S3 Graphics has announced the Chrome 400 Series of discrete graphics processors for notebooks and energy-efficient desktop PCs. Although the company has lost half of its graphics-related market, the VIA/S3 venture is determined to make a comeback with a new series of products, built on the 65nm architecture.

The Chrome 400 Series graphics chips are fully compatible with the DirectX 10.1 and come with a 64-bit memory interface. The chips' performance was not disclosed as of the moment of writing, yet the company states that it has managed to achieve "the highest performance-per-watt ratio ever". This may be seen as an attempt to take back some market share in the mobile computing segment, where the company used to have a strong presence in the past, as its products were extremely energy-efficient.

It is for sure that the chip comes with DisplayPort, HDMI 1.2 and HDCP capabilities and is able to fully support the H.264 video hardware decoding. The S3 chips are similar to Nvidia's VP2 engine, since it lacks capabilities to handle all of the VC-1 decoding processes. On the other side, AMD's technology that comes with UVD features can support VC-1 on-the-fly.

Additionally, the chip integrates the built-in ChromotionHD with full support for the latest HD standards including H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1, WMV-HD, and AVS. The PowerWise technology is another worth-mentioning feature that optimizes balance between performance and power consumption, which is ideal for laptops and other mobile computing products.

It seems that the S3 Graphics Chrome 400 Series GPUs will be manufactured using Fujitsu's 65-nanometer process node. The same process was successfully used by VIA for its recently unveiled Isaiah processor. The company refused to provide further information about the new chips, but they will hit the market in late February this year.