XGI Volari V8 Ultra

And those all-important performance results from the V8 Ultra initially aren't too encouraging, as performance is a long way below ATi and nVidia's current mid-range parts. In 3DMark2001 SE, the V8 could only manage 4,153 at 1,280 x 1,024 with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering on maximum, as opposed to the 5,743 of an ATi Radeon 9600 XT or 5,831 of an nVidia FX 5700 Ultra (see issue 111, p73). Testing DirectX 9 abilities by isolating 3DMark03's Mother Nature test, the V8 pulled in only 12.1fps against the 18.5fps and 16.6fps of ATi and nVidia respectively. It did pull ahead in Unreal Tournament with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering on maximum, but these results aren't directly comparable, since the card can currently only manage a maximum of 4x anisotropic filtering, as opposed to the 8x of ATi and nVidia.

The major factor to consider when looking at these results is that they were obtained using first-generation drivers. The ability of drivers to affect overall performance is huge, so future revisions could see XGI begin to close the gap. XGI's predictions for the performance of the Duo are encouraging, though, as the company claims a boost of around 60 per cent over the V8 Ultra. If true, that would see the Duo pulling ahead in most tests. The company has a newer version of the V8 on the way, sporting DDR2 RAM: when it arrives later this year, the hardware itself will be faster and the drivers may be more mature. A lot depends on pricing of course, but when we spoke to XGI it quoted approximate prices for the V8 in excess of what you'd expect to pay for a 9600 XT or FX 5700 Ultra.

While its claims of a graphics revolution are a severe overstatement, XGI has got off to a moderately good start: coming from absolutely nowhere and producing performance that isn't utterly dire is to be applauded. If we were ATi or nVidia, we wouldn't be losing a massive amount of sleep, but we'd certainly be keeping a close eye on the young pretenders to the graphics throne.

Author: David Fearon