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.'"

Comments

Variety, Nvidia and 3dfx

[dolo666]

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.

Drivers

[Indio_do_Xingu]

The most difficult thing is to release good drivers. Until then, I will wait to see how they really perform.

Relief thy name is XGI

[Chris_Stankowitz]

From the article: Of course, there are no official comments on who is pulling the strings, but it seems clear that XGI is on solid financial ground.

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!

Going from the beginning to where nVidia failed

[W2k]

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).

Re:XGI = SIS + Trident

[XO]

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.