Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra Review: XGI Volari Family Coming to Graphics Market. Page 27
[01/15/2004 01:47 PM | Graphics]
by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov , Tim Tscheblockov
We have an exceptionally interesting guest today: a dual-chip XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra graphics card from Club 3D company. eXtreme Graphics Innovation is a new player on the highly competitive 3D graphics market, who decided to break and enter the scene with an expensive dual-GPU part. Historically graphics cards with two processors were able to demonstrate exceptional performance, but were quoted at a very high price-point. Dual-chip products on XGI Technology do not cost more than competitors’ single-chip offerings, but are they really fast in today’s games and have a bright future? Find it out with us!



In Aquamark3 the graphics card from Club3D performs not bad at all and gets close to RADEON 9800 PRO and GeForce FX 5900. Nevertheless, the first XGI Reactor driver version was optimized exactly for Aquamark3 test, besides others. The new version of the driver is free from any cheats: at least we didn’t see any performance changes after the aquamark.exe file had been renamed. For a more illustrative comparison the diagrams above also contain the results shown by Volari Duo with the old XGI Reactor driver and renamed aquamark.exe file.
Now let’s check the image quality in this test:
XGI (new driver) | XGI (old driver, renamed files, no cheats) | Reference |

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The problems with the texture level of detail and lighting are evident here. Unfortunately, XGI’s attempts to help its Volari run as fast as the competitors were either vain or required significant image quality losses.
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