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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.

2 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.