by FastSite
01/12/2003 | 12:00 AM
Silicon Integrated Systems is mostly known for its excellent chipsets, but the company also produces graphics chips. Graphics chips from SiS always featured very moderate pricing, and also moderate performance. The company has been rapidly progressing, though. Soon after the launch of SiS315 (see our SiS315 Graphics Chip Review) there appeared a new graphics chip family aka SiS Xabre (see Xabre The Brave: New 3D Hero from SiS).<%BANNER[article]%>
These chips support DirectX 8.1, multi-display configurations, TV-Out… To cut it short, they have the entire range of features required in an up-to-date graphics card of the mainstream, rather than value level.
The announcement also disclosed the fact that Xabre is the name of a whole family of chips that are based on the same architecture, but have different performance and price:
These are not the all members of the Xabre family. The roadmap we saw at the time of Xabre400/200/80 announcement shows one more, and the fastest, of the Xabres: the Xabre600 that was going to enter the market a bit later:
Xabre600 hit the market in a much more discouraging situation than its predecessors. It's no secret that manufacturers of graphics chips and graphics cards make most money on mainstream and value solutions, which are mass products and are more popular than high-end expensive ones. The leaders in the gaming 3D chips field didn't waste their time and by the time Xabre600 arrived, there had appeared NVIDIA GeForce4MX440-8x and ATI RADEON9000/9000 PRO based cards targeted at the same price range. So, these graphics cards are the immediate rivals to SiS Xabre600.
Now, let's see what the fastest member of the brave Xabre family is like.
First of all, the SiS Xabre600 is made with a finer manufacturing technology than its predecessors. The transition to the 0.13micron tech process allowed to raise the frequencies above the planned 275MHz/300MHz (600MHz DDR). In the Xabre600 announcement (by the way, it's the first graphics chip to be manufactured with this technology) we read that its frequencies would be 300MHz/600Mhz (300MHz DDR). The clear minds of marketing men from SiS even coined a new word: "Duo300" that is supposed to reflect the power, which brings an imminent ruin to all the competitors.
The frequencies of the sample we had at our disposal are even higher: 315MHz/630MHz (315MHz DDR). We can't tell why they turned to be like that. Maybe all off-the-shelf cards based on SiS Xabre600 will have frequencies like that. But it also may be that the frequencies were only raised in samples, so that the Xabre600 could be in an advantageous position in benchmarks and during the comparison with competitors.
The press release dedicated to the launch of the Xabre600 graphics chip mentions some new features that are not present in other members of the family. So, Xabre600 features not only Pixelizer Engine, Frictionless Memory Control (FMC), Jitter Free Anti-Aliasing and MotionFixing Video processor, which are typical of the entire Xabre family, but also some features, which are supported only by Xabre600. Let's dwell upon the innovations:
Vertexlizer Engine is a "hardware optimized" technology that can split vertex processing work between the graphics chip and the CPU. This should lead to more effective vertex processing with less workload laid on the graphics chip.
In other words, vertex shaders are still executed by the software. The CPU calculates the transformations parameters, while the T&L unit of Xabre600 performs the actual vertex transformations. By the way, this technology is not a unique feature of the Xabre600. Our tests showed that it could be activated in Xabre400, too. All you need is to install Xminator II, the new driver from SiS that supports this optimization.
Xmart Technology is actually a combination of three "smart" technologies that increase Xabre600 efficiency in graphics applications:
So, let's examine the reference-card based on the SiS Xabre600 graphics chip. The graphics card is equipped with D-Sub, DVI-I and TV-Out connectors. By the current fashion, it's built on a black-lacquered PCB:
As you can see in the snapshot, the design of the Xabre600 based graphics card differs a lot from Xabre400 based ones. The first thing to catch our eye is the memory chips that are now in BGA packages. They are chips from Hynix with 2.8ns access time.
Under the cooler we found a new graphics chip from SiS: the Xabre600. Like Xabre400, it carries a metal shim to transfer heat from the die to the cooler:
The frequencies of the graphics core and graphics memory of the reference-card are 315MHz/630MHz (315MHz DDR) by default.
Although the graphics core frequency is rather high, its heat dissipation is low (the bottom of the card right under the graphics chip is just a bit warm to the touch when the card works). That's why the card features not a very big cooler:
As in Xabre400 based cards, the Xabre600 reference-card has a SiS301 companion chip onboard providing image output onto a secondary display device: a TV-set or a display with either digital or analogous interface:
The most interesting feature of the card is hardware monitoring implemented via a W83L785R chip from Winbond:
This chip keeps track of two temperature values (through thermal diodes), four voltages and also allows measuring and changing the rotation speeds of two fans.
By the way, in the snapshot of the fan installed on the SiS Xabre600 reference-card you can see a third wire, which transfers the signal from the rotation speed sensor.
So, the reference-card features hardware monitoring options, which are only typical of some "exclusive" graphics cards. It's rather nice. There is only one thing left: we should now check how well the software works with these options.
The Xminator driver set for graphics cards from SiS has grown to version 3.07 with the launch of the Xabre600 and is now called Xminator II. Let's find the differences and see what is good about the new drivers from SiS.
After we had plugged in SiS Xabre600 based card and installed the software from the CD, the Display Properties dialog box showed a new properties page:
This page in Xminator II v.3.07 doesn't differ from the same page in the first Xminator for the Xabre400. As there is nothing new here, let's take just a brief walk through the menu items:
Here you can adjust the color gamma of the output image. You can change the "gamma" level of every of the three color components independently as well as the overall Brightness, saturation (Enhance Color) and color balance (TINT).
This dialog box allows adjusting the overlays color gamma. In the preview window there is a test overlay, which of course didn't get onto the screen-shot: you see a pink box instead.
The Product and File Information page tells you that there is really a SiS Xabre600 based card installed in the system :), shows its revision number, clock-rates, memory type, driver version…:
…and also the version of each file from the SiS' driver set:
TV-Out and multi-display configurations can be set up in the Driver Mode Settings page:
Regrettably, unlike ATI and NVIDIA, SiS still doesn't want to place the most interesting things - the 3D settings of the card - in the Display Properties. There is a special utility for it: 3D Wizard, which you can start by clicking the icon next to the clock:
The drop-up menu lists all the items known since the times of SiS Xabre400 and there is nothing new except the item to run the 3D Wizard. This utility did change in Xminator II and became much more functional.
Let's run through the pages here as well:
The 3D Stereo name speaks for itself: here you can try to enable the stereoscopic mode.
Interesting, on marking the Enable Stereo button, the list of stereo modes available gets limited by one item only: "Shuttle class stereo (Wireless)". Since such glasses didn't come with the graphics card we received, we just couldn't test the Xabre600 in stereo modes.
In this page you can set non-nominal clock-rates for the graphics card. It's pleasant that SiS doesn't hide overclocking options like NVIDIA and ATI do. Of course, it's no great task to overclock cards based on graphics chips from ATI or NVIDIA with the help of third-party utilities, but it's really nice when the manufacturer himself makes overclocking easy with a "native" utility.
The "D3D" page allows configuring Xabre600 for work in Direct3D. The "Performance - Quality" slide-bar has three positions and controls texturing quality. When it's in "Performance" or middle (let's call it "Normal") positions, the TexTurboMode=3 is turned on. It provides highest texturing speed at minimum quality. (More details on turbo-texturing modes by SiS Xabre and the image quality in each of them are available in our SiS Xabre400 Review).
In the TexTurboMode=3 Xabre600 uses a horribly-looking approximation with a fewer texture samples instead of bi-linear filtering. Tri-linear filtering is not performed in this mode at all.
In the "Quality" position, the TexTurboMode=1 is enabled, where both bi-linear and tri-linear filtering are performed all right, but the textures level of detail (LOD) is much lower than the default LOD by the graphics chip from ATI and NVIDIA.
It's characteristic that the TexTurboMode=0 mode is not available at all. In this mode the chip from SiS provides about the same texturing quality as graphics chips from ATI and NVIDIA, but such "honest" and correct texture rendering results in a big performance drop.
This page also features the "Performance - Quality" slide-bar and full-screen anti-aliasing options.
The FSAA by SiS Xabre is implemented as supersampling and, as such, simply kills the card's performance. That's why we didn't test Xabre600 with enabled anti-aliasing.
Well, there are a number of games that don't demand much from the graphics card in terms of performance. So, even the slow anti-aliasing from Xabre can be of some value in such a game.
This page serves to set up the XmartVision mode and activate XmartDrive. XmartVision automatically "raises" the color gamma in games, when it considers the gamma to be too dark to play comfortably. The XmartDrive technology automatically reduces the graphics core and memory frequencies when there are no 3D applications running and the maximum performance is not necessary.
Overall, the 3D Wizard utility from the Xminator II driver set has become much more useful. But it still lacks a lot.
For example, there are no pages dedicated to hardware monitoring. As we have already said, these options are implemented in Xabre600 on the hardware level, but Xminator II seems to know nothing about them. It's a pity.
It is interesting that 3D Wizard has now lost the opportunity to enable "semi-transparent" and "wireframe" modes in 3D applications. Did SiS software guys simply consider these options unnecessary or was it the "gaming community" that protested against this kind of "cheating"?
Our testbed was configured as follows:
We used the following software:
We used the following settings for our benchmarks:
3DMark 2001 SE:
We set 32bit frame buffer; 32bit textures, 32bit (24bit) Z-buffer, D3D Pure Hardware T&L.
For High Polygon Count and Vertex Shader Speed tests: 640x480, 16bit textures, 16bit frame buffer, 16bit Z-buffer.
For Fill Rate tests: 1024x768, 32bit frame buffer / 32bit textures / 24bit Z-buffer and 16bit frame buffer / 16bit textures / 16bit Z-buffer.
For all synthetic 3DMark2001 SE tests we set the image quality to Normal in SiS Xabre600/Xabre400 drivers.
Quake3 Arena:
32bit screen and textures color depth. Maximum graphics quality settings. Tri-linear filtering and texture compression enabled.
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter:
We ran the tests in Normal mode: 32bit screen color depth. "Normal" graphics quality settings.
Unreal Tournament 2003 v.2107:
We tested with default settings.
In gaming tests the SiS Xabre600 based graphics card was tested in three modes: Performance, Normal and Quality. SiS Xabre400 based card was tested in Normal mode.
Let's start with testing the polygon processing speed:
SiS Xabre600, as well as Xabre400, shows excellent results. In case of one light source they lose only to NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x, while in case of eight light sources the graphics chips from SiS are much faster than the competitors.
Xabre600 and Xabre400 perform T&L functions at the hardware level. It's proven by the fact that the use of a much faster Pentium 4 2800MHz instead of Pentium 4 1600MHz hardly told on their results.
Vertexlizer Engine, one of the strong points of Xabre600, is nothing more but software optimization of calculations with the help of the CPU. The test results bear the evidence.
Xabre600, as well as Xabre400 working at lower frequencies, and even NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x, which differs from the by the absence of hardware vertex shaders processing unit, - they all show similar results. And these results are quite naturally determined by the CPU performance, not by the graphics chip vertex pipeline performance.
The graphics cards based on ATI RADEON 9000/9000 PRO chips have hardware vertex shaders support, so they run faster than other cards. Nevertheless, the high performance of Intel Pentium 4 2800MHz CPU helps the cards with no such support to catch up with the cards that have it.
The specialists from SiS must have been referring to this situation when they were talking about the absence of vertex shaders support in Xabre600, as about an advantage. A powerful CPU together with optimized drivers (Vertexlizer Engine) can bring Xabre600 to the level of graphics cards with fully-fledged vertex shaders support.
The texturing speed test brings no surprises. Xabre600 outperforms Xabre400 by a value corresponding to the difference in their working frequencies.
On the whole, the results of SiS Xabre600, one of the most well-armed chips of all present judging by the specs, are a bit disappointing. Although it has the highest working frequencies (315Mhz chip and 630MHz (315MHz DDR) memory), four pixel pipelines with two texturing units per each and 128bit DDR SDRAM memory bus, it's only a little ahead of ATI RADEON 9000 PRO, which has 275MHz chip and 550MHz (275MHz DDR) memory frequencies and four pixel pipelines with one texturing unit per each.
Regrettably, we have no miracle here and the release of Xminator II driver set didn't allow Xabre600/Xabre400 to become an equally powerful competitor to ATI RADEON 9000/9000 PRO.
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x has no hardware pixel shaders support and thus was not included into this test.
In the Advanced Pixel Shader test, both Xabre solutions have to build-up the scene in two steps as they don't have vertex shaders v.1.4 support, unlike ATI RADEON 9000/9000 PRO. So they lose even more here.
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x has no hardware pixel shaders support and thus was not included into this test, too.
The gaming scenes from 3DMark 2001 SE come first. They were run in "Low Detail" modes. This is more appropriate for graphics cards of the Xabre600 class as "High Detail" mode loads the card much more and, what's more important, makes the results more CPU-dependent.
The graphics chips from SiS feel at ease in Car Chase: they outperform the rivals in any mode ("Quality", "Normal" or "Performance") and with the both CPUs: Intel Pentium 4 1600MHz and 2800MHz.
Anyway, the texturing quality provided by Xabre600 is lower than that provided by any other tested graphics card, although in the "quality" mode this chip performs "honest" bi-linear filtering, at least. 3DMark 2001 SE tests don't use tri-linear filtering so there is no significant performance drop by Xabre600 in the "Quality" mode, which might have been expected.
This test also depends a lot on the CPU speed. The test includes some elements of randomness and true physical models transformation. This, and not the Vertexlizer Engine, is exactly the reason why Xabre600/400 worked faster in the 600x800 resolution on transition to the more powerful CPU. The insufficient performance of Pentium 4 1600MHz had been limiting the results, while Pentium 4 2800MHz allowed the graphics chips from SiS to show their best.
In Dragothic Xabre600's superiority is no longer as indisputable as in Car Chase. Nevertheless, while Xabre400 was the slowest in 1024x768 and 1280x1024, Xabre600 could compete on nearly equal terms with the ATI RADEON 9000 PRO in these resolutions.
The CPU affects greatly the results of the cards in the "Lobby" test. Thus, the results are rather close to each other in 1024x768 and 1280x1024.
But we can see that in 1280x1024, when the CPU's limiting impact gets lower, SiS Xabre600, ATI RADEON 9000 PRO and NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x do about the same, while SiS Xabre400 and ATI RADEON 9000 fall somewhat behind.
The "Nature" scene uses both: pixel and vertex shaders. The SiS' solutions execute pixel shaders very slowly, according to synthetic 3DMark 2001 SE tests, and as for vertex shaders, they don't support them on the hardware level at all. So, no wonder that SiS Xabre600 and Xabre400 just couldn't get close to the results shown by ATI RADEON 9000/9000 PRO.
The results also suggest that the software optimization of vertex shaders processing (Vertexlizer Engine) didn't help SiS graphics chips on transition to the faster CPU.
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x has no hardware pixel shaders support and thus was not included into this test.
SiS Xabre600 once again wins the race in Quake3 Arena, especially in higher resolutions, when the limiting impact of the CPU is less evident.
These results don't tell anything about the quality of the picture, though. And to tell the truth, it's a sore spot of all chips from SiS. The "Performance" and "Quality" modes don't even offer the ordinary bi-linear filtering, not to mention the tri-linear one. The driver simply ignores your attempts to enable it in Quake3 Arena settings.
And when the "Quality" mode is on (that is, bi-linear and tri-linear filtering are used), the results of Xabre600 drop down and it finishes the last of all.
But this is not the end. Remember that the texture quality by SiS Xabre600/400 is worse than by competitor products even in the "Quality" mode due to reduced level of detail (LOD). If we could set the texturing quality by Xabre600/400 to the level texturing quality provided by graphics chips from ATI and NVIDIA, namely, disable the "turbo-texturing" by setting TexTurboMode=0, we would get even lower results…
In the "Normal" mode Serious Sam: The Second Encounter game doesn't use tri-linear or anisotropic texture filtering. This doesn't help SiS Xabre600 at all. It wins the last but one place in all modes and is only better than its slow predecessor, the Xabre400.
Interesting numbers, aren't they? Xabre600 showed the same results as Xabre400, notwithstanding the higher frequencies of the newcomer. This may only be because of the CPU's limiting impact. Other graphics cards didn't notice the CPU performance increase, which is quite natural: Unreal Tournament 2003 in the Flyby mode loads the graphics card very well.
So, the cards based on SiS chips ended up in the end of the list. Seems like it's the insufficient optimization of the Direct3D part of the driver that is to blame here. On the other hand, we saw that SiS chips performed well in 3DMark 2001 SE. We can only think of one explanation: the Direct3D part of the driver was optimized exclusively for best results in 3DMark 2001.
As for image quality in Unreal Tournament 2003, we don't have any complaints here, except Xabre's usual texturing "delights".
So, SiS Xabre600 is really the fastest solution of all company's creations. The new chip showed 10-20% betterer results than its predecessor, SiS Xabre400.
The transition to the 0.13micron technology allowed increasing the frequencies above the expected level and thus raising the performance of the new graphics chip even more. It also means that SiS has no problems producing graphics chips with this fine manufacturing technology.
Among the advantages of Xabre600 we should mention DirectX8.1 support, high-quality TV-Out and multi-display configurations support, stable drivers and low heat dissipation.
At the same time, Xabre600 inherited the whole bunch of drawbacks from its predecessors. The most unpleasant among them is the low texturing quality in the "Performance" mode and low performance in the "Quality" mode.
As a result, Xabre600 can challenge graphics cards based on NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x and ATI RADEON 9000/9000 PRO in its fast mode, but if we turn off the "turbo-texturing", Xabre600 will experience a big performance drop.
To sum up, the graphics cards based on the new Xabre600 graphics chip from SiS may become an appealing buy only if they cost less than cards based on NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x or ATI RADEON 9000/9000 PRO.