September 2002 3Digest -
SIS Xabre400 128MB

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

Features:

• SIS Xabre400 chip, 250 MHz clock rate, 256-bit engine;
• 128MB DDR SDRAM in 8 Samsung 4ns chips, 250 (500) MHz clock rate;
• Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 1000 megapixels/sec and 2000 megatexels/sec.
• Hardware TCL.

The card was overclocked to Xabre 600 (275/550 MHz).

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 plans to release the folowing line based on Xabre GPU:

1. Xabre 80 - AGP4x, 200/166 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit SDR
2. Xabre 200 - AGP8x, 200/166 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit DDR
3. Xabre 400 - AGP8x, 250/250 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit DDR

And another, more powerful solution later:

1. 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. And even with a bit higher price for a 128MB version, we can state the good price/performance ratio.

You can get more details about SIS Xabre400 from our review, and from the review of the card, presented here.

On the 10th of September 2002 the latest drivers from SIS are 3.05, 3.05.50.

Performance readouts are in the summary diagrams.

You can compare screenshots taken on this card with reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3. As we've already said a lot about Xabre's 3D graphics in the mentioned reviews, we won't repeat it here.

Games / Cards	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
SIS Xabre		-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24
SIS Xabre
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	25	26	27	28	29	30
SIS Xabre
NVIDIA GeForce3

Game list: 1. Return to Castle Wolfenstein 2. Unreal2 (alpha version) 3. Comanche4 4. Jedi Knight II Outcast 5. Morrowind 6. Colin McRAE Rally2 7. Red Faction 8. Rally Trophy 9. Sacrifice 10. Venom 11. Unreal Tournament 2003 DEMO 12. Real MYST 13. Blade of Darkness 14. Neverwinter Nights 15. 3DMark2001: Game1 16. 3DMark2001: Game2 17. 3DMark2001: Game3 18. 3DMark2001: Game4 19. 3DMark2001: Dot3 20. 3DMark2001: EMBM 21. 3DMark2001: Vertex Shaders 22. 3DMark2001: Pixel Shaders 23. Warcraft III 24. Soldier of Fortune II 25. Command and Conquer: Renegade 26. No One Lives Forever Demo 27. AquaNox 28. Serious Sam: The Second Encounter 29. IL2: Shturmovik 30. MoHAA Andrew Worobyew (Anvakams@ixbt.com) Alexander Kondakov (kondalex@ixbt.com) Evgeniy Zaycev (eightn@ixbt.com) [an error occurred while processing this directive]