Volari Duo V8 Ultra – and the new drivers (v1.01.51)

Only a couple of days ago we've published our first, full review of XGI 's new flagship card, the Volari Duo V8 Ultra. The results we've got then –as we've mentioned it in the conclusion of the article- were based on a beta-state driver set. That was why we've postponed our final conclusion, and were waiting for the newer version of Reactor. I was quite surprised to see the new drivers to arrive on the last but one day of 2003, but at least I've felt that the time was right to make it the judgement day for the Volari. If you are interested about the looks, and technological background of the card, please take some time and go through our previous article. This time we are concentrating for the comparison of the two drivers only, run all tests and benchmarks once again, and add some new ones as well.

After installing the new drivers, the first thing I've noticed was the missing PowerManager feature, although there were traces about it in the registry settings, which indicates, that this feature is only out for a short period of time. There is certainly a solution for everything though: we've managed to get the PowerManager up and running. I've created a modification of the setup.ini file. Using this, the good-old feature and some others are back again.

Download: modded setup ini file (17 KB)

A few new WinXP64 registry entries makes it clear for us, that soon we might be seeing the 64-bit version of the Reactor drivers as well. However, this 32-bit version is still not 100% complete, as you can find an entry saying "...will be released when VBIOS is ready...". Many things have changed though in the latest version from the default gamma level, to the level of brightness and contrast. Some errors are still with us: in the 3D settings menu, changing the Max Anisotropy level to 1, than setting it to “Depend on AP”, the same window pops up, where the level is set again to “4”.

There are some traces about the support for Sony and Fuji notebooks, which indicates, that mobile solutions equipped with XGI products will be out soon. According to information picked from the driver again, ABIT plans to come out with 3 different Volari products. If our 6 th sense on this matter is right, these products will be ABIT Volari V8/V8 Ultra and the Duo V8 Ultra.

An important and somewhat obvious fact is that the Volari chip will soon have different versions available, as the DeviceID clearly showed different version numbers such as “A0, A1 and after". Our Volari Duo V8 Ultra was based on the A1 rev core. Theoretically the BIOS of the card can be flashed of course, but this feature is not yet available in this version.