Taiwanese graphics upstart XGI said that its dual graphics processor Volari architecture will be available on December 8th.

The firm, which previewed its architecture at last September's Computex, claims that its Volari Duo systems will nearly double the performance of what it describes as "traditional" GPU technology.

Read more: The Inquirer (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12972).

When SiS released the Xabre, their drivers allready offered dodgy image quality but it seems since they've been renamed to XGI, they learnt a few tricks from the heavyweights in this category.

The drivers for their Volari cards are filled with hard-coded optimisations for a large range of benchmarks & games ( those used as benchmarks of course ).

The xrvkp.sys file contained in the drivers had the following references in it :

3DMARK03.EXE; 3DMARK2001SE.EXE; 3DMARK2001.EXE; AQUAMARK.EXE; C4DEMO.EXE; GMMARK2.EXE; MAXPAYNE.EXE; BENCHMARK.EXE; UT2003.EXE; BEND3DIM.EXE; MADDEN04.EXE; HALO.EXE; 3DNASYS.EXE; CODECREATURES BENCHMARK PRO.EXE; CODECREATURES; SERIOUSSAM.EXE; SPLINTERCELL.EXE; C4.EXE; TRAOD.EXE; TRAOD_P3.EXE; TRAOD_P4.EXE; GIANTS.EXE; SEP.EXE; CLIENT.EXE; DFBHD.EXE; TOEE.EXE; MAJESTICCHESS.EXE; AOWSM.EXE; MGS2; SR2.EXE; F1_2001.exe; SPEEDDEMO.EXE; BF1942.EXE; X2-DEMO.EXE; XIII.EXE; FFXIWINBENCH.EXE; SIMCITY4.exe; GAME.DAT; WAR3.EXE; SM.EXE; FREELANCER.EXE; NR2003DEMO.EXE; FS9.EXE; DCT2.EXE; HCT.EXE.

Renaming the executables before running them didn't result in any performance difference. But if you were to modify this file & remove the references, the results are pretty explicit.

A few examples :

1. 3Dmark03 Mother nature scene goes from 20.6 fps to 8.8 fps
2. UT2003 Botmatch goes from 88.2 fps ŕ to 18.7 fps !!!

Halo looks really bad, to the point where it looks like it's running in 640*480 even when 1024*768 is selected. & for some reason it won't let a screenshot be taken either.:rolleyes:

We can certainly say thet VGA market has a new "player".:dead:

Info take from Hardware.fr (http://www.hardware.fr/news/lire/18-12-2003/#6233)

Two screenshots illustrating the differences ( Click images for full res screenshots ) :

With original drivers

http://www.hardware.fr/medias/photos_news/00/07/IMG0007313.jpg (http://www.hardware.fr/medias/photos_news/00/07/IMG0007313_1.jpg)

With modified drivers

http://www.hardware.fr/medias/photos_news/00/07/IMG0007314.jpg (http://www.hardware.fr/medias/photos_news/00/07/IMG0007314_1.jpg)

Even a dead bat could see the difference...:dead:

English (http://216.239.39.104/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&langpair=fr%7Cen&u=http://www.hardware.fr/news/lire/18-12-2003/%236233&prev=/language_tools) version of Didou's link
I would certainly say they are coming along, looks like they have more than a few things to work out before they can compete, but they seem like they are heading in the right direction despite a few fairly large speedbumps.

Two articles from XBitlabs on the issue :

XGI to Deploy Application Specific Optimizations? (http://usads.vibrantmedia.com/system/ExternalAdServeRedirect.asp?cbid=15708&size=468x60&type=html&time=1330632091)

XGI Denies Application Specific Optimizations (http://usads.vibrantmedia.com/system/ExternalAdServeRedirect.asp?cbid=15708&size=468x60&type=html&time=1033496400)

“The .exe files listed in xrvkp.sys are only for developers’ analysis during beginning of the developing cycle. We left the file names in xrvkp.sys and have not removed since then. We will take more intensive care to avoid confusion in the future and will fix that in the next driver release,” commented Chris Lin of XGI.

:rolleyes: