XGI REVIEW, XGI = 100% cheat

[Spectrobozo]

This is very sad news, but having tested Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra we arrived at the conclusion that this product hardly has any chance in the today's market.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/xgi-volari.html

[NitroX infinity]

this product hardly has any chance in the today's market

Duh, I knew that when I first saw it.
If you need a dual chip setup to approach the performance of your competitors then you don't really have a chance. I read that XGI's next generation is also going to use dual chip setups.

[qrazi]

hmmmz... i am a bit disapointed in XGI, but:

If you need a dual chip setup to approach the performance of your competitors then you don't really have a chance.

isnt this a 3dfx forum?

anyone remember the introduction of the first radeon? it ran as fast (or slow as it was back then) in 32-bit and 16-bit. its FSAA didnt only looked ugly, it took a huge performance hit as well. add to that the Geforce2 GTS was able to outperform it on most benchmarks.
what else could one expect from a company that brought us cards like the Rage series? look where they are now.

but, i wont buy a XGI card now. way too high priced for the performance you get...

[lecram25]

If you need a dual chip setup to approach the performance of your competitors then you don't really have a chance.

The reason XGI used dual chips was because it was easier/cheaper to manufacture two chips with a lower transistor count than one uber chip...plus the dual chip appeal...

[georgebou]

There are people that think that $449 (plus tax), is rather inexpensive. This makes XGI's top model a good $50 less expensive than the flagship models of NVIDIA or ATI.
You could take a look to these reviews for volari too.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13188
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031107/xgi-volari-21.html

In the first review it's mentioned the following:

A good start
XGI has definitely impressed us with its first card. It's not the fastest or greatest on the market but its damn good for the first card and don't let me start with Bosnian saying that includes throwing the first kittens in the river. I didn't expect to beat FX 5950 Ultra or Radeon 9800XT but it was not far away in some cases. It's all about the drivers and I believe that many applications will benefit from new drivers that will keep coming from XGI place in next weeks.

I agree with the don't you think?
You can't create the fastest thing in a market in six months.
ATI and NVidia spent a lot of money to create the fastest GPU's all these years that they exist.
Only 3Dfx managed to do that from the beginning, but unfortunately the PC users didn't respect that and the company closed.
Anyway,
i hope Volari will manage to overcome ATI and NVidia in the following years.

[georgebou]

There are people that think that $449 (plus tax), is rather inexpensive. This makes XGI's top model a good $50 less expensive than the flagship models of NVIDIA or ATI.
You could take a look to these reviews for volari too.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13188
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031107/xgi-volari-21.html

In the first review it's mentioned the following:

A good start
XGI has definitely impressed us with its first card. It's not the fastest or greatest on the market but its damn good for the first card and don't let me start with Bosnian saying that includes throwing the first kittens in the river. I didn't expect to beat FX 5950 Ultra or Radeon 9800XT but it was not far away in some cases. It's all about the drivers and I believe that many applications will benefit from new drivers that will keep coming from XGI place in next weeks.

I think he is right, don't?
You can't create the fastest thing in a market in six months.
ATI and NVidia spent a lot of time and money to create the fastest GPU's all these years that they exist.
Only 3Dfx managed to do that from the beginning, but unfortunately the PC users didn't respect that and the company closed.
Anyway,
i hope Volari will manage to overcome ATI and NVidia in the following years.

[mei]

Also, the title "XGI=100% cheat" is totally inappropriate.
Just look at the results in most of the benches like UT 2003, etc. and you will see the Volari isn't so bad as that.

Some people see that the Volari underperforms in some games and jump on the conclusion that Volari is worse than Deltachrome but they fail to see that the difference is that at least the Volari runs all the games thrown at it by XBitlabs. The Deltachrome on the contrary failed to render lots of textures in many games (F1 Challenge, X2 The Threat, etc.) or refused to run (IL2 Sturmovik, etc.) and therefore is far worse than the Volari

[qrazi]

mei: i believe the deltachrome was only tested with beta drivers, whereas in this review official XGI drivers where used.
remember that the first reviews used the very first official drivers, and didnt support AF and FSAA, and didnt work in all games either.

also, the 100% cheat phrase is used to indicate that XGI has optimized its drivers for certain games.
what the TS didnt actually say here, was that the cheating is less then with the older driver set, the speed has generally gone up.
also, if you look in tomshardware vga chart, you can see that the v5 ultra performs about half as good as the v8 duo, but sometimes gets really close. perhaps this indicates that XGI can still optimize its dual chip routines (or that XGI "SLI" sux... )

[georgebou]

I think that Nvidia and ATI were the first who tought the others about cheating.
On 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. When it was done, the result was satisfactional. Maybe they never achieved the quality of 3Dfx, but you get what you pay.
Anyway,
I hope i will be able too see these chips in Greece, because now everyone here uses GeForce and ATI cards.

[mei]

Originally 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...

On 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.

[amp_man]

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.

I completely agree. Driver support, and support in general, is a very big issue, at least for me, for whatever card I choose to buy. For their own products, NVidia and ATI have both been very good about support, the support clear back to the first Radeon and TNT cards, which is quite impressive, considering the TNT is what, 7 years old? S3's support used to suck, but it looks like there has been some fairly large restructuring within S3, but I can't say for sure. But XGI, with its support for even the Trident cards, has got to be the ultimate driver supporter.

By the way, from what I can gather, NVidia did not completely buy out 3dfx, they left the now technology-less and hopeless company to continue supporting their products. 3dfx went under (very) shortly thereafter.

[georgebou]

I agree you with you and i hope that XGI will be a good competitor to others. Besides i'm glad that XGI boards use some Trident technology inside, because my first Graphics card was a Trident and i was very pleased with it. This era there were no 3D boards yet on the PC scene.
On the other hand, before the Voodoo3 that i own now, i had used for a while a Savage4 and i could play the same games with the Voodoo3. The only differense while playing games was that Voodoo3 aimed to the top while Savage4 aimed to the average user. You can't compare 3DFX with S3, because they aimed to different market. 3DFX aimed to the enthusiasts and S3 to the average user.
On the other hand,
The thing that i beleive that has changed to S3 is that the use technology from VIA, and VIA support their products. I have a VIA Apollo 133 on my motherboard and i still get updates for it, and that counts to me. I beleive that this will continue to their graphic cards too.
Closing the only thing that will make me to buy a Volari is that it has Dual GPUs and that's something that i like it very much, and that's why it will be my first choice.

[amp_man]

my first Graphics card was a Trident and i was very pleased with it. This era there were no 3D boards yet on the PC scene.

Mine too , although I had many Cirrus Logic ones too, what ever happened with them? They're still in business, just not doing much. I think that the Dual GPUs is one of the major downfalls of the V8, because as many 3dfx users know, this causes some fairly large issues with the "SLI" between the GPUs, and ram sharing. As far as I can tell, this technology that XGI is reviving is still way too buggy, it shouldn't have been released yet IMOHO. IMOHO, they should have gotten a decent average-user card out, and a low end system, both of which could be aimed heavily at OEMs. Then work on the SLI, or getting the funds to produce some really nice chips.But seriously, this new player in the video world shouldn't be coming out with cards aiming for the top when they only have a dream of making it there.

[georgebou]

I don't know what happend to Cirrus logic. Probably the competition of the PC platform is too high that there is no room for many companies. As i can remember, when the 3D graphics entered the PC market Cirrus logic and Trident couldn't follow the stream. I remember that Trident had made the Trident 3D but it didn't have much luck. The Voodoo era had already started:).
On the other hand, although i agree with you in general, i think i can understand why XGI aims to the top. They are not new in graphics bussiness. They have joined SiS and Trident to    create something really hi end. And besides if their products are cheap, they can be obtained by the average user too.
Remember AMD and Intel. AMD was cheap, Intel was the name. Now AMD managed to balance this factor.(and i like it:D). I hope this will happen to XGI too. For S3 i'm not afraid any more. Even if they fail, VIA has the ability to overcome the situation. For XGI i'm not so sure because this is the reason that 3DFX closed. Their investors hadn't the patiense to support them any more, when the trouble started.

[amp_man]

Well, I agree with you, and then again, I don't. AMD vs. Intel has always been  a strong issue. AMD 486 and previous processors were just, much like the dozens of other companies that made them (ever heard of Evergreen? IBM made some, and many other companies). Intel became the name with the Pentium, but as soon as the 686 architecture caught on, AMD and Cyrix were outrunning the Pentiums and Pentium MMXs by far. Cyrix then died with the MII, which was a horrid failure, and the AMD K6 became the Pentium 2's competition. And that's where we get our current battle is from that weeding out of the crap. Okay, that was kinda off topic...
XGI, as you say, is not new. But it's like if 3dfx returned. XGI has almost no reputation, except one dating pre-pentiums/3D, so they are really starting over from the beginning, only with a slight head start.