X-bit labs

Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra Review: XGI Volari Family Coming to Graphics Market (page 10)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov , Tim Tscheblockov

[ 01/15/2004 | 01:47 PM ]

But let’s return to our synthetic benchmarks:

Yeah, the fillrate of the newcomer is far from perfect. When there are no textures it can be compared to that of RADEON 9600 XT, however, as soon as we need to lay at least one texture the performance immediately falls down beyond all acceptable limits and stays there as the number of textures increases. We can’t explain this disaster by inefficient texturing algorithms and small texturing caches – the performance drop is too huge even compared with the results of the previous tests. Volari Duo looks OK when performing some operations with the Z buffer, but only against the background of mainstream solutions. Even the 16 pipelines do not help here, as their efficiency is pretty low, too.

Now we disable Z writes:

Nothing changes: the card still slows down when we have to process at least one texture. Now we enable Z writes, but disable color writes:

The situation here is surprisingly similar, even though all other testing participants run close to their theoretical performance having got rid of the texturing workload.

As we see, the TMU of Volari graphics chip can hardly be called efficient, which is the first big drawback of the new XGI solution.