SiS Xabre 400 GPU review

[marco]

VR-Zone has done up a review on the new ECS AG400 card based on the SiS Xabre 400 GPU.

"SiS Xabre 400 supports AGP 8X and DirectX 8.1 therefore it will make it a worthy competitor to the GF4 MX440 in terms of price and performance and even to the GF3 Ti200. The cool thing about ECS AG400 is that it offers 3DVR connector that allow 3D Glasses to be used to obtain 3D Effects during gaming. By turning on the Transparent mode offer as a feature by the Xabre 3DWizard tool, in games such as Quake 3 or Counterstrike, the walls are transparent therefore it is great news for Cheaters but bad for Gamers. "

You can read the review here (http://www.vr-zone.com/reviews/ECS/AG400/)

[Freon]

I still know people who refuse to buy Asus products because of their cheater drivers way back in the Geforce DDR days. This is a really stupid move.

I hope the anti-cheat detection programs just completely deny access anyone with a Xabre card installed. The manufacturers need to learn the lesson.

Other than that, its scores are very respectable.

[marco]

Yup a strange move, as we all know the greater part of the 3d community won't accept these features. Overall I'm surpised of this litte card. Not as fast as the marketeers from SiS promised in the beginning. It's good to see new contenders on the scene.

The supersampling AA move is also very nice, be it a little strange, as the card is not a real high performer, thus it will loose every benchmark with AntiAliasing on to almost any other card on the market.

Hopefully the drivers mature and we see some benchmarks of faster parts also, hopefully here at Beyond3D.com

[Teasy]

Wow, I'm really impressed with this board, it seems to have some really good bandwidth saving tech (from the villagemark tests) fast pixel shaders (compared to Geforce 3) and is generally a little faster then the Geforce 3 TI 200 and allot faster then the Geforce 4 MX 440 at the same price as the Geforce 4 MX 440. Very promising indeed, with more mature drivers it may even start to challenge the Geforce 3 TI 500, the Xabre 600 certainly will.

[Gollum]

I'm pretty sure they'll iron out the drivers over the months, current reviews already paint a better picture than the first previews concenring driver compatibility and performance. Performance and features are very sweet for the pricepoint too, so its an excellent product IMHO. :)

The See-thru modes leave a bitter aftertaste, I mean the gaming community fell into a pretty bad mood with the ASUS drivers, people would accuse any good legit players of cheating just for the heck of it, lets hope this won't happen again ... :(

[Anonymous]

I'm wondering if NVIDIA are starting to think GF4MX was a bit of a mistake:

http://www.reactorcritical.com/#l1174

It seems that popularity of Xabre graphics processors is increasing rapidly. Something similiar we have seen at Computex 2001 with KYRO family of graphics processors when loads of videocard manufacturers announced their solutions based on the new chips. Those boards never appeared in huge quantities.

During the week we have found out that ASUStek, Gainward and Chaintech decided to join the camp of the brave Xabre.

OCWorkBench has posted the photos of Xabre400 based videocard from ASUS, one of the best friends of NVidia, online. The boards seem to be ready for mass production and is equipped with VGA, DVI, TV-Out connectors with two simultaneous display support via SiS301 chip.

Our colleagues from Clubic have information regarding the low-end videocards from Chaintech. Apparently, 5 out of 7 are based on different versions of SiS Xabre GPU, the rest are powered by the GeForce4 MX graphics processor.

We have learned at Akiba that Gainward, known for its higher clocked GeForces, offers Xabre videoadapters in Asia.

Well, everything seems to be fine. But will SiS be able to develop good-enough drivers and supply their graphics chips in large quantities? We will wait and see.

ASUS have always been a massive stalwart of nvidia and its quite a move for them to move into making graphics cards based on non-nv chipsets as well.

[hughJ]

the anticheat movement is hard enough as it is without this kinda support by another mainstream company.. i hope they sink like a rock..

it's funny to see the PR that gets twisted into these things.. ya hear the reasoning how the added 'feature' gives you an edge over the competition, while the company's PR is forced to condemn online cheating at the same time so they don't look like total assholes..

at best this will get the gaming community talking about their new products, although in a negative light... I can't see how leaving a bad first impression is going to help at all.. it'll just taint whatever clean products they may happen to release in the future..