QuoteOriginally posted by agrelaphon
If Banshee was a crap, then why did it sell over 1 million cards?

Because 3dfx was an established company and people buy anything with the 3dfx label on it, simple as that.
Banshee was in all case worse than a Voodoo2, let alone the Voodoo2 SLI, and the Banshee did NOT support multitexturing, even though 3dfx patented multitexturing. Result? Many games don't work on Banshee whereas they run on Voodoo2.

I don't understand why many of you are so hard on XGI : they are new in the market, they have very little experience and limited resources.
You cannot honestly expect a new company with 300 employees to outperform in one blow a company with over 2700 employees...

And let's not forget that even ATI and nVidia released poor performing cards : the ATI Rage Fury Maxx was crap and the nVidia Riva 128 had the market's worse image quality.

Seen on VolariGamers :

StorePC.net is selling, via eBay, the brand new Chaintech XGI VOLARI V3 graphics card with 128MB for only... USD $46.99! This card is ideal for those who want a silent PC as the Volari V3 uses no fan at all for cooling : there is only a small heatsink and the card is very small too. This is of course a brand new, retail card, with the box and all. The reference is SLV3-128.
StorePC.net is located in Cleveland, USA and ships to United States, Mexico and Central America, Australasia, Europe and Canada.
There are only 10 Volari V3s for sale, so you need to hurry in order to get one.

Here are the characteristics of the card :
- Chipset/Core Speed: XGI VOLARI V3/300MHz
- Memory/Effective Speed: 128MB DDR/500MHz
- SmartTile(TM) 128-bit memory architecture
- BrightPixel(TM) 3D graphics engine with DirectX 8.1 Vertex and Pixel Shaders in hardware
- UltraClear(TM) TFT image quality at UXGA panel resolution (1600x1200)
- CoolPower(TM) power management technology
- Motion Compensation and IDCT hardware for real-time playback of videos with 85% CPU headroom for other applications
- BUS: AGP 4x/8x
- Ports: VGA Out (15 Pin D-Sub) + TV-Out (S-Video) + DVI

Get a Chaintech Volari V3 now : http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=40161&item=5115677954&rd=1&ssPageName=WD1V

Spotted this on VolariGamers:

Clubedohardware has done a review of the single chip XGI Volari V8 card using the driver 1.04.51.
The card was compared to the 9800XT, 9800 Pro, 5950 Ultra, 5900XT, 5700 Ultra, 9800SE, 9600XT, 9600 Pro, GF4 Ti 4200, 5600, GF4 MX 460, 5500, 5200, MX 4000, 9600 SE and GF2 GTS under 3DMark2001 SE, 3DMark03 build 340, Aquamark 3, Quake III and X2 - The Threat.

Here's a snip (translation from Portugese):

The Volari V8 of the XGI is an excellent graphics chip for the market it is destined to. Its performance did not disappoint. It was faster of the one than all the simpler graphics chips, such as the GeForce FX 5500, 5600 GeForce FX and GeForce FX 5200. It left the Radeon 9600 eating dust. A really fantastic fact for a company with only one year of life.

The best result of the Volari V8 was the one in Aquamark 3, where this new chip got a similar performance to the one of the Radeon 9800, beating the Radeon 9600 Pro and is not very distant from the performance of the GeForce FX 5700 (that was only 6.89% faster than the Volari V8 in this test).

The review is available at: http://www.clubedohardware.com.br/v8.html

We know that the Voodoo5 uses SLI for the dual chips, but what exactly is the bandwith between the two chips on a Voodoo5?

So you mean that releasing a crap card is excusable and worthy to be praised all because the company was "an established company who had been a market leader"? Talk about leaving in the past...

Also, the only time 3dfx had been a market leader was at the days of the Voodoo2. Everything afterwards were crap. The Banshee was crap, the Voodoo3 was crap (no stencil, 32 bit, etc.), the Voodoo4&5 were crap, and the 6000 was too.

QuoteOriginally posted by Phalanx
Volari's don't perform well. Actually, they perform crap. They need two GPU's to even come close to the mid-ranged segment of the videocard market.

For people who raved about the Voodoo5 and still keep one, I'm surprised to hear such comments.
If I follow your logic, then the Voodoo5 was "crap" when it came out too (and even more now) as it did not managed to outperform the Geforce 2 GTS, let alone the Geforce2 Ultra or the Geforce2 Ti. Also, it had terrible image quality (no trilinear!), only its FSAA could make up for image quality.
Talk about being biased.

The Volari actually blows away the 9600XT.

Why not use the voodoo5 since you have one ?

QuoteOriginally posted by qrazi

mei: i believe the deltachrome was only tested with beta drivers, whereas in this review official XGI drivers where used.

Well, I read that the Deltachrome driver they used is WHQL certified, so it can't possibly be a beta...

QuoteOn ther other hand, i have great expectations from S3 Deltachrome too. I have used S3 graphic cards in the past and the only problem i had was that it was difficult to install the correct driver.

Remember when nVidia acquired 3Dfx and all form of support for 3dfx cards were discontinued and how angry the 3dfx community was when they discovered this ? Well, it is even worse for S3.

Since you owned S3 cards in the past, you should be the first one to remember of the very bad support S3 had for their customers : one year after the launch of the Savage 4, S3 discontinued support for it. A few months after the launch of the Savage 2000, they discontinued support of it too. The only choice people had was to use third party S3 drivers to make some games actually work, such as drivers made by JGC, and I guess you were referring to this when you said it was "difficult to install the correct driver". If S3 could do this not once but TWICE, don't you think they can do it again? I don't know about you but I learnt from my past mistake, I don't want to be bitten again.

This is very alarming indeed : do you actually want to pay for a card which support will be discontinued in a few months and hope that some guy who also has the card hacks the driver to make a game work? I don't. I never forget this bad customer support from S3 and don't want to be caught by them again.

On the other hand, I feel much safer with XGI : look, they even continue to support old chipsets from Trident (Trident was acquired by XGI) and offer new drivers for these antics, something 3dfx owners would love to have! This shows a lot about XGI's customer care.
This is something completely unheard of in the industry : remember, nVidia dropped all support for 3dfx after the acquisition and S3 can't even continue support for their own cards.
I would much prefer get a card from XGI and feel safe about their driver support and customer care than get a Deltachrome and have to worry in 6 months when they will decide to drop support for Deltachrome in order to force users to get the Deltachrome 2.

Just read this : interesting...
Looks like XGI wants to intensify efforts in supporting the gaming community...

Taipei, February 11th, 2004 --- XGI Technology Inc, a total graphics processing solution supplier, today announced the signing of an endorsement agreement with Team MeetYourMakers from Denmark, a top-ranked multigaming team of eSports athletes/e-gamers. As a result of the agreement, Team MeetYourMakers will train and compete on PCs equipped with XGI Volari™ graphics processor, and a major role in the XGI's grassroots marketing campaigns geared towards gaming enthusiasts worldwide.

"XGI is pleased to promote Volari™ products with such a well-known group in professional gaming world," said Chris Lin, CEO at XGI Technology. "Team MYM is so competitive in professional gaming and unmatched technical-wise. XGI is extremely excited to have them equipped with the world most advanced 3D gaming technology from Volari™ products."

Just saw this on Guru3D :

On February 28 Chinese Lian Guan (Crown Electronic Technology), which facilities are mainly located in Shenzhen, Guangdong, is going to ship two new solutions:

Crown X Tornado Volari V8 Ultra 128MB DDR (MBGA chips) — 799 yuan ($97)
Crown X Tornado Volari V8 64MB DDR (TSOP chips) — 666 yuan ($80)

These should be followed in the near future by the following:

Crown X Tornado Volari Duo V8 Ultra 256MB DDR2 (MBGA chips) — 1599 yuan ($193)
Crown X Tornado Volari V8 128MB DDR (TSOP chips) — 733 yuan ($89)
Crown X Tornado Volari V3 Ultra 128MB DDR (TSOP chips) — 399 yuan ($48)

You have to admit that these $193 set by Chinese company for Volari Duo V8 Ultra 256MB DDR2 are very different from the current sky-high price tags (set by Club3D). And the prices of single-GPU DX9 Volari V8 Ultra 128MB DDR and Volari V8 64MB DDR cards are even more bright.

This is very good news indeed!

WHy HSR ? Hidden Surface Removal ?

QuoteOriginally posted by dborca
What exactly does "fast trilinear" mean, anyway?!? 2TMU Voodoos take no penalty for trilinearness as long as combine_extension is disabled (Napalm) or not present (V2, V3). AND not multitexturing!

XBitlabs has an article describing S3's "fast trilinear" :
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/s3-deltachrome_13.html

The advantage is that this fast trilinear has no penalty hit, even with multitexturing! There is no hit in any situation and is therefore quite attractive.

QuoteOriginally posted by samuraiboy

does the tnt2 and savage4 opengl extensions can be applied to the mesafx? thanks!!! if yes, ill provide the extensions... i also have extension list of the rage pro... thanks!!!

I'm not sure what it would change : having a list of all the OpenGL is not very useful as these can already been found on the net.
And these extensions did not help the Rage Pro in running modern games which MesaFX now runs thanks to Daniel

I wrote ?? as I don't understand what Falconfly meant

??