XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra : First review

Posted on Monday, November 03 2003 @ 17:36 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
XGI recently announced their Volari 3D cards. Many will find it interesting to see how XGI his dual core cards perform against ATi and NVIDIA his offers. Well the German Tecchannel is the first to put up a review of the XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra, XGI his top card. The expected price of this card will be 400EUR.

The XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra with 256 MB DDR2 is tested against the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and 5700 Ultra from NVIDIA and the RADEON 9800 XT and 9600 XT from ATi. With latest driver versions : ForceWare 52.16 for NVIDIA, Catalyst 3.8 for ATi and the XGI card worked with a beta driver dated 24.10.2003. An important concern is that this beta driver does not supports anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering. But in the final version these will be available. The tests were done on an Intel Canterwood system with a P4 3.2GHz and 2x256MB RAM (CL2) from Corsair. Another important notice : the DDR2 RAM of this prototype was running at 450MHz (900MHz DDR). The final card his memory will run at 500MHz (1000MHz).

  In 3DMark2001 SE the Volari Duo V8 Ultra card performs between the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. But the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and ATi Radeon 9800XT are clearly faster.

In 3DMark2003 it places itself between the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and the Radeon 9800 XT.

In Quake III arena we see exactly the same, the top Volari card performs between ATi and NVIDIA their mid-range and high-end range.

In AquaMark 3 it manages to get rather close to the performance of ATi and NVIDIA their high-end cards.



Unfortunately they haven't tested image quality.



Overall it from this early review we can draw the conclusion that XGI his top graphics card places itself somewhere between ATi and NVIDIA their mid-range and high-end segment. Considering that this card has two cores these results clearly show that at the moment XGI is lagging behind ATi and NVIDIA. It is still a prototype with beta drivers however, so the performance of the final cards will be higher.

Because it is ment as a high-end card it will not be able to compete price/performance wise with ATi and NVIDIA his offers I think. A price of 400EUR is simple too much considering you can get a Radeon 9800PRO for 360EUR. But it is still too early to draw too much conclusions from a card that isn't even officially out yet. We'll see within a few weeks how it really performs. I'm actually highly interested in seeing if XGI will be able to deliver good drivers for these cards, and also very important good image quality. Maybe we can expect a lot from this new Taiwanese company in future.



Source : Tecchannel (Google translation to English)


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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