Our friends from XabreGamers have some news on the upcoming S3 videocard chipset, the Deltachrome.

According to S3, the "DeltaChrome desktop cards will be available in retail channels in Winter 2003", in other words one year after the first press release!

At least other manufacturers such as NVIDIA with their GeforceFX 5800 or another manufacturer which I won't name didn't make press releases of their upcoming product BEFORE it was actually ready! They may have announced it, information of the product may have leaked, but they didn't make tons of press releases of it before it was ready.

I won't bother going through once again the specifications of the DeltaChrome, I'm sure everyone heard more or less about it anyway through the hype generated with all their press releases... Anyway, the clock and memory speed of the DeltaChrome are still unknown.

The interesting part is that S3's Senior marketing manager proudly announced back in January that the DeltaChrome would obtain a score as high as 20000 points with 3DMARK 2001... with a Pentium IV 4 Ghz. Of course, this was mere speculation as the 4 Ghz Pentium4 still isn't available and probably won't be available this Winter either. So we have two scenarios : either the DeltaChrome will ship in Winter and will never deliver the 20000 marks in 3D Mark as the hardware does not exist (and even if it did, nothing guarantees that such a score would be obtained as it was pure speculation from the start) or either the DeltaChrome will be delayed once again to meet the release date of the Pentium IV 4Ghz... You choose.

More info available soon!

Source: XabreGamers