be a performance part under 32-bit color. Drivers were again an issue with S3's product; holding back overall performance and causing compatibility issues with software and hardware. Savage4 was hardly a match for the new 3dfx Voodoo3, ATI Rage 128, Matrox G400, or NVIDIA Riva TNT2. In OpenGL games such as Quake II, Savage4 performed about as well as G400 did with its slow initial OpenGL support and was far behind TNT2 and Voodoo3. Within Direct3D titles such as Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Savage 4 scored almost 50% slower than TNT2 and Voodoo3 even at a low resolution such as 800x600. The chip was very popular for budget machines, with many generic retail products based on it and OEM PC wins. Only the high-quality texture capability from its S3TC support gave it good mind share with the gaming community. Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena, two popular games at the time, shipped with built-in support for S3TC. The compressed textures were a vast improvement over the standard textures used on all other cards. Not only that, but S3TC allowed these much higher quality textures to be rendered with negligible performance impact. Savage MX/IX S3 designed these chips for notebooks, but they were also sold as budget AGP graphics cards. The MX had many similarities to Savage4 but had reduced clocks and added an integrated TV out function with optional Macrovision. The Savage IX was very similar to the MX, but had 8MB SDRAM directly integrated into the chip to make it even more compact. Savage 2000 During 1999, Diamond and S3 merged and the Savage 2000 GPU was the first product from the combined companies. The final graphics card was released late that year as the Diamond Viper II Z200. The GPU consisted of roughly 12 million transistors, approximately half the number of transistors of the NVIDIA GeForce 256. Despite this low level of complexity, it was marketed as being similar to NVIDIA's GeForce 256 series. Savage 2000 supported S3's S3TC texture compression, a hardware transform and lighting engine named "S3TL", and was equipped with a "QuadTexture Engine" capable of a single quad-textured pixel per clock or 2 dual-textured pixels per clock. The 3D engine had texture fill-rate potentially equivalent to GeForce 256 at the same clock speed. At the end of 1999, the Savage 2000 and the GeForce 256 were the only computer game oriented cards with hardware T&L.