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Introduction
The
GeForce2 MX series certainly lived very long and
did very well for its time. While it did not perform
around the same level as that of the GeForce2
GTS/Pro/Ti/Ultra, it did provide adequate performance
for the current games and technology. The GeForce2
MX was exactly a stripped-down GeForce2 GTS, thus
sharing the same technology and features except
for the speed. The GeForce4 MX series initially
brought the impression that they would be lower-clocked
GeForce4 Ti's with the same feature set unfortunately,
it wasn't like that. The GeForce4 MX didn't run
on the same feature set as the GeForce4 Ti's,
and not even to the level of the GeForce3. The
GeForce4 MX cards could be fast but once they
are ran on games that take advantage of DX8/8.1
features, their limitations would start to show.
AGP8X
has now arrived and video cards and games are
now making use of DX8/8.1 features. With this,
chip makers had to advance their products and
come up with their own competitors for the market.
In the low end market, it's more or less a battle
between the Radeon 9000, GeForce4 MX series, the
GeForce3 Ti 200 and the SiS Xabre400. The GeForce3
Ti 200 isn't really intended to compete in this
arena but for its current selling price and feature
set, it fits the bill perfectly.
The
Xabre400
SiS'
entry to the low end market is their Xabre200
and Xabre400 cards. In this review, the Xabre400
takes the spotlight. The Xabre400 was among the
first cards to adapt to the AGP8X interface and
aside from that, it has a feature set comparable
to the GeForce3's.
Features
Pixelize
engine
Built-in
high quality 3D hardware transform and lighting
(T&L) engine
Support
DirectX 8.1 and Pixel Shader ver 1.3
Supports
bump mapping, cubic mapping and volume textures
Supports
2X/4X full-scene anti-aliasing
Maximum
128MB frame buffer with linear addressing
8x8
full-driving power GPU
Supports
AGP 8X/DirectX 8.1
Supports
hardware auto-detect for AGP 1.0, AGP 2.0, or
AGP 3.0 mode support
High
performance 2D engine
Built-in
hardware command queue
Built-in
DirectDraw accelerator
Built-in
GDI 2000 accelerator
Supports
AGP 8X 533MHz data rate for all 2D engine functions
Built-in
programmable 24-bit true color RAMDAC available
up to 375MHz
MotionFixing
video processor
Supports
4 fields per-pixel motion detection de-interlace
function, video sources from MPEG decoder, Video
capture and AVI interfaces
Supports
down scaling function and scaling vector as 1/2,
¼
Supports
de-interlaced and 1/2 down scaling function
MPEG
2/1 video decoder
Motion
Compensation layer decoding architecture
Supports
up to 20 Mbit/sec bit rate decoding
Supports
VCD, DVD and HDTV decoding
Double-scene
technology
Companion
with SiS301,Support LCD+CRT, CRT+CRT,CRT+TV dual
view function to enlarge your view with ease
Unified
driver architecture
The
Xabre400 runs at 250MHz on the core with a quad-pixel
pipeline thus giving it a peak fill rate of 1.0
Billion pixels/sec compared to the dual-pixel
pipeline on the GeForce4 MX cards. The Xabre400
can also do eight textures per pixel pipeline
thus giving it a fill rate of 2.0 Billion texels/sec.
The Xabre400's memory bandwidth is at 8.0GB/sec
thanks to its memory running at 125MHz DDR (250MHz);
the Xabre400 can support as much as 128MB of memory
but this model only runs with 64MB of memory.
For
more information on the Xabre400, please refer
to these links:
http://www.xabre.com/products/xabre400.html
http://www.ecs.com.tw/products/ag400t8d64.htm
More
on the Card |
