Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
thats pretty nice, hope they bring down prices... looks like their best will be priced at around $300. if it isn't a total flop, ATI and nvidia might face some competition. i'd sure like to get a high performance card for 300 or 350, and a nice midrange for around 100... we'll see. maybe a midrange card on sale might even go for $70. i've seen some 5600s @ $90, it could go down more
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)
Did Slashdot just discover Tom's Hardware this week?
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!
It helps if your competitors don't sue you out of business like Creative did to Aureal.
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.
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!
WOW!!
but - wait a minute - guess I'll wait for the Volari Quattro Triplex V12 Turbo GTI XXL
_ThAT'll be a nice graphics card!
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
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?
external video bridge chip SIS301 MV, which is also responsible for the TV output
:)
Competition is good!
Why oh why do companies insist on using SiS's chips for TV out! It's horrible!! VIA used them on the Epia boards, and it stinks! Great little boards don't get me wrong, but it's TV out is nasty. Now these guys. Will the pain never end??!
[/sis rant]
But good luck to them
I personally agree with you here, no matter what slight advantange ATI cards currently get in the latest benchmarks, NVidia's drivers are simply better, more stable, etc.
I expect Nvidia and ATI to leapfrog back and forth with their latest cards stealing the benchmark king title from eachother, but I don't expect ATI to ever make drivers I like as much as Nvidia, so I will continue to buy Nvidia's cards.
Morphing Software
IMHO, don't expect a miracle. Don't forget, long-standing, legitimate graphics card makers (such as Matrox, or years ago - Hercules) all tried to get into the high-end 3D type accelerator card market and failed miserably. Even lately, you hear some rumbling coming from Matrox every once in a while about some new "killer 3D card", and it always turns out to effectively mean nothing.
ATI and nVidia being the only 2 real competitors in the 3D gaming card market isn't such a horrible thing. (Yes, things would be MUCH worse if we only had ONE major player.) As long as there are two, it keeps innovation and competition alive between them - and it reduces the support headaches for software developers.
It wasn't THAT long ago, you almost had to select your 3D card purchase based on how much you liked the "special edition" titles bundled in the box - because you never knew how many future games would actually be written to support the thing! (I recall buying a Matrox Mystique like this, for example. It came with a Mystique-accelerated version of MechWarrior and a few other decent games - but I barely found anything else that supported it afterwards.)
The old line about "too many cooks spoiling the soup" holds true for too many competing brands on the video card marketplace, too.
anyone knows about linux drivers???
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
Of course he knows it runs IRIX...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You would think, until "Card X" comes along and only implements 95% of DirectX 9.0, but claims they implemented it all, and some certain feature used by only a couple games decides to make those games randomly crash, but only on "Card X"
Matrox and S3 cards always seemed to work like that to me in the past.
Morphing Software
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.
Interesting that if you look at the graphs, the blue line doesn't appear to do that well (mid-table stuff) but reading the text, it's currently only running at 450MHz not the specced 500MHz and with beta-level drivers.
:-)
Multiply its figures by (at least) 500/450 and they look a lot better - normally just (really just, indistinguishably so) behind the leaders...
Cheaper, huh ? About time too
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I keep on having flashbacks of Ricardo Montablan (of 'Fantasy Island' fame, as well as his role as Khan in Star Trek) singing 'Volare' on a TV commercial in the mid-1970s for the Chrysler/Plymouth car of the same name.
It was a big honking V8 that they made in woody wagon versions as well. My idiot parents bought one. Yeesh.
Anyway, the benchmarks on this card suck ass. The card is dead last in most things, and when it isn't, it has quality issues. I am not seeing a first generation winner here. I hope they don't fold up after this iteration of their cards.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
They should be named EGI, not XGI... I'm automatically boycotting them for using that marketing cliche "eXtreme." If I had a gun with one bullet and could kill anyone I could, it would be the first ad wizard who thought of using that buzzword.
What was the athlon64 fiasco? I must've blinked.
Inconceivable!
From the review I think their benchmarks are great. For a first card to be scoring so highly against Nvidia and ATI is pretty amazing.
This should realy hot things up in the GPU market.... cheaper faster cards!
Ive run ATI's 9800 All In Wonder and have no trouble *at all* with drivers or stability.
While people have reportedly had problems in the past, Ive got to tell you, there is *nothing* wron w/ ATI.
... and looked at the results, some were abysmal. Yes, this is still a ref. board, but it seems to run a game great for the price, or horrible for the price. Wolf ET is based on the Quake3 engine, yet Q3 is dramatically higher than Wolf ET (this card came in LAST place in Wolf ET), and this is wiht games based on the same engine. Sorry, I would rather shell out 175$ for a car that will consistantly perform decent across the whole spectrum, than pay 300$ for a card that is sometimes great and sometimes sucks.
Correct, but idiots will still be spewing the "ATI has driver problems" myth for years to come.
The unofficial
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/
Let me know when the Type-R model is available though.
Linux or Windows?
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 agree. I've used ATI cards for about 5 to 6 years now. I've had 3 cards, and they've all run great, never had a problem. Some people just get an idea in their head and they refuse to believe otherwise.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
The problem is that the emphasis on games as entertainment, as opposed to games as technology, brings lots of teenagers to Slashdot. It's their chance to hassle adults without paying a price.
Some of those teenagers get moderation points and they moderate comments they don't understand, and flood Slashdot with garbage.
The thing is, to get these marks you either cheat, or are an idiot savant, or effectively a genius. Now you put all these people in the same room, what do you get? Superior products? No.
You get ego clashes, clueless idiots, hangers-on and cheaters who couldn't design a 10ms monostable with a 555 and a book from Radio Shack. NO real-world experience, NO real skills whatsoever.
The Matrox you see today is due to universities run wild and employers being blinded by them.
Just another example of the irrelevance of university to real-world problems.
XGI is a new player in this market and need something to distinguish themselves from the competition. This is an opportunity to persuade them that supporting Linux by releasing drivers would gain them positive reviews and have an impact on sales. Linux is gaining in popularity in the enterprise and server areas, so announcing Linux support for their products would sort of *legitimize* XGI's cards. It's worth a shot--the question is, how do we convince them?
>> They only do for their latest and greatest
>> cards.
The unified drivers support just about all the nVidia home graphics cards, not just the new ones!
>> The damn thing *still* won't let me use the
>> tv out on the card by way of drivers, I
Then perhaps you shouldn't have bought a card that adds it's own TV in instead of using the nVidia reference design.
Au contraire! You forget that those were the days of the API wars, before DirectX on windows and before cards could really do a full OpenGL implementation (hurrah for game engine specific ICDs, heh)
These days, everyone writes to DirectX, period. Whether they use Direct3D or OpenGL is irrelevant, they all use DirectInput, Directsound, so on and so forth.
This of course means that a graphics card maker need only supply DirectX and OpenGL support and users can run their games on the card. Granted - card specific paths are often optimized for speed, but the games will run.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The textures are washed out and lack detail. Some rendering is wrong. The "dual chip" version is always displaying a frame behind. But it has a really l33t FPS rate on Quake.
The good news: a new, cheaper GFX company bursts on to the scene to challenge Ati and Nvidia dominance.
The bad news: the cards suck ass.
So basically, nothing has changed since you woke up this morning.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
A new graphics company enters the game...yawn. They sure have no aces up their sleeves. They could though, if they had used a parallelizable engine (tile rendering, for some), and they could just add more processors as new models are requested by the market. They could also make cards upgradable.
I have a Toshiba Satellite 1800-100 with Ali all in Wonder chipsep=> Trident accelerator runnning Slaskware. Never had any problems setting up X, or at least problems coming from the Trident card. The only major issue was with wrong screen refresh rates detected by default, which doesn't allow to use the optimal resolution, but it can be rapidly fixed.
Anyway, my point was: Sure, Trident cards should not even have the right to be called Graphic Accelerators, but hell I don't see what your problem with X11 is???? It's up and running and it feels pretty smooth.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
You should get an account so I can befriend you.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
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.
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...
Everyone seems to forget the mid 90's when this upstart video company developed a chip called the NV1 it was sold as the Edge3d card here in the states. In comparison with the voodoo it was total crap but the company kept plugging away and now Nvidia is a household name. This new video company could help aleviate the stranglehold that Nvidia and Ati have on the market and could mean more reasonable prices for all. I dont know about you but I still feel weird paying more for my video card than my processor and motherboard.
An excellent point,
..
why not email them ?
developer@xgitech.com
other contact details here.
XGI Contact Details
I just popped an email off! Anyone else care to join the vigil?
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
This could end up a neato little model
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
AMD has helped prices in the processor market for years but there has not really been a player willing to wage a price war in the graphics card market. Now maybe those 500 dollars cards will come down a bit.
The texturing problems were due to not all the filtering modes being implemented, and the other glitches were reported and are being worked on
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
So you say your tv out doens't work with the nvidia drivers. Well use the drivers that came from the company who made your card. They will work fine. Stop whining..
Hugely entertaining posts. Enormous mod-point wasting antics ahoy! To all you trolls out there: keep modding up one another's dodgy pic links, so we can laugh as losers visit them!
It's simple: make sure that the card is well-supported with decent drivers, and you have a sale!
Ignore suport for Linux... and you're not even on the radar for me.
This is the company who (some years ago, I will admit) produced a card, promising OpenGL capability on the box. Did it work? Afraid not. But their website promised that OpenGL would be enabled in an upcoming driver release.
Meanwhile, those of us who bought the card got to enjoy the great 2D quality (what is it about 3D card manufacturers, that they can make a 3D card with a jillionbamillion triangles per second, but they can't get a nice sharp 2D image?) as well as a nice RCA out.
Also keep in mind that the drivers for this card could only be described as "sloppy" and "buggy as hell". When was the last time you saw a video driver installation that created 6 different directories during setup? Apps over here, DLLs over there, more DLLs in there...
Mind you, ATI has had driver issues as recently as 2001, but I digress.
Eventually, after checking the ATI site on a weekly basis for a month or so, they basically said "sorry, we were mistaken about that whole OpenGL thing, buy this card instead, it has some OpenGL features."
Do I sound bitter? Let's just say I haven't forgotten about that mess. It's been years now, so perhaps it's time for me to give them another chance... but I'd never say that ATI having (or having had) buggy drivers is just a myth.
Spelling, grammar, punctuation? We need something that checks logic.
The quake3 page shows something interesting, but look at the scores on the ET page. It comes in dead last by a long shot. Looks roughly to be in GF3 range. That's kinda typical for most minority GPU vendors I've seen over the years. They can usually come close to matching entry level cards and a benchmark or two but fall down miserably on the vast majority of benchmarks. Think Kyro etc.
Also these "3rd party" GPU vendors tend to not have the resources to implement truly state of the art functions. So while their may be some PR on advanced Pixel Shader support I'd be surprised if they can ever pull it off. I know I mentioned Kyro already, but I can just see the same thing happening. Poor performance was blamed on drivers, but then in the end we learned that the card just wasn't that good and no amount of driver tweaking could make up for its architectural flaws.
I do welcome another player, but I'm sure not holding my breath that they will be able to compete on a technical level with the big boys. In most cases consumers will still be better off buying the previous generation of GPU's from established vendors who have all their kinks worked out and have proven that they will be around long term.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Slashdot (the biggest anti MS site) runs banners for MSDN subscriptions. Whats your point?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Yeah, sorta like the "AMD's can cook eggs" thing. Heh. Intel's new chip beats the pants off of AMD's in terms of heat.
While one can play games on a Matrox, they were NEVER the best for any 3D games, so I wouldn't use gaming performance as a reason that they are going "down the tubes". While games are a significant part of the graphic card segment, they are hardly the only part, and because the company really doesn't compete in games doesn't mean they don't have a strong market niche.
For everything else that isn't 3D gaming, I've found Matrox cards to do plenty well and they did everything I wanted, plus a few things their competitors didn't do at all.
They do have some specialized cards too, such as four-head and a card with outputs designed for 12 megapixel displays. They also have some heavy duty cards designed for professional real time multi-stream video editing.
My SIS 650-based laptop (specifically a Acer TravelMate 270) struggles to even play Quake II at a decent fps.
Probably because it is missing stuff like GL_SGIS_MULTITEXTURE.
http://www.hex-tech.co.uk/egg.asp
But you CAN cook an egg on an Athlon XP! This person did it!
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!
I use Matrox cards and will continue to do so for any new boxes. The 2D quality of Matrox cards is *still* better than Nvidia and ATI. I will happily concede that for 3D, Matrox do not make competitive cards, but I don't run any 3D applications on my PC. For 3D, I've got a PS2.
It's all to do with finding the right tool for the job. I've yet to see a decent web browser / email client / nntp client / terminal that requires fast 3D graphics. YMMV.
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.
To aid the memory-impaired readers of slashdot, dupe articles should be clearly labelled. I think this icon would be appropriate:
The parent post is great!
It's a perfect satire of the extremely rabid open source nuts. (No offence is intended against the non-rabid open source nuts..)
Go here to create your own Slashdot dis
Tom's wasn't the only site to do this, but they compared the actually released Athlon64 to a hastily repackaged Xeon (the "P4EE") which wouldn't ship for another 2 months, and declared Intel the winner! AND, all the benchmarks were in 32 bit!
tcboo
I don't see any NVIDIA influence in XGI's logo, but would you deny that the XGI logo resembles the Cingular logo, except pixelized and painted green?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If they support open source Linux drivers and they work even moderately well, I'll replace all my cards and buy a dozen (I'm not kidding). I'm really tired of the hassles resulting from nVidia and ATI's binary-only drivers.
What? I've never had a buggy Matrox product, but I've also never owned one of their Parhelia products. Millennium, Mistique, G200/G400... All were excellent products.
I've ALWYAYS had severe problems with all S3 problems. From PCI bus hogging with ViRGE chips, to more PCI bus problems with Savage2000, especially when using a bitdepth over 16 BPP (Windows or Linux).
I've not had any problems with my Matrox, ATI, or PowerVR Kyro series products. All have been great cards on both Windows and Linux.
Does anyone with a clue agree with this quote? I know its relative, but $300 for one component of a gaming system is hardly inexpensive by any means.
I guess I miss the day where $200 would get you the best. (tnt2 ultra $199)
I like seeing new competition in this business, but I really wish that PowerVR had some new products on the way. Things were really promising with the Kyro series cards, but then ST closed their graphics division, ending any new licensing with PowerVR. I love my Kyro 2. Drivers are excellent on Windows and Linux, but sadly it's getting to a point where new games won't run too well with a GF2-class chip. It's still hanging in there though. I just jope that we'll see some of PowerVR series 5 soon.
More info on the Volari Duo straight from the XGI Homepage
Take off every 'sig'!
All your 'sig' are belong to us!
I had a Voodoo5 and a GF3-ti500 both the hottest cards out at the time. The Voodoo5 with only 2 CPU's kept up almost every game. But after the drivers stopped from 3DFX, you had to move to different hardware.
:
I'm sorry, but this is really walking very close to the Troll Line(tm).
The Voodoo5 was released around August 2000 while The GeForce3-Ti was released around October 2001. (ref: here)
As a matter of fact their was an entire generation of nNvidia cards in between the GeForce2 and GeForce2 GTS.
Let me quote what is said on this page about the speed you're claim of comparable speed between the two
During the following four months the Voodoo5 5500 proved to have the second best performance available, squeezing in between the Radeon and a GeForce2 GTS.
And do note that, this is only compared to a GeForce2-GTS not even a GeForce3 or a GeForce3-Ti
Also as a side note it's interresting to read back on the site that I've linked about the fact that nVidia, ATI and 3dFX where never really alone in the 3D market. PowerVR had an almost good successful prodect with it's KyroII line and SiS has always been pretty good in the the on-board/cheap-ass-but-works-ok line.
Murphy(c)
Ahh.. I probably should have clarified that I was talking about the long, long ago graphics market where people were going from ISA video cards to VL Bus cards.. PCI hadn't really made it's first splash yet..
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I concur. I wish more people understood the value of freedom (in its own terms and in terms of its practical impact--getting a new version of the Linux kernal and still be able to use the driver, being able to share the code with your friends and neighbors without legal problems, being able to inspect the code so you can be sure it's not doing anything bad) and demanded that from vendors.
I'm happy to work with commercial interests that help the Free Software community, and I'm happy to recommend them on-air too (I'm host of "Digital Citizen"--alternate Wednesdays, 8-10 PM).
Digital Citizen
Considering the company is dedicated to this chip, however, and not just licensing it (Hercules made the card, the chip was made by PowerVR), they may actually be a serious contender. Having been a previous owner of a Trident card (which was very good at the time; this was way back before 3dfx), and since they had historically focused on OEM sales, we *could* have a third option thrown into the fray.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Or maybe nobodies mentioned this yet, but the article mentions all the problems with using multiple GPU's on an AGP bus, it just doesn't work right without some sort of kludge.
What about PCI express? 2004 is supposed to be the year of PCI express's birth, and AGP's death. Does PCI express have a radically different setup that allows it to handle multiple chips in a SLI configuration better?
You could have referenced this set of graphs instead, just to provide a different point of view. Your post didn't save me that much time because I had to go back and look at all the graphs to find out that you referenced one of the worst. Too bad you didn't take the time to read about the beta part, and glad you are so loyal to ATI & nVidia because after all they are good cards. Ever since everybody woke up this morning, nothing has changed with bad /. posts.
I remember that. I hate Creative for that. They hit Aureal with eroneous lawsuits, none of which they won. All the while developers and, stores steered clear of Aureal because of Creative's accusations. When Aureals money ran dry, Creative came to the 'rescue' bought them and ripped the company apart. I haven't bought a creative card since the Awe64 gold. On my lastest PC I proudly own a Nvidia Soundstorm sound processor integrated on the motherboard. Nvidia announced they are intending to sell this as a stand alone product so Creative better watch out!
that article I linked to, I think they got some things confused because they said Nvidia bought Aureal but I remember the news from back then that Creative bought them out. A quick search on google confirms this
http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2000/9/22-165
http://www.inetria.com/hardware.shtml
A search using the terms "aureal buys creative" on google does not return any positive results.
Both the games I currently play have problems with ATI drivers. NWN and Etherlords 2 both have sections on bugs in ATI drivers and what to do about them (often nothing can be done until ATI works with the publisher to fix the problems). These are not the only games that have ATI problems either.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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...
Yeah, it did before Direct3D. Why all those assholes couldn't just implement OpenGL (or parts of it) is beyond me. The sad thing is, if 3DFX had done MiniGL instead of GLIDE from the beginning, we probably wouldn't have to suffer with the craptacular nature of Direct3D today.
We have unified 3D APIs for a reason, and that reason is to avoid specific hardware-accelerated games. Now the market can handle as many graphics cards manufacturers as people have money to support.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
but hell I don't see what your problem with X11 is????
I'm sorry you don't use Linux for anything more than 2D graphics. I use it for everything.
I also have a Toshiba Satellite running Slackware. Works just fine until it crashes trying to play a video. Never have this problem on any desktop system using any video cards from Nvidia, Matrox or ATI.
So I just won't be buying another Toshiba or Trident anytime soon. If they want my money they'll figure it out.
I second that motion.
I whole heartedly agree because I've dealt with too many of these egotistical smarty-pants from prestigious universities. They would rather sit in a meeting and argue about the proper definition of a simple word than to move on and actually get something done.
Hey! Don't be knocking aalib! Ascii porn is one of the greatest things ever!
-"It seems like you're trying to exploit a security hole. Would you like help?"
Sure, my friend with a GeForce Pro was jealous of how good Unreal Tournament looked on my Voodoo 3 2000 PCI, but it was useless with D3D. In the early days of 3D cards programmers would have to write separate drivers for the each family of graphics cards. Glide was the last vendor-specific API. The Voodoo 5 was stilborn because it was a Glide/OpenGL card released while everyone else was converging on D3D/DirectX. That and the OEM/STB sh*t.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Ah yes, the "classic" Diamond cards - I guess you're talking about their old ISA, VLB & early PCI cards? Tseng Labs (and later S3) based, they seemed to pull some nasty hardware tricks with the reference designs to tweak a bit more speed out of them - then cover up the bugs with some of the crappiest drivers ever devised.
Funnily enough, if you just fell back & used the chipset reference drivers, the bugs were less obnoxious. And there were a few hacks around - Diamond seemed to pull most of their nasty tricks in the area of memory timings (defaults loaded from the board BIOS), so there were a few programs to set them back to something sane. I remember hacking some of these into the OS/2 drivers for one of these chipsets (W32?).
I just turned 'round from my desk, picked up an old Stealth32 box off the floor, and found it still had the card inside. I guess the reason it's still there is I couldn't bring myself to give it away, even to somebody I didn't like. Now I've touched it, I feel all dirty now...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
CPU String: Intel Pentium(R) processor with MMX :D
:)
CPU Speed: 234 MHz
Number of CPUs: 1
Family: 5
Model: 4
Stepping: 3
But I must say that I respect you, Sir.. for it is the "My old keyboard got dirty, so I got a new one." crowd that drives the tech economy!
Just imagine the horror if everybody still used their IBM Model-M*!
- Children would no longer be able to spell words at the dumpheap with the found keycaps
- soils across the world would lessen in chemical content, lowering the energy output of the potato battery
- 10% of staff at recyling stations would have to find a new job, and a new source for their solder-fumes addiction
But, most important of all..
You would be unable to hit a single button that would open up your mail editor and start a blank e-mail.
Ah yes, the things we do for convenience
On a more serious note, keycap wear&tear is an important factor in determining keyboard usage statistics. For example, did you know that the left alt key is generally pressed in a bottom-right to top-left motion ? Or that the right half of the space bar is used twice as much as the left side for right-handed persons, and the other way around for left-handed ?
A software programme analyzing just the texts typed doesn't provide this valuable** information, and watching / videotaping a person type for months at end is prohibitive. Keycap wear analysis is faster, cheaper, and more accurate!
* http://www.modelm.org/mboard.html
** http://www.logickeyboard.com/
In Australia at least, the Unis have to compete with the tech schools for more and more students, since the Unis are getting less and less funding.
Fact: Unis need funding. That means students. That means relevant, useful courses.
Universities are educational institutions. That doesn't mean they can't be relevant. I'm doing a Micro-EE degree, and whilst there is a fair amount of "fairy" theory stuff I doubt I'll use every day (EG. Control systems theory, Finite Element/Difference Method modeling algorithms), the degree I'm doing is considered the most "practical" and useful in the state. In fact, next semester I'm starting a semester of "industry placement" where we do the equivilent of our final year project/thesis at an actual company who gives us the design task.
As an undergrad with one more year of my 4 year EE degree, it would appear to me that the Job market wants experience. With the electronics industry in Australia going backwards at an alarming rate (there's what, 4 export quality PCB fabs left?) the job oppurtunities for a graduate with no practical design skills looks pretty grim.
- Paul
So would all the other teenagers out there. Trust me, when you reach 30, you'll look back and think "God, I was an idiot!"
:-)
It's OK, though, from what I hear when you reach 50 you look back at your 30s and say "God, I was an idiot!"
Perhaps achieving enlightenment is coincidental with thinking "I am an idiot"
I tried to submit this as a news story a few times a few weeks ago, and it was rejected. Regardless, I have to point out: Bitboys HAVE PRODUCED a product, and we should stop making fun of them on the front page. It is the first graphics chip to do actual curve rendering, supposedly. Check out their product page here:
http://www.acceleon.com/
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Trying to use the cards with OS/2 was when I discovered that they sucked when they didn't have their Windows drivers behind them.
bleah!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
The only bug I know of is that the G400 reportedly does not support VESA 2.0 *in hardware*, but rather relies on the driver for that, and only has hardware support for VESA 1.2. I use a DOS game engine that knows the difference, which is the only reason it concerns me. Also, I've found some older linux disties won't work if the video card doesn't have VESA 2.0 *in hardware*.
Otherwise -- I've been buying Matrox Millennium G200 cards off Ebay and off the used table at swapmeets, and have stopped worrying about which submodel I'm getting, being there are several (or even whether there's a seller warranty) -- they all work fine, no problems whatever with any of them, in any environment. They aren't terribly fussy about having the "exactly correct" driver, either -- any G200 driver seems to work well enough for any G200 card.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Then why is a bachelor's REQUIRED for almost ANY job these days? Why is the human resources person who sits in at interviews and nods NEED A FOUR YEAR DEGREE FOR THAT?
Because employers can afford to be picky. The job market sucks for individuals. It is flooded with candidates. They're using the "degree required" as a way to filter them down. Years of experience are required for almost any job these days too. Back in the dot-com days, you didn't need either. Maybe in the next few years you'll start to see requirements loosen up.
Because university is a self-perpetuating scam, a cult and the biggest fraud and threat to the western world.
Have you ever attended a university?
While we have to put off our lives longer and longer to get more and more papers, other societies are busy at work kicking our asses.
Who are these societies? When I was at the U, more than half of the people in the graduate CS program were Indians. In the CS undergrad program I personnally knew a Brit and a German, and our program isn't that big. 4 of the dept's 9 profs were Asian immigrants (ie, they had PhDs). And it was some no-name state university.
The only link I see on that page is the one about using the clock chip off a motherboard. Are you in the process of updating it or something?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Tell you what, describe to me what the problem is with the tv out. If you've tried "everything" known to man, your video card is probably broken though, and no driver will fix it. In any case, you can't blame nvidia for your problem, they only deal with oems. If you had an XYZ cell phone, and it didn't work, would you take it apart, and call up the company who made the chips? No, you would go to the company who made the phone and sold it to you
Hmm... Well, I haven't actually tried one out but reading about it on matrox own site it says that it is supposed to drive one 22" LCD screen at 3840 x 2400 using two LFH-60 (that is two dual DVI connections = four DVI channels) for the same screen.
Take a look here
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Hmm.. insmod mga_vid ?
/usr/lib/mplayer/vidix/mga_vid.so /usr/lib/mplayer/vidix/mga_vid.so /usr/lib/mplayer/vidix/mga_vid.so: ELF file /usr/lib/mplayer/vidix/mga_vid.so not a relocatable object
---
root@gaia linux # insmod mga_vid
insmod: mga_vid: no module by that name found
root@gaia linux # locate mga_vid
root@gaia linux # insmod
---
I would wery much be able to. Neither do the kernel sources have any clue to whether there is a mga_vid.o (?) anywhere.
So where can I find this mysterious mga_vid module?
- Voice of Ambience -
A newline bug seemed to interveen my post.
/usr/lib/mplayer/vidix/mga_vid.so
/usr/lib/mplayer/vidix/mga_vid.so
/usr/lib/mplayer/vidix/mga_vid.so: ELF file /usr/lib/mplayer/vidix/mga_vid.so not a relocatable object
couple of br-tags should take care of it, I'll cut'n'paste again:
root@gaia linux # insmod mga_vid
insmod: mga_vid: no module by that name found
root@gaia linux # locate mga_vid
root@gaia linux # insmod
- Voice of Ambience -