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Xabre Graphics Card Reviewed
Daniel Rutter writes: "Graphics cards using the SIS Xabre chipset don't seem to have quite made it to the retail market in most of the world yet, but they're on sale now here in Australia. I've checked out Triplex's shiny XabrePRO card. It's weird. Not just because it's silver, in typical Triplex fashion. It's also got weird drivers. Not bad drivers. Just... weird. And it makes a weird noise. Seriously." Check out those screenshots, and wonder.
So is the noise they make just Xabre rattling?
Name a "wierd" driver that makes your life easier.
If the only way to describe something that one should never, ever see is 'wierd', something is wrong.
It shouldn't be wierd, it should just work. I don't notice my sound card's drivers, and that's how it should be.
-twb
You can't trademark real words.
I think he means the extremly ugly visual style of the (windows) control panel.
Not posted 10 minutes and its already slashdotted.
Hey, I didn't know that guy actually submitted his reviews to Slashdot. I love his reviews, he usually doesn't do cutting edge stuff like Tom's Hardware or Anandtech do, but tests periphery equipment and fans (his HSF comparance is awesome). He writes quite entertainingly, without taking himself or the topic too seriously. The site could use a makeup, though, but I prefer the disorder to the clickfests of THG and AT. Sorry if this comes up as advertisement, I swear to god I'm not affiliated with him in any way, I really just like the site. :)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
YHBT, YHL, HAND
That's so weird!
Too bad you can patent common ideas.
From the viewpoint of a newbie gamer geek, I'm sick of all these hardcore graphics cards with a million widgets on the control panel.
I'd like to have a simple interface and an explanation of what does what coupled with a high-performance graphics card.
Hence "weird drivers" shuns me away.
PayPal $$ if you sign up for free offers (eBay, cred cards, e
well what is so wired about it? and what could be so strange about the drivers? are th7ey like 20 MB or something? what i want to know is how is the proformance, are they berrte/worse than the nvidia/ATI chip set's, and how much they are?
If you hate the British spellings so much, why promote it?
sabre (sbr)
n. & v. Chiefly British
Variant of saber.
'Sabre' is one of the alternate commercial spellings you seem to hate so much.
It spelled saber, if we're feeling picky and trollish. Get your facts right.
-twb
(and some extra stuff to keep the lameness filter at bay.)
My favorite part is the "About Xabre"... legend. Is this even marketing? Some of the best parts:
"For 500 years, demons tyrannized the world of human vision with omnipresent control. The demons competed among themselves, and the winner set the rules for domineering the world of human vision while human beings paid a high price for their enjoyment."
500 years? Very creative description of the current (and fairly recent) video card market. Then the story borrows heavily from the sword in the stone myth:
"Xabre entered the forest of visual fantasy bordering the land of the demons, where he discovered the 8X8 twin sword."
Those screenshot are weird, but this story of a graphics processor that is a 500-year old mysterious night is truly bizarre.
Interesting... I thought "Windows" was trademarked...
Word
Outlook
Excel
Access
Publisher
Passport
They're not real words?
"Microsoft Windows" is, as is the Windows logo, however the word windows by itself is not.
YHBT, YHL, HAND.
::shudder::
nested trolls
Triplex Millennium Silver XabrePRO graphics card Review date: 28 May 2002.
Until now, Silicon Integrated Systems (SIS, or "SiS", as they for some reason want their acronym to be rendered) have not been the chipset provider of choice for the performance PC graphics enthusiast.
SIS have produced quite a lot of graphics chipsets, but they've all been cheap chips for entry level systems and boring business boxes. In those tasks, they're generally perfectly fine, for the money; if a video chipset discourages your employees from spending company time shocklancing enemy Havocs, then that's a feature, not a bug. But if you want to run 3D applications, SIS products have always, to four significant digits, sucked.
--------------------
IN BRIEF
What it is: High performance value graphics card
Who makes it: Triplex
What it costs: $AUD242 delivered
Best points: Strong performance for the money
Worst points: Drivers a bit quirky. Makes a weird noise.
----------------
This is, however, no longer the case. Because now there's the Xabre.
The Xabre chipset is aimed at the same "high entry level" 3D video adapter market as Nvidia's GeForce4 MX. And it's priced about the same, too. A GeForce4 MX440 card gives you ample 3D power for pretty much any current game on pretty much any current monitor; here in Australia, Aus PC Market will deliver a Leadtek Winfast A170 DDR MX 440 board to you for $AUD242.
But Triplex's new Millennium Silver XabrePRO card costs, as I write this, exactly the same amount. And, if you look down the feature charts, it seems to beat the A170 handily.
For a start, it's faster. Which is something I'll get to in more detail in a moment.
Also, a cheap MX 440 card like the A170 isn't likely to have twin monitor connectors. So Nvidia's drivers may let you access "nView" multi-monitor features, but all you can use them with is the card's TV output, which isn't going to let you do proper dual screen computing.
The Triplex Xabre card has a standard 14 pin D-sub VGA connector, and a Y/C (S-Video) TV output, and a DVI-I connector. It can run two outputs at once, in mirror or true multi-monitor mode. You also get a DVI-to-RGB adapter, so you can easily hook up two regular VGA-connector monitors.
The Xabre also has a full DirectX8.1 feature set, which means it can handle all of the pretty-features used by the newest and shiniest Direct3D games. GeForce4 Titanium cards have full DX8.1, but GeForce4 MX cards don't; they don't even have a full GeForce3 feature set.
In the real world, this isn't a very big deal; everything still runs on a GeForce4 MX, and it generally runs very quickly indeed; you might have noticed that all of those people with GeForce2s haven't suddenly noticed they're unable to play new games. It's going to be some time before DX8.1 compatibility is a must-have feature. But hey, it doesn't hurt to have it, for the same price.
The Xabre is also alleged to embrace compelling relationships and grow ubiquitous synergies between the paradigm frontiers of the blah blah blah, with all sorts of trademarked "technologies", which seem to be broadly similar to those claimed for every other new graphics chip since the invention of dirt.
Frankly, marketing people have so comprehensively poisoned this particular well that I no longer even attempt to figure out which of the new "technologies" mean a darn thing. They're like promises from politicians on the campaign trail; life's too short for it to be worthwhile paying attention.
To be fair, I don't think any graphics chip company has ever described their product as a "mysterious knight" before. But that doesn't mellow me out much.
While we're on the subject of apparently cool stuff that doesn't actually matter very much, the Xabre also supports AGP 8X, the latest doubling of Accelerated Graphics Port speed. AGP 8X brings AGP theoretical bandwidth up to match that of PC2100 DDR memory.
Not that anything's likely to be able to use most of that bandwidth to send data to the graphics card, mind you. Certainly not texture data from main memory, which often has to serve multiple simultaneous requests from various subsystems, and which has large overheads even when it's only got one job to do.
AGP 8X may be the fastest AGP mode yet, but it's still much slower than on-card video memory, so you still need enough memory on the card for all of the textures you want to use.
Besides, practically nobody on the planet has an AGP 8X capable motherboard yet, as I write this.
The "Xabre 400" chipset, also known as the Xabre Pro, is the first to be released; there are two slower models and one faster one in the pipeline. I'm pretty sure that this Triplex card is the only retail Xabre card in existence so far.
It's a good looking thing, with Triplex's distinctive silver finish (also used on their Nvidia-chipset cards, including the GeForce4 Ti4600 one I review here).
The main chip cooler on the Triplex card is quite impressive, but you don't get any heat sinks on the RAM chips. That's OK, though. RAM-sinks on video cards are like spoilers on passenger cars; buy the more expensive, faster model and you get the extra frill thrown in. It doesn't do much of anything, though.
The eight memory chips (there are another four on the back of the card) are all Etron Technology EM658160TS-3.3s. They're slightly faster than any of the EM658160 variants listed on the manufacturers' page here; the -3.3 version is the 3.3 nanosecond incarnation of this 64 megabit chip, and so it ought to have a ceiling specified speed of 300MHz.
So you've got a thoroughly acceptable 64 megabytes of memory (eight times 64 megabits, eight bits to the byte), which should be happy running at an effective 600MHz, after taking DDR doubling into account. Or a bit more, with luck, a following wind, and perhaps also some extra cooling.
This memory isn't running at 300/600MHz on this card, though; the Xabre Pro has 250MHz core and RAM (before DDR doubling) clock speeds, by default.
Hi-ho for some overclocking, then.
You can do that with the standard Triplex drivers, which seem to be the only ones available for the Xabre at the moment. Triplex themselves don't have any Xabre drivers for download; heck, you can't even download drivers from the Xabre site itself yet. The driver pages are "under construction". So don't lose the driver CD that comes with the card.
Drivers for new video chipsets are, typically, crummy. Inadequate development, inadequate testing, personality defects and bugs galore. Nvidia's drivers are a big reason to buy cards that use their chipsets; there's exactly one driver package for each Windows variety, and it covers every Nvidia chipset since the original TNT, and the drivers inside that package have been thoroughly tweaked and tested over the course of years of updates.
Perfect, Nvidia's drivers aren't. About as good as you can get, they are.
SIS seem to have done an OK job with the core functions of the Xabre drivers. But I didn't check a bunch of games on different Windows flavours to be sure; I just ran a few tests on a WinXP Pro machine. For all I know, the card catches fire if you run Quake 2 on WinME, but the drivers smelled all right to me.
The icing that Triplex have put on the SIS code core, though, is... quirky.
As a representative sample of the Triplex visual style, check out this overclocking control panel:
Yee-ow.
If this pub-carpet school of interface design doesn't turn your crank, rest assured that various driver features can also be accessed via what look like cheesy software MP3 player interfaces, instead:
This is a family Web site, so I'll refrain from commenting further on this.
The overclocking controls let you wind up the core and RAM clock speeds quite a bit, but the card, she does not want to know. The results of my overclocking experiments were somewhat inconsistent - a given speed would hang the machine when I tried it one time, but work when I restarted and tried again. But none of the results were particularly impressive.
RAM chips that're rated for a speed well above the speed at which a given card runs them are all very well, but there are limiting factors besides the RAM itself. Those factors are in full effect on the Triplex Xabre board, as far as I can see.
Setting the RAM speed slider to 300MHz instantly, and not very surprisingly, borked the computer.
275MHz mangled the display, but at least I could cancel out of it. 265MHz, the first time I tried it, caused more borkitude, with no escape. Then, after a restart, it worked OK.
Raising the core speed to just 260MHz took me on a trip to the magical land of the BSOD when I tried to do a 3D test, but 250/265 was OK, although it didn't make anything more than 1% faster.
That was the best the Triplex card could do. Perhaps this was something to do with the drivers; they did worrying things like setting the clock sliders all the way to the left, sometimes, when I went to the "DisplaySetting" tab for the first time after a reboot. Clicking Cancel and then going back to DisplaySetting solved that problem every time it happened, putting the sliders back in the right place. But stuff like this didn't inspire confidence.
Triplex provide a couple of optional extras along with the drivers themselves - a pop-up menu thing that gives quick access to Display Properties and other features and is therefore somewhat useful, and a multi-function bar thing whose best feature is that you don't have to install it. That's it for the software bundle; no cheapo DVD player software, no colour calibration thingummy, no bundled game you don't want to play.
In contrast, the software bundle that comes with the Leadtek A170 includes all of the above.
Big deal.
More significantly, the A170's 64Mb of DDR memory is made up of Samsung K4D263238M-QC40 chips, which are four nanosecond chips, and should be good for 250 un-doubled megahertz, or 500MHz after DDR's worked its magic.
The MX 440 only runs at a core speed of 270MHz and a RAM speed of 200MHz, by default. The general consensus seems to be that no core overclock worth bothering with is likely to be possible, but RAM speeds of 225 to 250 pre-doubling megahertz are routinely attainable. That'll net you a worthwhile speed increase, if you're running a high enough resolution and/or anti-aliasing mode.
Probably not, however, enough of an increase to make up for the Xabre's natural speed advantage over the MX 440. Not unless you've got a pretty big monitor, anyway.
I tried out both the Millennium Silver XabrePRO and the Leadtek A170 on what now, alarmingly enough, qualifies as a medium performance PC. It's a Thunderbird Athlon machine, running at 1477.5MHz (according to WCPUID, anyway) on an Asus A7A266 motherboard, with 512Mb of humble PC133 RAM. Roughly Athlon XP 1600+ CPU performance, let down a bit by the RAM, in other words. Tests were performed under Windows XP Professional.
Mad Onion's 3DMark2001 SE is a thorough and quite realistic DirectX 8 benchmark. The Xabre can't currently handle the Advanced Pixel Shader test, but SIS say that's Mad Onion's fault, not theirs.
With the defective test disabled, the Xabre at stock speed beat the MX 440 at stock speed by about 33% in 1024 by 768, using 32 bit colour and compressed textures. It won by about the same amount when both cards had 2X full screen anti-aliasing turned on.
In the same resolution with 4X FSAA, neither card was performing particularly well, but the Xabre still won by more than 11%. That gap would be pretty much annihilated by a reasonable RAM overclock on the MX 440 card.
In 1600 by 1200 with no FSAA, the Xabre won by less than 10%. Then again, it managed 1600 by 1200 with 2X FSAA at a respectable 66% of its no-FSAA speed. The MX 440 is less memory efficient, and couldn't even attempt that test.
For those who can't comprehend benchmark numbers unless they're presented in a cheesy Excel graph, here one is.
I wanted to do some OpenGL tests next, but was defeated by the fact that the drivers that come with the retail Xabre card don't seem to provide any way to turn off vertical sync (vsync), which tells the video card to wait for a new screen refresh before displaying another frame.
With vsync turned on you won't get "tearing" caused by the screen updating faster than it refreshes, but you also end up with a hard cap on your frame rate that's equal to the refresh rate. Try as I might, I couldn't turn vsync off - turning it off elsewhere (in, for instance, the Quake III Arena config file), didn't work.
So much for that, then.
As quirks go, though, the locked-on vsync paled into insignificance compared with the noise.
The Xabre card makes a noise when it's in 3D mode.
It's usually a vague, high pitched, white-noise-y rasp. Sometimes, as in the 3DMark2001SE Point Sprites test, it's distinctly different - more of a whistling noise. I've never heard anything like it from a video card before. It's bizarre. It's not really annoyingly loud, but you'd be able to hear it without taking the side off your case.
This is not an oddity of the one card I got for review, either. I procured another one. Same noise. A friend tested a third. Same noise.
Perhaps this is just the sound of a Triplex Xabre board; perhaps it's the sound of all Xabres. Usually, solid state devices making a clearly audible noise are in the process of being electronically beaten to death; by misdesigning a power supply, I once managed to make a solid state battery charger tick like a clock until it expired. It did so in such a thorough way that the note later attached to the charger by a thwarted repair technician read "murdered by owner".
But looping demos on the Triplex cards didn't seem to hurt them.
So the source of the noise baffles me.
Overall
Frankly, I wouldn't buy a Xabre card right now. The thing seems to be decently fast, but it has sufficient points of weirdness that I think it'd be a good idea to hang about a bit and see whether any of them turn out to be symptomatic of serious problems.
If someone gave me a Triplex Xabre as a present, though, I wouldn't go straight out and try to swap it for a GeForce4 MX. It doesn't seem terribly likely that it'll go up in a puff of smoke, none of its driver quirks are crippling (well, unless disabling OpenGL vsync is essential for your continued happiness), and the little melon-picker is a dual-monitor board with respectable 3D performance.
So wait and see on this one, I say.
If you've got the price of a Xabre board burning a hole in your pocket and you're currently using a thoroughly inadequate graphics card, then play it safe and get a GeForce4 MX instead. If you can stand to wait for about a month, though, do. By then, enough people should have prodded the Xabre around that Usenet and review directories should give you a definite yea or nay on the thing.
Right now, though, it's a Video Card Of Mystery. And I'd rather not pay for one of those, if it's all the same to you.
My graphics card makes noise too. All I have to do is open up some document in Acrobat Reader (in Linux of course), press the mouse anywhere in the document, and move it up just a pixel or too. Then there is a slight noise coming from something in the computer as long as you hold the mouse button. It sounds kind of like when a hard drive seeks, only muffled. And with very few variations - almost a constant sound.
I know it is not the harddrive that makes the noise (it is much louder), and it is not the fan on the graphics card. It is not a conflict with the sound card (because the sound is produced even with all speakers off). It is not the PC speaker (I disconnected it), but it could be the buzzer on the motherboard (that replaces the speaker when it is disconnected). But it could also be the graphics card. It is a Leadtek NVidia Riva TNT card by the way.
What happen!?
What happen!?
Somebody set us up the bomb!
The eight memory chips (there are another four on the back of the card) are all Etron Technology EM658160TS- 3.3s.
read: The eight memory chips (there are another four on the back of the card) are all Enron Technology EM658160TS- 3.3s.
t was a bright sunny Saturday morning and Ruth went to check her mail box. There was only one letter. She picked it up and looked at the envelope. There was no stamp, no postmark, only her name and address. She opened it and read the letter:
Dear Ruth:
I'm going to be in your neighborhood Saturday afternoon and I would like to visit.
Love Always,
Jesus
Her hands were shaking as she placed the letter on the table. "Why would the Lord want to visit me? I'm nobody special. I don't have anything to offer," she said to herself.
With that thought, Ruth remembered her empty kitchen cabinets.
"Oh my goodness, I really don't have anything to offer. I'll have to run down to the store and buy something for dinner." She reached for her purse and counted out it's contents.
Five dollars and forty cents. "Well, I can get some bread and cold cuts, at least."
She threw on her coat and hurried out the door. At the grocery store she carefully selected the few items she was able to afford. A loaf of French bread, a half-pound of sliced turkey, and a carton of milk...leaving Ruth with grand total of twelve cents to last her until Monday.
Nonetheless, she felt good as she headed home, her meager offerings tucked under her arm.
"Hey lady, can you please help us?"
Ruth had been so absorbed in her dinner plans, she hadn't even noticed two figures huddled in the alleyway. A man and a woman, both of them dressed in little more than rags.
"Look lady, I ain't got a job. My wife and I have been living out here on the street, and, well, now it's getting cold and we're getting kinda hungry. If you could help us, lady, we'd really appreciate it."
Ruth looked at them both. They were dirty, they smelled bad and frankly, she was certain that they could get some kind of work if they really wanted to.
"Sir, I'd like to help you, but I'm a poor woman myself. All I have is a few cold cuts and some bread, and I'm having an important guest for dinner tonight and I was planning on serving that to Him."
"Yeah, well, okay lady, I understand. Thanks anyway."
The man put his arm around the woman's shoulders, turned and they headed back into the alley. As she watched them leave, Ruth felt a familiar twinge in her heart.
"Sir, wait!"
The couple stopped and turned as she ran down the alley after them.
"Look, why don't you take this food. I'll figure out something else to serve my guest."
She handed the man her grocery bag.
"Thank you lady. Thank you very much!"
"Yes, thank you!" It was the man's wife, and Ruth could see now that she was shivering.
"You know, I've got another coat at home. Here, why don't you take this one." Ruth unbuttoned her jacket and slipped
it over the woman's shoulders. Then smiling, she turned and walked back to the street... without her coat and with nothing to serve her guest.
"Thank you again, lady! Thank you very much!", the couple called after her.
Ruth was chilled by the time she reached her front door, and a little worried too.
The Lord was coming to visit and she didn't have anything to offer Him.
She fumbled through her purse for the door key. But as she did, she noticed something in her mailbox.
"That's odd. The mailman doesn't usually come twice in one day unless he has a package to deliver."
She took the envelope out of the box and opened it.
Dear Ruth:
It was so good to see you again. Thank you for the lovely meal. And thank you, too, for the beautiful coat.
Love Always,
Jesus
The air was still cold, but even without her coat,
Ruth no longer noticed.
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Access
Microsoft Publisher
Microsoft Passport
These are the official trademarks. You can't legally trademark common words like 'word' or 'windows', as the Lindows case has shown.
The Story of Xabre
Title: The World of Human Vision - Return of the Hero
Some time ago, in an unspecified era, our story beginsK
For 500 years, demons tyrannized the world of human vision with omnipresent control.
The demons competed among themselves, and the winner set the rules for domineering the world of human vision while human beings paid a high price for their enjoyment.
In the midst of all the chaos, the people began to pray for the arrival of the mysterious knight, whom legend had it would end the strife and rejuvenate the visual world.
And so it happened that a mysterious knight - Xabre - did appear at this time. He understood the people's suffering under the demons' tyranny. He knew what the people needed and secretly began breeding a magical steed that could race across the sky.
During his quest, he also found three lost sacred stones - Pixelizer Engine, Software Shader and Frictionless Memory Control, each with wondrous powers.
With these treasures, Xabre entered the forest of visual fantasy bordering the land of the demons, where he discovered the 8X8 twin sword. The one-and-only twin sword in the world was stuck in a cold and hard rock so big that no ordinary human being could pull it out.
Xabre knew that without this magical weapon he would not be able to defeat the demons. And so he gathered all the wisdom and power of the people and withdrew the sword from the rock.
Then, without hesitation, he went into the demons' land and defeated them one by one to create a new visual paradise for the people.
I think everyone begs to ask the question: does it support linux?
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
what makes them weird? Are they organized differently? Do they interface to the card and system apps in a unique method? I am curious and now feel blue balled that it was not explained... ouch!
Perfect, Nvidia's drivers aren't. About as good as you can get, they are.
Reviewer like Yoda speak, yes? Graphics chip reviews inverted sentences need like head with hole ... hmmm?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
"You can't trademark real words."
Like "Windows"? "Word"?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
From the article:
I think I'll wait until the ideas in This article about the future of video cards come to munition.
Lets fire Jon Katz and get him writing here.
Err, the language is called "English", thus the English spelling would be correct.
Besides, you lose any respect you may have had with statements such as "It spelled saber".
Yes lostchicken, it spell like that. Spell like that good. Good spell like that. Like that good.
Moron.
Whenever I read a hardware review, I hit ctrl+f, type in "linux" and then hit enter -- first thing. If I see it jump down the page, I read the whole thing. If not, I hit spacebar to make the "not found" dialog go away and carry on with what I was doing. I can't buy hardware that doesn't support Linux, and so I have no time to read about hardware rewviews which only mention Windows. Would a hardcore Windows user care about a review of an iPod? Unless it mentioned something about the Win32 hacks, I doubt it. In fact, I could see some people actually feeling challenged if the review said "the iPod is Apple-only, but there are ways to get it running under Windows, although not for the faint of heart". Or whatever. I haven't read any iPod reviews, so I'm just guessing.
The thing might make tea and toast for me before I get up in the morning, but unless it can run under Linux, it's of zero use to me (as well as quite a few others here, I'd suspect). Normally, I'd have just gone about my business, and chalked the review up to yet another that doesn't mention Linux, which is no big deal at all. But since Dan was pimping his site on /., Linux (and *BSD, come to think of it) should have been mentioned. Lots of people here (40%?) run Windows, sure, but there ought to be a rule that when you self-submit a review you've done to Slashdot, you have to throw the other 60% of us a bone and at least see if you can dual boot or something. Win32 users can get information in hundreds of places. Users of alternative operating systems come here.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Just because something is weird doen't make it bad. The way linux works is still 'weird' to me (sorry, but I just haven't had the time to sit down and tool around with it), yet I'm sure many people here would say that linux is not bad, and I don't think it is either.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
The two aren't that closely related. Just because you can draw X polygons N times per second doesn't mean you can draw 2X polygons N/2 times per second. You may run out of onboard memory or some other resource.
There's also a time penalty for switching from the back buffer to the front buffer. In full screen mode, this is generally a switch, but in windowed mode, copying is usually involved, and some boards do that copy much faster than others.
The "ooh, shiny heat sink" approach to board evaluation is also amusing.
And it makes a weird noise.
So does my notebook's, and the darn thing doesn't even have a decent 3d support!
Oh, but it just happens for a short period of time after my notebook is carried along. I guess it must be some sort of security thingy (i moved! i moved!)....
No, "saber" is Spanish for "to know".
Yes, you can.
They're calling in Lindows, not Windows. It's not confusing enough.
I assume from your ill-informed comment that you are an american citizen. If any nation can claim to be the primary manglers of the English language is is they.
Some history.For a long time there was no "correct" spelling for English words, this tradition giving rise to the many varied spellings of otherwise identical surnames. Those businesses who are either fairly old >500years or those who wish to feign the same mis-spell the word "shop" as "shoppe" (to use your example)
I always feel slightly queasy when I see americans mis-spell words such as "foetid" for simplicity's sake and then mis-pronounce the word. I just wish the "count"ry would stop the pretence that they are speaking English.
In the united Europe we are building there will be many languages. At least we Europeans will be able to speak at least one of them correctly.
Lucius Sour
NP - Rammstein: Live aus Berlin
PS - All UN*X-using US techs are exempted from the above rant.
Newslfash: Americans did not invent the english language. If anything shop is a mispelling of shoppe.
"first-fun-to-read-graphics-card-review"
Um...all of Mr. Rutter's reviews, video card and others, are fun to read. Check them out.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Don't post your callsign on Slashdot, unless you enjoy getting signed up to NAMBLA's monthly newsletter. Havn't you ever read at -1?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
You make an interesting point. I suppose I live in a dream world where hardware vendors realize that there's more than one OS. Instead I'm just a troll in a /. world. :-) Quite honestly, I just don't have the wherewithall to write a driver for a new video chipset -- I'm at the mercy of the hardware manufacturer. I don't feel too badly about it, though, since I can't make silicon. So I can't give a new type of ASIC or chipset back to the community either.
I rely on hardware vendors for a lot of things I can't or won't do myself. Did I write a USB driver for the Palm m505 I bought that came with a USB cradle? No, I just paid for a serial cable after reading a review of the new Palms from a geek site. That review specifically mentioned that if you want to sync up with Linux, you have to get the serial cradle since Palm won't release their USB specs on the m5xx series.
I guess if I have to google for a driver for this new chipset, then everyone else can too. I still think Dan could have thrown that info into his review, since he knew he would submit it himself to Slashdot. Maybe I got the feeling that he needs the page views/new visitors and finally found the "geekiest" hardware yet to review. I like Dan and his site, and I read him a lot, but the self-submission seemed really off without at least mentioning Linux. Maybe in that dream world I live in, Slashdot still has more OSS guys than not.
Also, SIS are one of the few companies that have actually provided their own linux drivers in the past, so there's no reason to believe they won't now. Especially when the drivers section of the Xabre website doesn't even have Windows drivers there yet.
And this I didn't know. I'll definitely check back (or get notified when an MD5 sum of that page changes) in that case.
And as a matter of fact, every modern video card will work with linux and X via the VESA standards (though admittedly the performance won't be as good as a native driver)
3D? If a video card can't do 3D reasonably well, it won't succeed (personal computers in the home, no not embedded, etc). Since I need 3D, I need a driver.
And BTW, thanks for you post, mabinogi. If I hadn't commented in this story, I would have moderated it up as insightful. 'Course, I wouldn't have made a comment for you to reply to, so the point is somewhat moot... :-) But I learned something and it was good to rationally discuss things (isn't it sad that rational conversation is typically the exception to the norm?).
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I've bought one of those board after reading all the raving reviews about them and that supposed-leaked marketting thing with Nvidia bashing them, I thought maybe they were good. I went out and bought a 64Megs with TV-out for less than 100$, it ran okay for games, offering decent performance, but as soon as I touched Lightwave3D (i.e. professionnal 3D application that requires OpenGL acceleration) it SUCKED big time, the layout wasn't even updating correctly and the scene was breaking down and smudging like hell. I emailed tech support, their answers?? (that should be a classic a la "where's the any key")
"when you use Autocad or Lightwave or any pro 3D apps, you have to go in the properties->hardware acceleration OFF"
(implying also that if you want to switch from working to gaming you need to go to that control pannel everytime... PAIN!!!).
So basically you buy a 3d accelerator that has no 3d acceleration for software that requires 3d acceleration.
Those of you that will say "yeah but calm down beavis, that card is for gaming, what else do you expect from a 3d board??"
well 2 things: if it DOESN'T accelerate my pro apps, at least make it not BREAK them at least, and second, every NVIDIA product works in all 3d software, so if one is doing it, the others would be damned not to follow.
Anyways, I returned the card and went to buy a Geforce 2MX for the time being...
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
If any nation can claim to be the primary manglers of the English language is is they.
I neerly fel out uf my seet laffin their.Put identity in the browser.
Xabre was created to take advantage of the Xtra features in Ximian sometime in the future.
Friend, I agree for the most part with your comments, but whenever I hear a BBC newsreader say something about /Muh-NAG-yoo-uh Nick-uh-RAG-yoo-uh/ or /JAG-yoo-ar/ automobiles, or refer to /Don JOO-un/, I can only (1) wish that I could listen to a blackboard being scratched instead, and (2) conclude that Americans inherited their fine disregard for pronunciation of borrowed words from England along with other linguistic and legal concepts.
English spelling is a lost cause in any case; if we tried to make it phonetic, whose phonetics would we choose? (Ah, well; what do you expect with hundreds of years of backwards compatibility?)
We tried prying the data from them for the 3D support- and Coollogic HAS an NDA with them. So far, no go- all we got so far was the 2D and MPEG stuff from them. I'm going to give it another go shortly, hopefully with at least marginally better results.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The drivers that were written for the 300 were okay when they shipped them, but they opted to discontinue support for whatever reason (and they've been kind of broken since then...) and haven't released any drivers for the 315 or for the Xabre that I know of. They tend to NOT give out 3D programming info, even to their NDAed partners, so that avenue for driver support has been pretty much a dead-end so far. (I plan on pestering them again to see if things have lightened up or maybe that I've been talking to the wrong people there...)
There's every reason for someone to not expect them to provide Linux support with this display chipset.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
But, you're missing the OTHER game we play.
You spend hours tweaking out Doom III just so on your so-new-the-surface-mount-is-still-wet video card. It looks good.
Your buds come over and their jaws hit the floor. They run out and buy the game.
It doesn't look as good on their box at home.
They buy a new monitor. Still doesn't look as good.
They get the new card, drop a month's pay doing it. Still doesn't look as good.
They swallow their pride, and come crawling for help. You kick back, read Pitr's copy of "Evil Geniuses for Dummies" and leisurely decide how to respond.
And that's the best game of all...
Explain.
I'm rather confused.
-twb
What's the point in buying a "pretty" version of a piece of hardware if all it's going to do is hide inside the case of your PC? Now if I had one of those cool see-thru cases that may be different, but most of us don't. This just seems like a big waste of money. I say buy OEM and buy ugly ;)
Seems like a not entirely uncommon problem. It is interesting hear from others with the same problem.
Anyway, I tried again to locate the problem - now listening inside the box when the noise was made. And I still couldn't find the exact source. It could be coming from the harddrive or the 300W powersupply (it's only a 2x400MHz P2 box with only one harddrive, so it shouldn't really need 300W).
I did a 'strace -f' when running acroread, and it appears that when you drag the mouse a lot of information is shared between it and the X server via some socket. The CPU load is pretty high. So it could very well be the power supply.
I've got a noisy card, too - the original Voodoo Graphics cards make a loud 'clunk' noise when you used them. Not as worrying as a continuous high pitched noise, though :(
Posting your callsign is the same as posting your full name and address. I wouldn't put it past some of the weird people on here to sign you up a lot of "special offers" if you said something they didn't like.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Thanks for the advice.
:-(
I've fixed it.
It's quite sad, though, that I can't trust people
-twb
Just my 2 centimes...
...and they drive on the wrong side of the road.
Does it have a Creative Labs logo on it?
This may be part of the problem.
$242 AUD ~= $136 USD
I just bought me a GeForce3 Ti200 from compuplus.com for $79. If only I'd waited, an extra 50 bucks would have bagged me an inferior, untested card with screwy drivers.
Seriously, how can they sell even one of these cards? Of course, they will. People generally don't know what they're buying anyway.
"I am a cipher, a cipher, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce" -Jimmy James