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Xabre Graphics Card Reviewed

Posted by timothy on from the first-fun-to-read-graphics-card-review dept.

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.

4 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Quick! by lostchicken · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  2. Vsync, and all that by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful
    People who benchmark by redrawing faster than the display refresh rate are missing the point. The question is how much you can draw per frame time, not how many times you can redraw the same simple scene in a second. That measurement stopped being meaningful when display boards became fast enough to draw useful screens in less than a frame time.

    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.

    1. Re:Vsync, and all that by smash · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Granted, it may not be the best measure of performance, but it *does* give an indication of the cards maximum polygon/texturing throughput.

      Given that most people who buy these cards don't give a crap about windowed performance (ie, they just play games), the window content copying isn't so important (those who are, are more likely to be getting a professional card). Also, the time spent doing a copy of a windowfull of data is likely insignificant when stacked against the GPU cycles spent rendering. (4-8meg copy at 7gig/sec .. oh no :P)

      I think part of the reason the quake3/etc benchmarks are used is because Joe Gamer can easily relate to them, and they're a "real world" application that is close to what he will use the card for.

      Anyway, interesting point, but I think its just a case of using a benchmark that Joe gamer will understand..

      smash

      --
      I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
  3. What's the point? by LinuxInDallas · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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 ;)