X-bit labs

Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra Review: XGI Volari Family Coming to Graphics Market (page 12)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov , Tim Tscheblockov

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

The benchmark for version 1.1. pixel shaders from 3DMark 2001 SE test package again brings Club3D to the very last place. It is not too far behind GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, but the latter belongs to mainstream solutions, while XGI positions its Volari Duo V8 Ultra as a high-end one. As we see, the benchmark results do not prove this statement yet.

Pixel shaders version 1.4 are also far from being among the trumps of Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra. The card fell behind all its rivals and its results can only be compared with those of GeForce FX 5700 Ultra.

Pixel shaders 2.0. This is a total disaster for Volari Duo V8 Ultra. No more comments here.

Now let’s take a look at the results in ShaderMark 2.0.

At first ShaderMark gave out the same report as we acme across during our tests of GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and S3 DeltaChrome. Only the details were a little bit different this time:

Before the testing actually started, we had already understood that we will not see some shaders at least with this driver version. Here are the results we obtained in this test:

Well, this is a pretty curious picture, I should say. Volari Duo V8 Ultra is certainly not a RADEON 9800 XT, and even not a RADEON 9600 XT, but it is also not a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra: the newcomer doesn’t process the shaders fast enough to compete with the invincible ATI Technologies, but at the same time it is quite capable of competing with the mainstream NVIDIA solutions. However, this can hardly comfort us, as it is priced as a good high-end product. Besides, ShaderMark is actually almost the only pixel shader test, where Volari manages to get a little ahead of NVIDIA. I doubt that you will be willing to pay almost $500 just for the sake of learning yourself that a much less expensive RADEON 9600 XT or GeForce FX 5700 Ultra can offer you the same or even higher performance.

Anyway, the results shown by Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra are extremely low. In games using high-resolution textures, as well as in games with pixel shaders version 2.0 this solution will not grant you high level of performance.

Well, it is high time we tested the vertex processors and geometrical capabilities of the new XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra.