October 2002 3Digest - SIS Xabre600 128MB

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

This chip is presented by Joytech Apollo Blade Monster Xabre400 128MB DDR, AGP card.

Features:

SIS Xabre400 chip, clock rate raised to 275 MHz, 256-bit engine;
64MB DDR SDRAM in 8 Hynix 4ns microchips, clock rate raised to 275 (550) MHz;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 1100 megapixels/sec and 2200 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, 275/275 MHz (core/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 our review, and from the review of the card, presented here.

On the 10th of October 2002 the latest drivers version from SIS is 3.06.55.

Performance readouts are in the summary diagrams.

You can compare the screenshots with reference (NVIDIA GeForce3) below. 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? :-))