XGI Volari V8 Duo 256 DDR II a flyer

SINCE I MISSED Computex earlier this year, I've been wondering what to expect from XGI's dual head cards. Many picture with 3dmark03 results came from that show and from late September we all have been avid to see how the technology will actually perform.

The first preview was done by out friend Lars over at The Pabster place and the card didn't look to good due to many problems with beta drivers.

In mid-December things have got much better for XGI as it was able to hand deliver one of the cards for a very limited amount of time but still enough for us to form our impressions with the spanking new drivers.

XGI comes from a former part of SIS graphics department famous for its Xabre cards and Trident -- a long time graphics player that it acquired recently. The boffins put two and two together and started XGI and decided on the Volari brand for the current generation of cards.

XGI now counts 280 employees, most of them in Taiwan while the ex-Trident part is based in USA. XGI dared to go into the dark depths of dual chip configuration, famous because of the Voodoo 5 generation of cards and the not so famous ATI Rage Fury MAXX card. Both of them were unique since they had two chips on board making them a Rabelaisian like dual headed beast. XGI's goal was to make a good high end card to be able to be more competitive in other market segments and to be mentioned side by side with ATI and Nvidia. The Volari chip is made on UMC's 0.13µ (micron) marchitecture because of a strong connection between XGI, SIS and UMC. The chip, at its highest implementation, works at 350 MHz.

On the card that we tested XGI used DDR II memory running at 450 times two, 900MHz just like a high end Nvidia card except that Graphzilla uses DDR I not 2. Nvidia as you might remember didn't felt good last year this time with DDR II chips clocked to an astonishing 1000 MHz but still made its peace with DDR II that it uses in the FX 5700 Ultra, its mainstream part.

Two chips at 350 MHz with 900 MHz memory sounds good I must admit but two times 350 is not 700 MHz of performance but might be a good boost up from a single 350 MHz chip. The card is equipped with 256 MB of DDR II and can use DDR I as well clocked to 375 MHz or more while the card can address 512MB of memory totally. Volari is a DirectX 9 chip with Pixel and Vertex shader 2.0 and each chip has eight pipelines. Since the Duo card that we tested have two chips we are talking about two times eight pipelines, sixteen all together making it, specification-wise the most advanced card on the market.

The Volari Duo card has four vertex shader units two on each chip, while it has eight pixel shader 2.0 units - four on each chip. The original chip design was to focus more on fixed functions then on shaders. Second display is drive through SIS's own XV301 chip that Xabre cards used for this purpose.

XGI holds some interesting Voodoo like patents in order to make this beast run. The second very relevant thing is that the driver has to run two chips at once.

XGI calls this marchitecture Bit Fluent Protocol. The first chip renders the first frame while second chip renders second theoretically giving this card very big boost.

The card uses two Molex cables in order to work properly meaning that these chips consume quite a lot of power. The card doesn't work if you forgot to plug one of them in. When you turn your machine and consequently your card on you can hear two not so quiet coolers that are far less noisier then NV30 but louder then the current Nvidia and ATI high end cards. The coolers are equipped with eye pleasing blue light that will make your card attractive.

Performance
We tested on:

Athlon 64 3200+ clocked at 2000 MHz
EPoX 8HDA3+ K8T800 board
2x512 MB Corsair DDR 433 PC 3500 Memory at CL2
Maxtor 80 GB 2MB cache drive
Liteon 48x24x48 CD RW
Enhance 460W PSU
Akasa Athlon64 cooler in Intel box

We tested this card versus the fastest Radeon 9800XT from Power Color clocked at 412MHz core and 730MHz memory. This card is used just for reference as we expected it to beat Volari in most cases.

Our first impression was that the card, even with early drivers is quite stable, and it took quite some time until we froze our Windows. In Q3 card works just fine while Unreal Tournament 2003 in both tests works extremely well making this card fastest ever that we saw in Bot test, even faster then ATI and Nvidia high end Radeon 9800XT andFX5950 Ultra cards, believe it or not.

In 3dmark 03 you will get sufficient 4800 3dmarks while Radeon 9800XT scores about 5600in same test, Radeon 9800XT around 6500 and Geforce FX 5950 Ultra 6300 3dmarks. Only in theoretical test Volari beat ATI and Nvidia due to its 16 pipelines while it lost in all of the games.

In good old 3Dmark01 you will get very nice score of 16608 marks while the Nature test will get you only 65.7 FPS. ATI and Nvidia high end cards goes from 100 to 130 FPS easily on that test.

We could not resist testing FSAA 4X and Anisotropic filtering and we were surprised to learn that the card uses only 4X Anisotropic filtering while ATI high end cards can go up to 16. This was due to the original hardware design and cannot be changed we are told.

Serious Sam 2 - after one crash - worked but I was quite certain that image quality was not as high as on Nvidia and ATI cards and Volari was significantly slower then ATI and Nvidia but still with nice frame rates.

Aquamark3 is one more pleasant surprise since we're talking about a very complex game with lot of DirectX 9 feature inside. The 45.17 is more then just a good result for this card. XGI performance in some cases and lack of it in other scenarios leaves us puzzled.

Unreal Tournament 2003 beat ATI Radeon 9800XT in bot mode and we believe that UT 2003 might just love the 16 pipelines that Volari provides.

I tested FSAA and Anisotropic filtering settings in OpenGL based Serious Sam 2 where I noticed that there were not any performance penalties when using FSAA with Aniso or FSAA alone. I didn't have time for detailed investigation.

The first problem that we saw was an unplayable frame rate in Microsoft Halo DX9 game, while benchmark was running more or less fine with only one texture artifact that I noticed. I learned that Volari was quite slow when motion blur was used.

A similar problem occurred in Max Payne 2 with difference that you could play it with great frame rates but in the INQUIRER Max Payne test that has lots of motion blur usage we could get card to freeze Windows quite easily. XGI is working on these problems and their resolution as we speak. Due to limited time I could not run some of the popular games on the card but hope that I will be able to report to you about this in future. Driver doesn't have WHQL so far but XGI said it will get it shortly.

A good start
XGI has definitely impressed us with its first card. It's not the fastest or greatest on the market but its damn good for the first card and don't let me start with Bosnian saying that includes throwing the first kittens in the river. I didn't expect to beat FX 5950 Ultra or Radeon 9800XT but it was not far away in some cases. It's all about the drivers and I believe that many applications will benefit from new drivers that will keep coming from XGI place in next weeks.

Volari Duo Cards with Club 3D sticker are already available and their SRP, Suggested retail price is acceptable at €375. If you don't want Nvidia and ATI and still want respectably fast card you can go for XGI. I still believe that it will take some time till XGI drivers grow up as you cannot make good driver overnight.

As a piace of hardware, card looks good with its blue coolers that hide two chips.

The next XGI high end should be announced at Computex so middle next year that should be in hard competition with NV40 and Loki R420 cards. XGI is definitely on the way to becoming a serious graphics competitor. µ

3Dmark 2001SE Nature	Nature	1024x768
XGI Volari V8 Duo 2 x 350 MHz / 450 MHz	65,7	16608
Power color Radeon 9800XT 412 / 730 MHz	132.4	20137
UT 2003 FLY	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
XGI Volari V8 Duo 2 x 350 MHz / 450 MHz	207	145.8	110.7
Power color Radeon 9800XT 412 / 730 MHz	260.8	215.4	147.3
UT 2003 BOT	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
XGI Volari V8 Duo 2 x 350 MHz / 450 MHz	114.4	100.3	97.7
Power color Radeon 9800XT 412 / 730 MHz	94.5	98.3	92.7
Serious Sam 2	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
XGI Volari V8 Duo 2 x 350 MHz / 450 MHz	88.1	61.4	49.6
Power color Radeon 9800XT 412 / 730 MHz	144	111.7	82.8
Serious Sam 2 FSAA 4X + Aniso 4X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
XGI Volari V8 Duo 2 x 350 MHz / 450 MHz	65.2	39.0	30.1
Power color Radeon 9800XT 412 / 730 MHz	123	86.4	63.6
Halo PS 2.0 benchmark	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
XGI Volari V8 Duo 2 x 350 MHz / 450 MHz	25 .51	14.8	15.4
Power color Radeon 9800XT 412 / 730 MHz	41.9	37.7	27
Aquamark 3			1024x768
XGI Volari V8 Duo 2 x 350 MHz / 450 MHz			45.17
Power color Radeon 9800XT 412 / 730 MHz			46.2
Composite Figures 3Dmark03	3Dmark03	game 2	Game 3	Nature
XGI Volari V8 Duo 2 x 350 MHz / 450 MHz	4806	36.1	28.2	21.3
Power color Radeon 9800XT 412 / 730 MHz	6233	45.6	36.1	36.1
Composite Figures 3Dmark03	Single Texturing	Multi Textur.	Vertex Shader	Pixel sharer 2.0
XGI Volari V8 Duo 2 x 350 MHz / 450 MHz	2176.3	2421.6	16.4	17.3
Power color Radeon 9800XT 412 / 730 MHz z	1507.1	3302.2	20.4	50.9