X-bit labs

X-bit Labs CeBIT Hannover 2004 Coverage: Part 2 (page 3)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/22/2004 | 11:01 PM ]

XGI Technology: New Graphics Architecture in Late 2004

Despite of a not very successful enter into the graphics market, XGI Technology is quite optimistic about the future.

The company is now providing its graphics cards to various game developers so to make sure there are no problems with upcoming titles on Volari-based graphics cards. Additionally, its engineering team is constantly growing and we can expect higher quality drivers and more efficient hardware going forward. For instance, already in a number of weeks from now XGI plans to enable anisotropic filtering – a feature that has been disabled on SiS Xabre and XGI Volari graphics processors.

Sometime in mid-year XGI is expected to release its graphics solutions for PCI Express x16 bus. Just like NVIDIA, XGI is using a special chip to bridge its AGP graphics processors with PCI Express x16 bus. There are already prototypes of such cards, though, I am not sure whether they are capable of working or not.

Native PCI Express solution is only expected to emerge along with the new architecture from XGI. The company’s upcoming graphics processors scheduled for late year release will not be a refresh for the Volari, but something totally new. We should probably anticipate that the product code-named XG45 will deliver what every new graphics processor is supposed to, e.g. speed improvements, feature-set improvements, etc.

EPoX: PCI Express Ready, nForce3 Ultra Steady

EPoX has a nice booth with quite a lot of interesting products inside. Basically speaking, PCI Express, DDR2 as well as new chipsets and platforms for Intel Pentium 4 and AMD64 processors are probably the major topics to cover about this spring’s mainboards.

Unfortunately, it really looks like Intel and VIA are a bit behind their schedules with PCI Express and DDR2 chipsets, there are very few companies at the show to demonstrate a lot of products with both technologies. For instance, the only Grantsdale-G solution EPoX has is EP-5EPA2+ mainboard with Socket T, four 204-pin DDR2 slots, PEG x16 slot, two PCI Express x1 slots and a lot of additional features, such as RAID. The platform is supposed to be available in very late April, although May is probably a more likely timeframe for the part.

As for Socket 939 mainboards, there are only a couple of them at the booth as well – EP-9VDA+ and EP-9NDA+ fueled by VIA’s K8T800 Pro and NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra. In fact, there will be three nForce3 products coming out this Spring: nForce3 250, nForce3 250Gb and nForce3 Ultra. The nForce3 250-series, according to EPoX, do not sport 1000MHz HyperTransport bus and thus is not the best solution for Socket 939 mainboards for sure. Specifically for the upcoming AMD64 processors NVIDIA has nForce3 Ultra chipset capable of handling AMD’s new chips properly with 1000MHz bus.