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| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer hardware |
| Founded | January 1989; 37 years ago (1989-01) |
| Fate | Defunct or Merged |
| Headquarters | Fremont, California, U.S. |
Key people | Dado Banatao Ronald Yara |
| Products | Video cards |
| Parent | HTC |
| Website | s3graphics.com at theWayback Machine (archived 2017-01-04) |
S3 Graphics, Ltd. was an American computer graphics company. The company sold theTrio,ViRGE,Savage, andChrome series of graphics processors. Struggling against competition from3dfx Interactive,ATI andNvidia, it merged with hardware manufacturerDiamond Multimedia in 1999. The resulting company renamed itself toSONICblue Incorporated, and, two years later, the graphics portion was spun off into a new joint effort withVIA Technologies. The new company focused on the mobile graphics market. VIA Technologies' stake in S3 Graphics was purchased byHTC in 2011.
S3 was founded and incorporated in January 1989 byDado Banatao and Ronald Yara. It was named S3 as it was Banatao's third startup company.[1]
The company's first products were among the earliestgraphical user interface (GUI) accelerators.[2] These chips were popular with video card manufacturers, and their followup designs, including theTrio64, made strong inroads withOEMs. S3 took over the high end 2D market just prior to the popularity of 3D accelerators.[3]
S3's first 3D accelerator chips, theViRGE series, controlled half of the market early on but could not compete against the high end 3D accelerators fromATI,Nvidia, and3Dfx.[4] In some cases, the chips performed worse than software-based solutions without an accelerator.[5] As S3 lost market share, their offerings competed in the mid-range market. Their next design, theSavage 3D, was released early and suffered from driver issues, but it introducedS3TC, which became an industry standard. S3 boughtNumber Nine's assets in 1999,[4] then merged withDiamond Multimedia.[6] The resulting company renamed itself SONICblue, refocused on consumer electronics, and sold its graphics business toVIA Technologies.[7] Savage-derived chips were integrated into numerous VIA motherboardchipsets. Subsequent discrete derivations carried the brand names DeltaChrome and GammaChrome.
In July 2011,HTC Corporation announced they were buying VIA Technologies' stake in S3 Graphics, thus becoming the majority owner of S3 Graphics.[8] In November, theUnited States International Trade Commission ruled against S3 in a patent dispute with Apple.[9]
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