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airspirit · 09-26-2003, 10:08 AM

There is a new player in the graphics card market: XGI. They are a spinoff of SiS, and have purchased a couple of other research labs. They will be coming out with a new line of graphics cards in early November called "Volari".

What interests me are the specs on the highest end cards such as the Volari Duo V8 Ultra (mouthful). It is a SMP graphics card that assigns 256MB of DDR-II memory per core (and requires two 12V connectors!!!). Every other frame of rendering is done on every other core, meaning that each core has half the workload of other cards, and due to their SMP implementation they are currently only showing 30% loss over perfect 200% SMP core performance (very impressive).

Currently on pre-beta drivers and sample hardware they are pulling 5633 3DMarks03. I have a feeling, however, that due to the way the SMP performance is implemented (and not accurately measured in synthetic benchmarks) that the actual performance comparison to the Radeon 9800 Pro (its only real competition ATM) may put it well ahead, especially considering that their drivers are extremely immature at this point.

What are your guys' thoughts?

09-26-2003, 10:08 AM	#1
airspirit Been /.'d... have you? Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Moscow, ID Posts: 1,986	XGI ... is anyone else intrigued? There is a new player in the graphics card market: XGI. They are a spinoff of SiS, and have purchased a couple of other research labs. They will be coming out with a new line of graphics cards in early November called "Volari". What interests me are the specs on the highest end cards such as the Volari Duo V8 Ultra (mouthful). It is a SMP graphics card that assigns 256MB of DDR-II memory per core (and requires two 12V connectors!!!). Every other frame of rendering is done on every other core, meaning that each core has half the workload of other cards, and due to their SMP implementation they are currently only showing 30% loss over perfect 200% SMP core performance (very impressive). Currently on pre-beta drivers and sample hardware they are pulling 5633 3DMarks03. I have a feeling, however, that due to the way the SMP performance is implemented (and not accurately measured in synthetic benchmarks) that the actual performance comparison to the Radeon 9800 Pro (its only real competition ATM) may put it well ahead, especially considering that their drivers are extremely immature at this point. What are your guys' thoughts? __________________ #!/bin/sh {who;} {last;} {pause;} {grep;} {touch;} {unzip;} mount /dev/girl -t {wet;} {fsck;} {fsck;} {fsck;} {fsck;} echo yes yes yes {yes;} umount {/dev/girl;zip;} rm -rf {wet.spot;} {sleep;} finger: permission denied