X-bit labs

Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra Review: XGI Volari Family Coming to Graphics Market (page 8)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov , Tim Tscheblockov

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

Display Property menu allows adjusting the graphics card driver settings, which you can also access via the Display Properties – Advanced – Utility Manager:

From here you can control all the parameters of Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra, namely: gamma-correction of the image, overlay settings and displaying devices parameters.

3D Setting option is worth mentioning separately, because is contains three most interesting and important pages about the Dierct3D and OpenGL modes:

As you see, the card allows enabling FSAA up to 4x and anisotropic filtering also up to 4x. The latter was a bit disappointing for us, because all contemporary graphics accelerators have already learned to perform 8x and even 16x anisotropic filtering. However, we are going to talk more about it in the corresponding section of our article. Getting a little bit ahead of time, I would like to mention that we couldn’t enable anisotropic filtering as well as full-screen anti-aliasing at all with the older XGI Reactor 1.00.00 drivers. When we installed the latest XGI Reactor v1.01.51 drivers anisotropic filtering had finally appeared, but FSAA remained unavailable: none of the existing games reacted in any way to different positions of the slider responsible for the FSAA modes. We are absolutely sure that this issue will be eliminated with the time, and the new XGI Reactor versions will not suffer from it any more. As for the page responsible for clock frequencies, we have to confess that we didn’t try overclocking the card fearing that it will negatively tell on its “health condition”, because it already got extremely warm even at the nominal frequencies with the fans rotating at their maximum speed.

Testbed and Methods

Volari based graphics cards are still considered something exotic, they have just appeared in the market. Therefore, we decided to go deep into details with our piece, which we usually do with all new solutions that get into our lab. For multiple reasons we included into our comparative analysis high-end graphics cards, such as NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and ATI RADEON 9800 XT, alongside with mainstream ones, represented by ATI RADEON 9600 XT and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700/5600 Ultra.

Our testbed was configured as follows:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3400+  (2.20GHz, 1MB L2);
• Mainboard: ASUS K8V Deluxe;
• RAM: Corsair XMS PC3200 512MB (2x256MB, 2-3-3-6);
• HDD: Seagate 7200.7, Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer;
• Audio: Creative Sound Blaster Live!;
• Software: Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP1, DirectX 9.0b;
• Drivers:  XGI Reactor v1.01.510, ATI Catalyst 3.10, NVIDIA ForceWare 53.03.

All drivers are the latest official versions downloaded from the developers’ web-sites.