S3 Graphics

» see s3graphics.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Every game you have played in the last twenty-five years ran textures through a compression scheme whose OpenGL extension is still spelled with three characters of a company name: s3tc. Microsoft licensed the format for DirectX, where it got renamed DXT and later BC. The company those two characters and a numeral belonged to has not shipped a graphics chip since 2009 and has not updated its own website since 2012.

S3 was incorporated in January 1989 by Dado Banatao and Ronald Yara, and it was called S3 because it was Banatao's third startup. The 86C911 arrived on 10 June 1991 as one of the first chips built specifically to make Windows redraw faster, which in 1991 was a genuine problem worth solving in silicon. Then came the Vision series, and then in 1995 the Trio64, which put the RAMDAC and the VGA core on one die and became the most widely shipped part the company ever made.

That is the part of the story that reached me. In Turkey in the late 1990s a graphics chip was not a purchase, it was a line on the spec sheet of an assembled machine, decided by whoever put the box together and priced at whatever was cheapest that month. For two or three years running that slot was an S3 more often than it was anything else. You learned the name from the boot screen and from the driver disk, not from choosing it, and when people traded hardware lists in forum signatures the S3 line in yours was the one nobody commented on.

~ the dossier ~

~ half the market and none of the wins ~

The ViRGE shipped in 1995 into 1996 as S3's answer to 3D, and on volume it worked: early on it held something close to half the 3D accelerator market, because it was the chip already sitting in the cheap machines. On the thing it was named for it did not work at all. Running a game through the ViRGE's 3D path was frequently slower than running the same game in software on the processor, and the part earned a nickname in the enthusiast press that it never lost.

3dfx arrived with Voodoo and took everyone who cared. S3 answered late with the Savage 3D in 1998, which brought the texture compression that outlived it, and then with the Savage 2000, whose hardware geometry unit was never made to work properly in drivers. After that the company was selling into the part of the market that does not read benchmarks, which is a real business right up until integrated graphics eat it.

~ sold three times in twelve years ~

In 1999 S3 picked up the assets of Number Nine and merged with Diamond Multimedia, and the combined company renamed itself SONICblue to signal that it was now about consumer electronics. A year later SONICblue sold the graphics business to VIA Technologies, which folded the Savage lineage into motherboard chipsets and kept the S3 Graphics name alive as a joint venture producing the Chrome series.

On 6 July 2011 HTC bought VIA's stake for $300 million and became majority owner. HTC was not buying chips. It was buying 235 patents, two of which the International Trade Commission had just found Apple to be infringing, in the middle of the phone patent wars. On 21 November 2011 the ITC reversed course and found Apple in the clear. HTC went ahead with the deal anyway, and the last new S3 part had already shipped two years before that.

~ the letters that outlived the company ~

S3 Texture Compression became the format everybody used, which meant everybody had to license it. For years the open source graphics drivers on Linux shipped with S3TC support present but switched off, because the patent covered a thing that every game asset in existence was already encoded in. The patent expired in 2017 and the drivers turned it on.

So the company's most durable product was not a chip at all. It was a compression scheme that shipped inside other people's hardware for a quarter of a century, and it took a patent lapsing for it to become fully free, nine years after S3 last made anything.

~ the flash banner somebody keeps alive ~

s3graphics.com answers today. It serves the front page it was serving in 2012, down to the line reading Copyright 2012 S3 Graphics Co., Ltd. All rights reserved, and it comes through Cloudflare with a last-modified header from June 2026. Across the top, in italics next to the yellow badge, it still says Get the Hi-Def Experience. Every link on that page is dead. The drivers page answers with a 500 and everything else under it answers with a 404.

The front page still loads a Flash movie called main.swf, and next to it the server hosts a 363 KB copy of ruffle.js, the emulator people use to keep old Flash content playing in browsers that removed the plugin in 2020. Somebody is paying for that hosting and somebody went to the trouble of bolting a Flash emulator onto a dead company's homepage so the banner would keep animating. They did not fix a single link underneath it.

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