Posted on Monday, September 15 2003 @ 15:59 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck| XGI, found in May 2003 today announced the Volari serie which contains seven new graphic cards. Three of them are for the mobile market, and four are for the desktop market. The aim of these new DirectX9 graphics cards is to compete with the offers of ATi and NVIDIA. They have announced Volari GPUs for four different markets : For the Enthusiast market they have the VolariDuo V8 Ultra and VolariDuo V5 Ultra. These cards will contain two GPUs, the cards will have 512MB RAM but only 256MB will be available to each GPU. For the High-end market they have the Volari V8 Ultra and Volari V8. For the mainstream the Volari V5 Ultra and the Volari V5. And for the mobile market they have three different versions of the Volari XP5. These graphics cards also have an unified driver called Reactor, just like NVIDIA and ATi have their Detonator and Catalyst drivers. |
 |
| Enthusiast | High-End | Mainstream | Mobile | ||||
| VolariDuo V8 Ultra (2GPU's) | VolariDuo V5 Ultra (2GPU's) | Volari V8 Ultra | Volari V8 | Volari V5 Ultra | Volari V5 | Volari XP5 | |
| Core clock | 350MHz | 350MHz | 350MHz | 300MHz | 350MHz | 300MHz | 250MHz |
| DDR2 Support | 500MHz | 500MHz | 500MHz | 450MHz | 500MHz | 400MHz | N/A |
| DDR Support | 375MHz+ | 375MHz+ | 375MHz+ | 325MHz | 375MHz+ | 325MHz | 250MHz |
| Max DRAM | 512MB | 512MB | 256MB | 256MB | 256MB | 256MB | 128MB |
| Pipelines | 16 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Vertex Shaders | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Pixel Shaders | 8 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Shader Ver. | 2.0 | 2.0 | 2.0 | 2.0 | 2.0 | 2.0 | 1.3 |
On paper it looks good, but I could not find anything about prices, expected release dates and benchmarks which compare the Volari's with Radeons/GeForces. So I'm a little bit sceptical about this..
More information about the Volari series can be found here, or a table which compares all of the Volari GPUs can be found here.
