X-bit labs

Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra Review: XGI Volari Family Coming to Graphics Market (page 23)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov , Tim Tscheblockov

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

In the screenshots with “optimizations” you can clearly see alternating strings: one string, then two same strings, then one string again and then two same strings again… This results from picture scaling along the vertical axis, when the picture was enlarged by 1.5 times. This way, it is evident that XGI did more than simple texturing optimizations. They even resorted to such a measure as building the scene in lower resolution first and enlarging it then to normal size. Having analyzed the resulting images we discovered that in HALO the resolution is reduced only along the vertical axis and only by 1.5 times. But it means that theoretically Volari can build an image in any “convenient” conditions and then enlarge it to normal dimensions. The visual evidence of this approach being use is dramatically broken polygon borders.

Please, welcome anti-Anti-Aliasing from XGI!

On the screenshots obtained without any optimizations on Volari’s part, everything looks OK, but the performance is simply unacceptable for comfortable gaming. Even to make these screenshots I had to make a lot of efforts, because the image was moving jerkily.

One more game, this time it is Splinter Cell, and another evidence proving unfair policies pursued by XGI, trying to increase the performance of its Volari solution by right or wrong. They didn’t even care about the image quality here. Look:

As you see, when we renamed the starting exe-file the image quality changed a lot. In particular, the lighting and textures got much clearer, the missing shadows returned to their places. However, the performance dropped down to unacceptable level.