series VGA Card supporting DirectX10.1 and OpenGL 3.0 applications. It claims to be the first graphics card to support OpenGL 3.0, but NVIDIA had already unveiled a driver supporting OpenGL 3.0 for GeForce 8000/9000 Series. There are no games supporting OpenGL 3.0 as yet. John Carmack from id Software might be interested in working on this.

S3 Graphics announces that the OpenGL 3.0 acceleration function on Chrome 500 Series VGA card supports Windows and Linux platforms, which indicates its driver has been maturely developed.

Chrome 530GT is already available on GStore at $44.95.

S3 Graphics Chrome 500 Series New Features:

• Microsoft® DirectX™ 10.1
• Shader Model 4.1
• OpenGL 2.1/3.0
• GPGPU Shader Architecture
• Optimized 64-bit Memory Interface
• AcceleRAM™ Graphics Memory Support
• ChromotionHD™ 2.0 Video Engine for Blu-ray™ and BD-Live™ Playback
• H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 HD Acceleration
• AES 128 Encryption Engine
• Integrated DisplayPort™ with HDCP™
• Dual-Link DVI™ and HDMI™ with HDCP™
• PowerWise™ Advanced Power Savings

Mr. Chris wrote:Interesting, that card is made by VIA, they've been using the S3 name for years now. Hmm. Looks like a nice budget low end card. Wonder how it stacks up against other Nvidia and ATI cards? Maybe I'll have Josh add an "other" video card section. Chris.

New driver for Chrome

S3 Graphics has released a new beta driver that enables OpenGL 3.0 support for S3's Chrome 500 series. This will allow software developers to take advantage of OpenGL 3.0 on S3 Chrome 500 series via this new driver and GLSL 1.3 shading language on Windows XP and Vista.

The new beta driver includes new OpenGL 3.0 features, such as a new version of GLSL shader language, vertex array objects, 32-bit FP textures, four new texture compression methods, sRGB rendering/blending as well as performance enhancements for conditional rendering with highly efficient array indexing.

The new driver is available for both Windows Vista 64-bit and 32-bit.

dostov_ wrote:Man, I guess we're reading the same news, eh? I posted the same thing over at TRP today!

This looks like a sweet little card to me. I don't understand why they didn't go with a passive cooling design though... It would've been a much better option for HTPCs and entry-level workstations.

honestjohn wrote:How much heat can a little card like that put out. Actually who knows since it's an S3 and we're using ATI/Nvidia as a yardstick.

dostov_ wrote:

honestjohn wrote:How much heat can a little card like that put out. Actually who knows since it's an S3 and we're using ATI/Nvidia as a yardstick.

Well, I can tell you that I have an Nvidia 6200LE and it originally came with a fan that is very comparable to the S3 Chrome 530GT in size. I found it useless and I replaced it with a small passive heatsink. The temperatures were about the same. So I think it wouldn't need a very big heatsink to do the job of a fan that small.