X-bit labs

Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra Review: XGI Volari Family Coming to Graphics Market (page 30)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov , Tim Tscheblockov

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

The fourth gaming test brings another devastating failure. On the one hand, the results shown by Volari Duo V8 Ultra are not that bad, but on the other hand, the price we pay for this performance is unacceptable.

Conclusion

This is very sad news, but having tested Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra we arrived at the conclusion that this product hardly has any chance in the today’s market.

Club3D did everything they could to make the new product as attractive as possible for the end-user. And we should admit that they really did a great job on that. The card looks very impressive and aristocratic. However, it is not only the exterior that you usually value about the graphics card. It is not for nothing that you prefer performance and good image quality to the nice looks and PCB design. Unfortunately, XGI can’t boast much here.

The current XGI Reactor driver version ensures the performance level comparable to that of the mainstream solutions from ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corporation, however, it sacrifices image quality for the sake of extra fps. Note that we revealed not only texturing quality problems, but also problems with the lighting, problems resulting from the attempts to speed the solution up by rendering in lower resolutions and then enlarging the image to the necessary dimensions, problems with “fake” anisotropic filtering.

XGI didn’t have any pains of conscience when they introduced “driver optimizations” for specific games and test applications. Moreover, it was done so crudely, that it immediately caught our eye. We could not only see the file names in one of the files included with the XGI Reactor drivers, but also the image quality got so much worse that it simply couldn’t remain unnoticed.