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.

We've tried to overclock the Volari, but surprisingly enough the clock speeds for the memory and the core are still not matching those factory specified numbers. According to XGI 's official specs, the card should operate at 350 MHz core clock, and 1000 MHz memory speed respectively. These numbers were not near close to what we've experienced. According to the drivers, in Reactor 1.00, the Volari Duo V8 Ultra had 328/900 MHz, and in the latest 1.01 version somewhat different 330/896 MHz. What is the reason behind all this? The first conclusion we can draw, is about the core, which might became instable, when trying to reach such high speed (the official 350MHz), and that is a consequence of manufacturing difficulties. The DDR II memories by Samsung are rated at 1000 MHz and according to their data sheet these modules are capable of reaching such high speeds. We are quite nervous about what can cause this uncertainty about the lower memory speed, but definitely shows us, that the card's manufacturing process is not mature enough.

Our tuning has resulted with the following results

• We were able to overclock the core clock from the stock 330MHz to 360MHz, (9%) but sadly the performance of the card improved only 0,6 per cent .

• We had more success tuning the memories: from 896MHz we've reached a whopping 960 MHz, (7.1%) above this, major screen failures occurred. Performance wise, the overclock resulted a 3,7 percent increase.

The temperature of the card changed dramatically during the overclocking process. The heatsink for the memories on the back of the card has risen from 48 to 55 degrees Celsius. According to PowerManager, the temperature of the GPUs have risen from the original 40-42 degrees to 65, using 3D apps, while during overclocking and heavy 3D load, we've even seen 70 degrees Celsius as well. Another interesting thing we've noticed was that the 2 nd GPU cooled much slowly according to the PowerManager feature, which might be true, or might be just another driver issue, and that is why they've disabled the entire feature as well J

Turning on a new feature called V-Drive resulted in no changes what so ever, and that is something again, that can be declared as a dead feature. Coming back to the PowerManager service, some things are very promising though. The AutoPower function lets the card to auto-adjust the core voltage for both the GPU and the memory chips, which comes quite handy fro those who are not willing to get into hardware modding of their precious new card. We do hope that this feature will be enhanced, and will be available on most Volari products.

Performance wise we've experienced the most dramatic change by far, when we ran FutureMark's 3DMark03 (build 340) with the new set of drivers. Compared to the performance we've seen under version 1.00 of the Reactor drivers, the score was down by 15,7 %, and that means only one thing: XGI does not want to follow NVIDIA 's every footstep. Basically they've taken out the optimized bits from the new drivers, and that is a 100% proof for those, who claimed, that XGI uses special code to produce such performance under 3Dmark03. The new results Volari has produced are perhaps somewhat closer to those what the card is truly capable of. The biggest loss in the 3DMark test was the performance of the vertex shader. The score fell by more than 50% from the original 17,6 to a shady 9,2. We've also experienced some significant performance loss of the Fill Rate scores. Even in Single Texturing, the original 2311 MTextels/sec fell to 1712 MTextels/sec (26%). We've experienced no changes of the image quality.

Using AquaMark 3, no changes could be seen.

The only program that previously caused BSoD ran smoothly this time, which means, that the developers do enhance the drivers. The numbers you can see on the table below are quite shocking. The Volari's performance is high above NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, but trail behind ATI 's Radeon 9600 Pro scores, by almost the same margin.

Gaming experiences

The game settings did not change since our previous review of the Volari Duo V8 Ultra. We set the graphic detail to the highest possible, but disabled both anti-aliasing, and anisotropic filter. During this round up, we've tested 24 different games, ranging from fps to rts, new to old ones just to see how well these new drivers, and the card itself is put together. We've experienced the followingst:

Tomb Raider The Angel Of Darkness run flawlessly at last, but was too slow to enjoy.
Prince Of Persia SOT was still unplayable, although this is the lack of support in the program, which in time hopefully will change .
The OpenGL based games performed similarly to our first tests, with no troubles at all. We got some of the most promising fps out of Quake 3, Elite Force 2, RTCW, etc.
Halo performed much better, with the 1.01 Reactor's, soon one might be able to play the game with a decent speed.
Using Splinter Cell, we saw a whopping performance increase of almost 40 %. The Volari's marks are now the same as ATI's or NVIDIA's.
Call Of Duty ran smoothly, and with decent speed at last.
Max Payne 2 locked up after a couple of minute.
Delta Force BHD' night vision mode ran perfectly this time, but the Volar's performance is still only half of its competitor's.
The DirectX 9 game, Gunmetal showed increased speed, we were able to play the game on the Volari at last.
Will Rock froze after 10 minutes of gameplay.
Dungeon Siege Legends of Aranna was another positive surprise, and playable. If you can bear 8 minutes of loading, and a few green screens.
Chrome was a bit slow.
C&C Generals: perfect and fast. Period.
Warcraft 3: same as C&C: flawless and fast.
Silent Storm locked up as well.
XIII: very smooth, very nice gameplay.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield: flawless.
Freedom Fighters: perfect.
FireStarter: very fast, although the Volari had some troubles displaying the sky properly.

After months of agony waiting for the product to arrive and after hours of tests and benchmarks, the time for the final conclusion to be drawn has come. There are no longer beta drivers, although some functions and programs are missing, we think these are now “true” drivers. Before getting to our final conclusion, we enumerate all pros, and cons, that can be, and must be taken to consideration for someone, who is interested in getting a Volari.

Pros:

Although the Volari Duo V8 Ultra is a new product, it's remarkably stable.
Beautiful colours, perhaps the best, we've seen sofar.
The excellent quality of the TV output
A lot of game ran flawlessly
Stable OpenGL-based games
Room for improvement: Halo, Splinter Cell
If XGI can keep up with the new driver releases (1,5 months approx) than it is something very positive

Cons:

Noisy fans.
Not satisfactory performance in many games, although this may improve in time.
Not user friendly softwarepack, the interface is somewhat too complicated.
Only 128 bit memory controller
Expensive, expensive, and again expensive.

It ends. We have never spent so much time with a single card, and the analysis of a driver set. XGI has taken out some optimization from the code, and that is something disturbing. Disturbing, because if a card can achieve such good scores in an application such as 3DMark03, why can not it keep the pace with the competition, when it comes to real-world gameplay? The answer lies probably in the support (or lack of support actually) of games. It's not enough nowadays, to have a good product or a driver set, it's also important, that the developers take care about XGI's products as well. If all this becomes reality, the XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra can match, even outshine the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, or perhaps ATI Radeon 9600 Pro's performance. Sadly, until that point, the Volari remains better in an ambiguous point: the price. When would it worth the pricetag it carries? Perhaps if it would cost half as much as it costs today, until then the Volari is doomed. The 2 chip design has yet to show it's true performance, and that means, price/performance wise the Volari Duo is a dead-end. All we can hope for is the aggressive pricing and competitive performance of the Volari V5/V5 Ultra/V8/V8 Ultra (single chip solutions). That may mean that the Volari can be a true conqueror of some market share.

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

Gaming experiences