February 2003 3Digest - SIS Xabre400 64MB

This chip is presented by Gigabyte Xabre400 64MB DDR, AGP card.

Features:

SIS Xabre400 chip, 250 MHz clock rate, 256-bit engine;
64MB DDR SDRAM in 8 Hynix 4ns chips, 250 (500) MHz clock rate;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 1000 megapixels/sec and 2000 megatexels/sec.
Hardware TCL.

Just after the announcements of Matrox and 3Dlabs, we were presented a fast one from SiS - Xabre. It's another effort of a successful chipset company to expand its presense on the graphics market.

The company produces the following Xabre GPU line:

Xabre 80 - AGP4x, 200/166 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit SDR
Xabre 200 - AGP8x, 200/166 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit DDR
Xabre 400 - AGP8x, 250/250 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit DDR
Xabre 600 - AGP8x, 315/315 MHz (GPU/memory) 128-bit DDR.

Of course, the new SiS family doesn't pretend to heights and records of performance and architecture. But it proves the noticeable breakthrough comparing to previous products and features a considerable architecture advancement, uniavailable for all this-level rivals - pixel shaders hardware support. This alone might become a nice reason to praise SiS that stands alive on its own place, shaked by brand wars. Three factors are the most important in this sector: minimal price, good price/performance ratio, easy installation and working with.

You can get more details about SIS Xabre400 from its basic review from its logical continuation - Joytech Xabre 128Mb review.

Wasn't overclocked.

By the end of the month the product belongs to the $53-73 range; closest rival: GeForce4 MX440.

On the 10th of February 2003 the latest drivers from SIS are 3.10.00 and 3.10.51 for WindowsXP.

Windows XP

Even without our Xabre400 article about its quality improvement, I can state that the latest drivers version is preferable.

You can compare the screenshots below with reference images obtained on ATI RADEON 9500. We've said much about Xabre 3D graphics quality, so we are not to pause on it again. The only comment - about DOOM 3 alpha. High performance is shown because there's just no light in the game, did anyone turn it off? :-))