Pine S3 Savage 4 16MB AGP review

With the big $443 CDN ($300 USD) video cards hogging the spotlight recently, I've decided to throw a budget video card into the fray. Today's lucky contestant comes in the form of a $69 CDN ($47 USD) S3 Savage 4GT powered, "Pine, S3 Savage4 AGP" card. Here are the specs from the back of the box:

Pine S3 Savage 4 AGP (PT5987) Graphics Engine:S3 Savage 4GT (AGP 2X) S3TC"! (S3 Texture Compression) 32-Bit rendering Trilinear filtered single-pass multi-texturing 16 MB Frame Buffer Maximum 2D / 3D resolution 1920x1080 Optimized Direct3D and OpenGL acceleration AGP Ram Sharing Technology

We all know that the Geforce DDR that is in my Box O'Pain is definitely going to be faster than the Savage 4GT but let's see exactly how much faster it is. Bear in mind that this is a $69 video card ideally suited for SOHO applications such as surfing, and doing a little bit of Excel. However the front box does claim to be a 3D VGA chipset, and I honestly believe that 3D benchmarks are a lot more exciting than 2D benchmarks (especially since 2D "matured" a long time ago.)