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Description: Dado Banato and Ronald Yara started S3 Graphics, Limited in January of 1989. The company initially produced integrated 3D graphics cards but it later developed into a consumer electronics company. They developed digital media and information appliances. The company started with an offering of 2,000 shares for the public on NASDAQ in March 5, 1993. VIA Technologies bought S3 Graphics for US $323 million in year 2000. However, they decided to continue manufacturing and distributing chipsets using the original S3 technology.

Some S3 chipsets are being integrated into VIA north bridge parts. This began particularly after 2001, when the graphic card division was sold to VIA. The graphic cards UniChrome and Twister are particularly often used as an integrated north bridge solution.

The new S3 Graphics primarily produced graphic cores for the VIA IGP chipset. The company later revived its original Chrome brand name and products. S3 resumed development of graphic accelerators such as Chrome 440GTX, Chrome S27, Gammachrome and Deltachrome.

S3 Graphics’ accelerators are competitive with the Nvidia GeForce and ATI Radeon product lines while most of the graphic cards are developed mainly for personal computers. These chips can also be used for PCI-E. One of the most recent developments of the company are support 3D acceleration, Chrome 440 series, HD Blu-ray video and DX10.1.

The earlier ones however, like the TRIO line, support only 2D. Yet, the TRIO 2D products still remain as one of the best selling graphic chipsets of all time. During its launching in 1995, it was considered ahead of its time; and is still one of the company’s products that are greatly in demand.

S3 Graphics added 3D functions in the later released ViRGE and Savage graphic cards. The Savage cards featured a motion compensation engine, a video scaler and hardware alpha-blended sub-picture blending. VirRGE, on the other hand, was prematurely released and received many undesirable feedbacks.

One S3 development not related to hardware is the S3TC. It is a set of algorithms used to compress images. The S3TC was later included in DirectX 6.0 from Microsoft and even now, the use of S3TC in graphics accelerators continues in the form of gaming consoles.

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