Zardon

Ever since the death of 3dfx back in year 2000, the graphic chip market has became literally bipolar. Even though there were some companies who tried to show something new, none of them could survive. But here comes a company called eXtreme Graphics Innovation which tries to get some share from the imaginary cake with a line-up of products worthy of note.

The company's short history goes back to May this year when the graphic chip design crew of SiS (Silicon Integrated Systems) excelled and reborn under the new name XGI. The previously known SiS Xabre II, with very promising features, has been renamed to Volari: the subject of our current article. Later on this year, parts of Trident Microsystems has joined the company: their work is represented in XGI's mobile line of products. The split up of SiS and XGI was primarily due to the fact that SiS used to produce lower to middle class products, but the new graphic chip –according to their hopes at least- intended to be among the high-end solutions. XGI's roadmap is nothing but daring: the company intends to produce profit by the end of 2005 and take top market share by 2007. Luckily, in order to fulfil these goals, XGI already has one of the key elements: the support of top manufacturers. We have definite knowledge of well-known companies such as Club 3D and ABIT to produce Volari products and that is quite an achievement considering that the product-family has literally come from scratch.

Hardware OC

Zardon

# Prince of Persia SOT – blurry image, unplayable.
# Tomb Raider TAOD – missing graphical effects, (in TAOD's settings menu, the vertex shader is disabled).
# Delta Force BHD – Switching to NightVision mode, the image falls apart.
# In some cases the mouse scroll becomes very slow.
# Collin McRae Rally 3 – missing effects.
# Gunmetal – too slow to play.
# Max Payne 2 - frozen.
# Will Rock - frozen within few minutes.


early days yet by the looks of it...........

Zardon

Volari Duo V8 Ultra – and the new drivers (v1.01.51)
http://www.hardwareoc.hu/index.php/p/articles/y/58.html

Performance wise we've experienced the most dramatic change by far, when we ran FutureMark's 3DMark03 (build 340) with the new set of drivers. Compared to the performance we've seen under version 1.00 of the Reactor drivers, the score was down by 15,7 %, and that means only one thing: XGI does not want to follow NVIDIA 's every footstep. Basically they've taken out the optimized bits from the new drivers, and that is a 100% proof for those, who claimed, that XGI uses special code to produce such performance under 3Dmark03. The new results Volari has produced are perhaps somewhat closer to those what the card is truly capable of. The biggest loss in the 3DMark test was the performance of the vertex shader. The score fell by more than 50% from the original 17,6 to a shady 9,2. We've also experienced some significant performance loss of the Fill Rate scores. Even in Single Texturing, the original 2311 MTextels/sec fell to 1712 MTextels/sec (26%). We've experienced no changes of the image quality.

The_Neon_Cowboy

another good review on that card

http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphi...107/index.html

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WarGun

We've experienced no changes of the image quality. Yet thier performance on some things droped 50%?? lol.. i was wondering is hidden surface removal a cheat these days? I mean really, do we have to kill a cards performance so much if it doent affect image guality? Hmm i say we take the faster drivers if it doent affect quality...what ye say? Or at least have the option to use optimized drivers...two sets lol one for 3dmark and one for peeps who want more performance


Or maybie i missed the point

The_Neon_Cowboy

the whole point is for them to make thier card look alot faster and a better bargeing then it is....
who would to buy a super hyperspeed gigantica gefore2-mx 8mb for $300

there alot of name tricks and driver cheating going on

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WarGun

Hmm... i quess they never learn. But im still wondering if HSR is still around or did they consider it a cheat as well? Its been a long time since i've heard anything about it...way back when it sounded like a good idea, and not a cheat.

mainman

From the reviews i have seen they still have a long way to go, we all just have to wait...

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