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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
(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.
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.
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!
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
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