XGI Volari V8 Ultra review

For those of us getting a tad bored of the two-horse race that is the 3D graphics market at the moment, there may just be good news on the horizon. Not only has S3 announced its DeltaChrome and UniChrome graphics chipsets, but a brand-new company has now also leapt into the fray. XGI - the name stands for eXtreme Graphics Innovation, if you were wondering - is a mere slip of a company, founded in the middle of last year from the remnants of venerable graphics name Trident, acquired from SiS. And while S3 claims only 'solid' performance for DeltaChrome with its custom GPUs, XGI is making grand claims for its graphics prowess, sticking its neck out to the point of talking about 'blowing away 3D benchmark challenges'.

The company is producing both notebook chipsets and, more interestingly, desktop parts. There are three chipsets dubbed the V3, V5 and the top-end V8, with the V5 and V8 both coming in Ultra flavours. Right at the top of the tree is the Duo card, which, as the name suggests, sports dual GPUs. We got hold of a pre-production V8 Ultra for testing and managed a quick hour-long peek at an early Duo, but didn't get the chance for formal benchmarking.

When we first heard about the Duo, alarm bells started ringing. Those who remember ATi's response to nVidia's original GeForce processor will know why: the company threw brute force and fill rate at the problem to try to make up for the lack of hardware T&L (transform and lighting), producing the muscle-bound but ultimately ill-fated Rage Fury MAXX. But the Volari's GPUs are fully loaded as far as DirectX 9 feature compliance - which includes T&L - is concerned, so in theory you should get the best of both worlds. The dual GPUs and attendant heatsinks make this single- width card incredibly heavy, however, even when compared to the double-width GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. It also requires two 12V Molex power connectors to supply it with the 75W it needs.

Noise levels from the 5,000rpm-plus fan on the V8 Ultra are verging on unacceptable, with the same whooshing quality as nVidia's much-maligned and hastily replaced FX 5800 Ultra and accompanying FX Flow cooling system. The Duo was subjectively at a lower acoustic level than the FX 5800 Ultra, but still nudging the line of the threshold at which most people would find it too much of a distraction.

The V8 Ultra is fitted with 128MB of DDR RAM running at an effective 700MHz, with a the GPU core clock at 350MHz. Rather encouragingly, the drivers have frequency control for a bit of judicious tweaking, but we didn't have much success when it came to nudging the default settings any higher. Aside from 3D graphics bells and whistles, all the traditional 2D and ancillary features are included. The V8 has both DVI-I and analog D-SUB outputs, with support for dual display setups, as well as an S-Video port for the card's VIVO facilities.

These days, you can't produce a serious graphics card unless your drivers have an impressive-sounding name: nVidia has Detonator, while ATi has Catalyst. XGI has plumped for the name Reactor, with full support for OpenGL as well as DirectX 9. The memory-to-GPU bus architecture, dubbed, BroadBahn and makes use of compression techniques, with a compression ratio of up to 2:1 to increase data throughput. V Drive, which can be activated through the driver's Advanced settings tab, allegedly tweaks hardware settings on the fly for maximum performance. however, we found that activating it had no discernible effect when it came to playing games or running benchmarks.