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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
I think he means the extremly ugly visual style of the (windows) control panel.
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.
(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.
I know why it's weird, when i tried setting up the resolution, it had "High Quality Porn" as a setting
.smell my feet.
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.
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.
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
I think I'll wait until the ideas in This article about the future of video cards come to munition.
I hate to say but at least 85% of the people here are viewing this site from Windows. More of us have XWindows-based boxen to play with that the readers of other sites but we don't usaully consider buying expensive (consumer) graphics cards for them because no one will make any games for them to begin with. So I for one, knowing this chipset was brand new, did not expect it.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
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.
> 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.
An attitude like that won't help expand the variety of hardware available....
If it's new and interesting technology, then it's new and interesting technology, regardless of where it runs.
Linux support for most video cards doesn't come from the manufacturer, it comes from people who look at a review, really like the sound of the card, notice there's no linux support, and start working on fixing it.
Besides which, I havent seen linux mentioned in the last few ATI or nVidia card reviews....yet drivers exist for them.
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 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)
Advanced users are users too!
"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
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.
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?)
Then you should switch to linux. The vi interface is extremely simple, and its all you need to configure XFree86.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
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
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 ;)
Thanks for the advice.
:-(
I've fixed it.
It's quite sad, though, that I can't trust people
-twb
$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