S3 takes a shot at multi GPU

Keywords: S3 Multichrome Chrome S27 benchmarks
The German publication PCGames Hardware had a look at a new multi GPU solution from S3, which uses it's Chrome S27 card, the company's current flagship.
This is not exciting as in "it will rock your geek world" kind of news, but it is interesting to see that S3 is not dead, yet.
The Chrome S27 is card now more than two years old, and had some disappointing performance and graphics driver problems when it was released.

The Multichrome technology is similar to what ATI and Nvidia have used for Crossfire and SLI in the low-end, it doesn't the use of bridges to communicate, relying on the PCI-Express bus. Of course there are no chipset limitations here and PCI-Express x4 slots will work with Multichrome. It uses Split Frame Rendering and Alternate Frame rendering to balance work.

The results are encouraging in some benchmarks - scaling wise - but, in the end, it's not worth the work which S3 has gone through - two of them still lose to the now aging 7600GT.
They could have some new card planned but knowing what S3 has done in the last few years, they probably should be spending more time working with the driver, something that lacked quality at launch, at which still doesn't seem up to par.