Xabre400 review at Tbreak

[Blitzkrieg]

www.tbreak.com

doesnt look to good for SiS. Their Geforce4mx killer looks like a Geforce2 killer if its lucky.
Even if it is just really buggy drivers, I personally dont see a driver fix doubling their framerates in games to even get close to the 4mx

 

[Tagrineth]

As we mentioned earlier, this is an Engineering sample of the card and it did come with it's fair-share of problems. First of all, we could not get the card to work on the Iwill P4R533 motherboard which is an Intel 850E chipset board. However, the board did work on the SiS 645DX chipset reference board which is what we use to benchmark all the graphics cards. Even on this board we suffered quite a few crashes and we'll detail them through the benchmarks we conducted.

Another problem with the Xabre is it's AGP support. The card supports AGP 8X and while no motherboards currently support AGP 8X, there seems to be a compatibility problem with VIA and nForce chipsets. On these two particular chipsets, the Xabre can only run in 2X modes and SiS blames it on the bugs on these chipsets rather than its card. Unfortunately, these chipsets make up a lion's share of the AMD CPU market and something definitely needs to be done.

Before we proceed to the benchmarks, we would like to inform you that Triplex sent us a mail saying that the drivers included with the Engineering Sample will be greatly enhanced in the next few weeks. So again, keep in mind that the retail version will probably feature better performance.

First of all the Advanced Pixel Shader test crashes 3D Mark 2001SE on the Xabre 400 and SiS informed us that this is because of a bug in 3D Mark and that MadOnion should be releasing a fixed version in the next few weeks. This all the benchmarks were conducted without the Advanced Pixel Shader test. The performance does not seem very pleasing for the Xabre at this time, however, a graph on the packaging of this card shows 3D Mark scores for the Xabre to be higher than that of the MX440 and we're pretty sure that by the time this card hits retail, performance should be greatly enhanced. We also experienced a couple of crashes while running 3D Mark which again shows the need of some driver-fixing.

NOTE: DISABLING TESTS DOES NOT REMOVE THE WEIGHTING OF HARDWARE FEATURE SUPPORT

Again, we Xabre seems to be taking the back seat at all resolutions, however, we experienced no crashes which could be looked at as a good thing judging by the way things are going. Normally, we have some Anti-Aliasing benchmarks as well, however, we did not find any support for it in current drivers

Notice all the driver issues? ^_^;