SiS 6326
The SiS 6326 was a graphics processing unit (GPU) manufactured by Silicon Integrated Systems. It was introduced in June 1997[1] and became available to the consumer market in the end of that year. Although it had a low performance compared to the GPUs of its age, eventually it became very successful, specially integrated in many motherboards designed to the corporate market, where the low cost is decisive and the 3D performance is not a priority. SiS shipped over seven million units of the SiS 6326 in 1998.
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[edit] Architecture
The SiS 6326 was available in discrete, with an AGP 2x or PCI bus, and integrated graphics. It had a 64-bit 2D/3D graphics accelerator, a DVD decoder, a TV coder as well as the AGP interface. It was available in 4Mb or 8Mb of memory.
[edit] Performance
Since this chip aims cost over performance, it does not have a good performance, even compared to contemporary products. According to a test of Tom's Hardware of January 21, 1998, it could perform roughly a third of the performance of a NVidia RIVA 128 or 40% less than an ATI Rage Pro in terms of frames per second in Direct3D benchmarks and simply couldn't play Quake due its lack of OpenGL support. [2]. Yet, the same article says that even the "slow and unknown graphic chip" could still produce a "quite nice image quality".
A beta driver codenamed Java was released as late as 1999, being the only version with an OpenGL ICD included, which finally allowed it to run some OpenGL applications such as GLquake, Quake2 and GLexcess. it still crashes in Quake3 though, due to its incomplete 3D features.
The SiS6326 was even capable of running relatively newer 3D applications such as 3Dmark2000/2001, with no significant image flaws to be found despite its abysmal speed.
[edit] Linux support
There is little support to Linux except the drivers developed independently by Thomas Winischhofer[3]. Since the driver does not support OpenGL, not even the Windows one provided by SiS, this driver is only for 2D acceleration. There is also an experimental FrameBuffer driver developed by Sergio Costas[4], currently unsupported, available only for 2.4 kernels and without any kind of hardware acceleration. This driver was not ported to 2.6 because the native VesaFB driver available offered the same capabilities.
[edit] Successor
The SiS 300 succeeded the SiS 6326 in April 1999[5].
[edit] Overclock
The card is overclockable using the software PowerStrip[6], but with most cards, even 5 mhz overclocking will cause serious pixel failures on windows desktop.
[edit] References
- ^ About SiS > History, SiS, accessed December 26, 2008.
- ^ 3D Accelerator Review Step One - 3D Performance, the Real Deal, Tom's Hardware, accesses January 25, 2010
- ^ http://www.winischhofer.net/linuxsisvga.shtml
- ^ http://www.rastersoft.com/sis6326fbeng.html
- ^ Press Room > Press Release, SiS accessed January 25, 2010.
- ^ Oc numa sis 6326 - Fórum do Clube do Hardware, Clube do Hardware, accessed December 26, 2008 (In Portuguese).
