XGI Technology, a graphics company from Asia, at Computex Taipei 2004 trade-show demonstrated working prototypes of graphics cards for PCI Express bus, following two top graphics firms ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corp..

Officials from XGI Technology declined to comment on the peculiarities of its PCI Express x16-enabled graphics cards, but said the products work and make use of additional bandwidth provided by PCI Express x16 lanes.

Sometime in mid-year XGI is expected to release its graphics solutions for PCI Express x16 bus. Just like NVIDIA, XGI is using a special chip to bridge its AGP graphics processors with PCI Express x16 bus. There are already prototypes of such cards, though, I am not sure whether they are capable of working or not.

Native PCI Express solution is only expected to emerge along with the new architecture from XGI. The company’s upcoming graphics processors scheduled for late year release will not be a refresh for the Volari, but something totally new. We should probably anticipate that the product code-named XG45 will deliver what every new graphics processor is supposed to, e.g. speed improvements as well as feature-set improvements.

XGI also recently licensed PCI Express x16 controller from Rambus.