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New Graphics Company, With Working Cards
gladbach writes "Toms Hardware has in their hands an actual working card, unlike other vaporware cardmakers *cough* bitboys *cough*... To quote Toms: 'A new player dares enters the graphics card market that ATi and Nvidia have dominated for so long. XGI (eXtreme Graphics Innovation), based in Taiwan of course, comes at the market leaders with a line of cards for a whole lot less money. We look at XGI's product range, and offer results of a beta model from XGIs top model Volari Duo V8 Ultra.'"
A new player dares enters the graphics card market that ATi and Nvidia have dominated for so long
What about Matrox, who've been dominating the multiple monitor graphics card market for years?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
XGI is just Trident with a new name, and Xabre added in
From webpage:
'Founded in May of 2003 and headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, XGI pulls from a deep reservoir of engineering and design talent stemming from its acquisitions of Trident Microsystems, and Silicon Integrated Systems' graphics divisions.'
Although it says Taipei, most of the hard core engineers are in san jose, in the old trident building, right across from Fry's electronics. Go say hi, they're a nice bunch
They lost that suit, but I can understand that it may have destroyed them financially.
Not according to their corporate strategy! corporate strategy!
It is good to see the graphics chip market is not too much of a closed shop for any new companies to enter. I would like to know how they plan on getting around the many recent patented methods nVIDA and ATI share with each other, will the SiS aspect get around this? I am not anexpert, please enlighten me!
OpenGL performance in Quake 3 and Enemy Territory on these boards roughly matches that of a comparably priced GeForce FX 5600.
Drivers haven't been tested, but LinuxHardware reports that Linux drivres will be available in Within the first quarter of next year. Let's just hope it doesn't suck suck and that there are some real perks of running an XGi over a GFFX5600.
It's because they have half of the RAM on the back of the cards as well, and since it's DDR2 (which, right now, is quite cheap since no one had really been using the stockpile that NVIDIA created with the NV30 because GDDR3 is on the horizon), it requires cooling on the RAM. NVIDIA is doing the same thing with their 5700 Ultra reference design. However, they have a rather small backplate. Pretty nice.
Looking at the Volari card now, it doesn't seem that much bigger than the 5700 Ultra engineering sample or the GF4 Ti4600 engineering sample I have sitting around. Engineering samples are generally 2-3 inches longer than their retail counterparts because of extra capacitors on the cards (why those capacitors are there, I don't know, but they most certainly are).
Ah, Tom's Hardware. Not trying to be negative, but IMHO, they are a terrible source for tech information, and the bulk of their reviews contain startling errors, conclusions that defy reason, glaring omissions, and sensationalized reporting.
The majority of those writing the reviews clearly have no idea what they are talking about, at least regarding the subject they are reporting on. Overall, I would rate them slightly above HotHardware.com.
Tom himself, as far as I can tell, is on the ball and knows his stuff VERY well, but he doesn't write articles much anymore, and obviously doesn't read them either.
It is a common practice among hardware enthusiasts to quote Tom's for the humor value, trying to see if the author of the latest article is even more clueless than he was in his (or her) last article.
To be fair, they do have some excellent articles occasionally, and were the first ones to dare publish information on Intel's unstable Pentium III 1.13GHz processor, but unfortunately these seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
Also, as has already been stated, XGI is hardly a new company. Of course, these bits of SiS and Trident are in completely new territory if they are trying to compete in the high-end gamer's market. Considering that this is their first real foray into that market, I think they have done an amazing job. I'd say give them the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise. Remember, even the (once) most respected companies in the field can faulter, and that XGI has something that is even in the same ballpark as the most seasoned of players is an impressive feat.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I'll say it because no one else will. Tom is an ass.
c eshardware.com
But more importantly his reviews suck! I haven't even looked at this one but i venture to guess it's at least 15 pages, milk that advertising cash cow, tom!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then you are one dumb mother fucker Tom.
Now for the informative part of by rant:
try www.hardocp.com
or
www.anandtech.com
or
www.a
all 100% better than tom's
Veramocor
I will never visit or recommend tomshardware again as long as they run ads for the Business Software Alliance.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
THG is a little off on the Latin:
1. Volatus means flight, not velocity
2. Volari appears to be closer to volare, meaning "to fly"
3. Velocity comes from the Latin velocitas (meaning quickness), which is derived from velox (meaning quick)
While the fact that the two stems (velo- and vol- for velox and volare) share initial consonants suggests that there is a relationship between these stems, this relationship is more likely to have arisen in some proto- or pre-Latin than Latin itself.
I am a PC game developer. We recently released a W32 game which uses OpenGL.
Some hardware companies were especially responsive when we found driver bugs and in general were very helpful and an absolute pleasure to work with. nVidia's developer relations team is head and shoulders above the rest.
Just about all others were very good. I don't think it would be fair to expect anything more than what all the rest gave. I'd put Matrox, Intel, ATI, 3Dlabs, and S3 in this category.
Then there was SiS and Trident. We experienced tremendous bugs with the Xabre. Numerous times I offered small code examples to reproduce these bugs. These are very big bugs; crashes if you use a 3d texture, crashes if you use certain keywords in a vertex program, incorrect rendering of primitives, etc. It was around a year before we shipped I started to contact IHVs to ensure any bugs they had could be worked out. SiS and Trident didn't give a damn.
It is one thing to develop good hardware. That is 1/3 of the task. Companies have been doing that for years. Remember the g400? Great hardware, aweful drivers. The next 1/3 is making everything run correctly. ATI, which is pretty good these days, is still fixing bugs like flipped textures in Flight Sim 2004 (which would obviously affect other games, FS04 is just the first to expose it) in their latest drivers. How mature can we expect the drivers to be from a new company? Not too good, given no new company has done it first try and these do have a track record of being aweful.
The final 1/3 of the driver is to extract maximum performance. I'm not too worried about this unless it comes before the other more important parts as generally this is some form of cheating; or as Trident called it "application specific acceleration"
I truely pitty somebody who buys one of these cards because it gets the same 3dmark score as a GeForce or Radeon, but costs $10 less. There is more to a good card than the scores it gets in the most popular benchmarked games, it is more important that it runs all the games you want. The Xabre can't run FS2004, Splinter Cell, Homeworld2, etc. Atleast Intel's integrated graphics which may not be that quick do run everything reasonably well.
Please remember this when you recommend a system for a friend. Please insist they either spend the extra money for an nVidia or ATI product or simply get a card in their price range with less raw 3dmark performance from nVidia or ATI.
You get what you pay for when it comes to software support!
The 2nd highest card in this category is a FX 5950 ultra scoring 58.6 fps.
This is nvidia's top of the line card coupled with a p4 3.2 and it's just able to eek out the desirable 60 fps (What's with that game anyways, 60 is the goal for tv but in the 70's is more desirable on a pc.)
What I'm getting at is, is there something wrong with this picture that such a top of the line system is just making the performance equivlant of what an xbox is accomplishing with a launch title?
Yes, console makers can optimize their hardware more specifically geared towrards gaming and game developers can optimze and get more out of the hardware, but this is a launch title and would have learned more tricks with current titles.
> Slashdot (the biggest anti MS site) runs banners for MSDN subscriptions. Whats your point?
Feeding the trolls: Microsoft sells a product. It may be a crappy product that OEM's are strongarmed into reselling, but they're still a business. The BSA exists to shake companies down with license audits, and has jackbooted thugs literally break down doors to ensure compliance.
Slashdot is "anti-microsoft" insofar as there's a large and very vocal segment of its population consisting of semi-literate fanboys who have knee-jerk reactions to everything involving microsoft.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
More info on the Volari Duo straight from the XGI Homepage
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