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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.'"
Yeah, looks great and you have hype on your side, but can we make it a goal to stay in business for more than 3 months so I can get drivers for it 3 years down the line?
Well if they provide good support for X and OpenGL and maybe even with open source drivers, I'll be buying one instead of that NVidia I was planning to get soon.
I remember when Nvidia came into big production, and a lot of us Voodoo owners were skeptical at first that anyone could oppose the great Voodoo cards from 3dfx (the same cardies that revolutionized how we all play Quake). Smart business policy, quality hardware and lots of blood, sweat and tears have pushed Nvidia to where it is today. As a gamer, I welcome any new blood to the table, because it just means that the race for the mother of all graphics suites is getting that much more interesting... and the road is shorter when the competition is fierce!
:)
Competition is the mother of invention, if necessity can't possibly be.
Seems that XGI is going after some odd designs, using the fabled 3dfx dual chip design as a way to get more bang for the buck. It's not a solution, as Tom's Hardware reveals that this results in more problems. The problem? Half-norm memory usage. *ouch*!
Still, this is the first line for XGI. I'm sure we'll see a lot more from them, if they don't go broke.
The most difficult thing is to release good drivers. Until then, I will wait to see how they really perform.
And that is all I really wanted to hear. Thank goodness they won't be a fly-by-night company. This is a very welcome addition to the market. Lets also hope that they either make linux drivers or open the arch so developers can do so.
The great thing about new companies with financial legs to stand on is that they can learn from the mistakes of others without having to make them themselves as well as learn from the things done right by other companies.
I for one welcome our future (their mission statement is to be #1 by 2007) GPU overlords!
I don't foresee this going very well for XGI. Firstly, look at the cards. Dual chips, non-shared memory? 256 megs on the card, only 128 available because the chips can't share. "Wasting" 128 megs might be acceptable, considering the card is still pretty cheap, but how about when high-end cards start coming with 512 MB or more? If XGI start putting 1024 MB of memory on their cards they are going to see any advantages their cards may have in pricing go bye-bye pretty quickly. Remember, going for quantity rather than quality was what killed 3dfx. How quickly some people forget :)
Second problem is that due to the size of the card, it's not gonna fit in smaller form-factor PC's. Why they put such a huge HS on the back of the card, where there's usually not much space, versus just putting more cooling on the front of the card, where high-end users (of nVidia cards, anyway) are already accustomed to leaving a PCI slot open to make room, is beyond me.
Those two big fans they've stuck on their reference board sure aren't going help keep noise levels down, either. My (reference) Radeon 9800 Pro still beats the crap out of most cards on the market today, and it's only got a small HSF for the chipset and nothing on the memory chips. And I was still able to OC it quite a bit. If nVidia's and XGI's chips really require as much cooling as manufacturers stick on them, even on "reference" boards, they must be very inefficient chips indeed. These things aside, it's always nice to see more competition in the graphics chipset business, hopefully prices might come down a bit as a result if ATi and/or nVidia see XGI as a real contenter, rather than a wannabe like Matrox (though I don't know if they're even at the "wannabe" level any longer, considering how poor their chips are nowadays).
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
this is different from ati how?
Card not supported? Isn't that what an API like Directx is for, so that developers don't have to write support for the cards directly into their games?
A long, long time ago, in a graphics market far, far away, S3 used to have some pretty awesome chips and drivers. I used to say "poo" on the S3 stuff, after exeperiencing several Diamond manufactured S3 based cards that were piles of crap, with drivers that absolutely sucked for anything but Windows - the Windows drivers got around all the bugs of the cards, whereas the drivers for all other OS's were just reference drivers, and illuminated hundreds of issues with the hardware.
Then, I discovered, upon using a couple of computers that had reference boards, rather than Diamond-enhanced boards.. that the reference boards, with the reference drivers were an order of magnitude better, faster, more stable, than what I had believed from teh Diamond junk.
Just because XGI is a "new player" (with experienced hands) and the beta card sucks and the beta drivers suck.. doesn't mean that they can't make quality out of it.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
If you buy bleeding edge cards, as I did when the Radeon 8500 was new you can expect problems.
I bought mine the day it came out and was unhappy with it for at least 4 driver revisions.
This includes WHQL certified and the betas. Before Catalyst came out.
I wouldn't necessarily apply this to ATI driver writers though, I mean, how many service packs and hotfixes do you have to apply to Windows before you're happy with it, if ever?
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
No denying that Taiwan is HUGE, but why is this an of course?
Let's look at the other main graphics card companies--Nvidia, ATI, Matrox.
Nvidia--California based.
ATI--Canada based.
Matrox--Canada based.
Now, if we were talking motherboard manufacturers, things might be different...
For analog video (CRTs) Matrox has always been the best as far as image quality.
ATI and nVidia (traditionally) had horrible video quality (blurry edges, ghosted edges due to ringing, etc)
Awhile back, I helped a friend of mine upgraded his video card to gain dual display. The first thing we tried (his first choice) was some type of GeForce4 card - it worked, and ran games plenty fast, but the image quality was not really that great particularly for high resolution desktops (Dual 19" Sony CRTs) and the cooling fan had a really annoying tone.
Just for curiosity, we went back to the store and picked up an ATI Radeon (9500 Pro I believe.) The video quality for high resolution desktop was vastly superior to the nVidia card. Not only that, but the ATI card actually supported higher display resolutions than the nVidia! (I think the nVidia maxed out around 1600 where the ATI went up to something like 1920 and could drive both monitors at the highest supported resolution!) Games seemed to play equally well on the ATI card and the cooling fan wasnt so annoying.
He ended up returning the nVidia and keeping the ATI.
Now, for DVI output (to LCD displays) this is theoretically not a problem. With DVI the signal from the video card to the LCD is digital and you shouldn't have problems with blurry edges or ringing like you get when driving a CRT from a video card with crappy analog VGA outputs. So if you plan to use DVI, this comparison doesn't really apply to your application.
Personally, I still use an old Matrox card to drive a 21" Sony CRT but if I were to upgrade, I would choose ATI based on the above experience.
Employers like me because I actually can use my skills to build something, not just repeat stuff I heard in school like a parrot without understanding.
Well someone with a U degree woudln't repeat stuff from school anyway. At a real university they don't teach many directly applicable things anyway. They're not supposed to. That's what tech schools are for, and maybe that's what you're thinking of...