February 18, 1999 - ELSA will present its new graphics accelerator ELSA WINNER II at the CeBIT '99. Based on the Savage4 graphics chip, the ELSA WINNER II offers home consumers and corporate desktop customers excellent graphics performance with brand new features.
The new S3 chip features AGP 4x which pushes the data transfer rate between graphics accelerator and CPU to its technical performance limits. The ELSA WINNER II is subsequently best qualified for future generation of processor and motherboards.
For consumers the focus attraction of the new board is the excellent 3D performance with 32-bit rendering and the support of immense texture capacities. A further highlight is the S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) which S3 developed to achieve highly detailed graphics images by compressing textures. S3TC has been integrated as a standard in Microsoft´s Direct3D. This unique method of data compression enables the processing of data which would normally need six times the RAM storage capacity of that actually available on the graphics board. The result: extremely good contrast and amazingly detailed images.
The S3 chip holds a further important feature in store which supports next-generation digital flat panel-based systems via the ELSA WINNER II DFP connector.
"In the early 90's we achieved revolutionary success implementing the S3 graphics technology on our ELSA WINNER 1000 boards. We're happy to hook on to this long-lasting and successful cooperation with S3 with the Savage 4 graphics chip. We're convinced that the new ELSA WINNER II board which is based on Savage4 and conceived for the mainstream PC will set new price/performance standards," commented Theo Beisch, President and CEO of ELSA AG.
"S3 is pleased to have found in ELSA a strong partner in Europe with a well built sales channel structure, especially with regard to system integrators. We are absolutely convinced that the performance of the Savage4 chip meets today's market expectations 100 percent and we're certain that this cooperation will play a role in ELSA´s company success," said Ken Potashner, President and CEO of S3 Incorporated.
Leading game manufacturers like ID software, Epic MegaGames, Argonaut, DID (Digital Image Design), are convinced of the excellent performance and have announced their support for the new Savage4 graphics chip and the S3TC method.
The ELSA WINNER II will be available as a retail version and a further version will target the specific needs of system integrators. The new boards will have their debut at the ELSA booth in Hall 9 at the CeBIT '99. The ELSA WINNER II boards will be on the market at the end of April.
| ELSA was founded in 1980 and today has around 550 employees. In addition to its headquarters in Aachen, Germany, it also maintains subsidiaries in Santa Clara, California, as well as Taipei, Taiwan and Tokyo, Japan. ELSA develops, manufactures and markets PC hardware and software components for the data communications and computer graphics sectors. Its product range includes modems, ISDN adapters, videoconferencing systems, ISDN routers, graphics boards and monitors. ELSA AG shares have been traded on the "Neuer Markt" stock exchange in Frankfurt since June 15, 1998. |
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