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 à 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.
We can certainly say thet VGA market has a new "player".:dead:
Info take from
Hardware.fr