X-bit labs

Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra Review: XGI Volari Family Coming to Graphics Market (page 14)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov , Tim Tscheblockov

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

Bump Mapping, etc.

Now we are going to run a few other benchmarks from 3DMark2001 SE and 3DMark03 test packages:

Volari Duo cannot cope well with EMBM bump mapping, too. To be more exact, it cannot cope with it at all: 26.7fps in 1600x1200 is an indisputable failure. And we see a 500-dollar graphics card perform like that! Is it another consequence of the low texture caching efficiency?

Dot3 bump mapping finally gives us a break: Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra performs not bad here, although it is still behind RADEON 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

Point Sprites test is actually none other but a test of vertex processors efficiency and fillrate. Remembering the previous results we expected Volari Duo V8 Ultra to suffer a total fiasco here, too. However, the situation didn’t turn dramatic this time, and the card worked pretty fast, although only in 1024x768. After that it yielded to everyone except RADEON 9600 XT. I would blame not very efficient work with the memory here. Maybe two 128bit buses do not work as fast as 256bit buses of RADEON 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. Or maybe the relatively narrow bus between the two chips with the bandwidth of a little bit more than 2GB/s limits the performance.

The results in Ragtroll test prove our supposition about architectural inefficiency of Volari Duo V8 Ultra, and once again indicate how slow its vertex processors are. Even the availability of two VPUs as well as DDR-II memory working at 450MHz (900MHz) doesn’t help here. All in all, Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra performed far from acceptably: it managed to compete only with a morally and technically outdated GeForce FX 5600 Ultra and sometimes with newer mainstream solutions, such as GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and RADEON 9600 XT.