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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)
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!
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
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)'
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.
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/
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
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?
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.
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!
VA Linux! Biggest IPO of all time. Granted they are bankrupt now, but that's beside the point, no really - it's beside the point.