Xabre 400 Roundup - August 2002
Drivers
Drivers have always been a bottleneck for video cards manufacturers. It is hard to count up how many excellent solutions implemented in chips remain unclaimed because of poor drivers. So many chips have failed to reveal their potentials because of programmers' failure to create quality drivers! While ATi and nVidia after many years of hard work have finally succeeded in creating decent level, almost claim-free drivers, other manufacturers like SiS, STM, Trident and evenMatrox shudder at the thought of drivers writing. See how SiS took writing drivers for Xabre. We used the most recent drivers of version 3.03.51.
Compared to nVidia Detonator or ATi Catalyst,drivers for Xabre look mean. They lack basic 3D settings like filtering, sync, or anti-aliasing. Use of TV-out is a bit confusing, since the respective menu item is enabled only after hooking up the cable and rebooting the PC.
Color calibration menu
Video player menu
Monitor settings
Since the drivers come with the 3DWizard utility, it's possible to tweak anti-aliasing, overclock the video card, make the image stereographic and cheat by making the walls in a game look transparent.
By the way, with SiS315 it also is possible to look through walls, and no negative response has come up. Video cards on SiS-based GPUs are not so widespread to cause mass cheats in Quake III cyber-fights over the Internet, so you are very unlikely to come across a player who uses a Xabre video card - currently SiS315 is not that powerful, we'll see what will come of it.
TV-Out and DualHead
Xabre400 video cards use chip codec SiS301 which has been around for some time in notebooks. The chip includes a NTSC/PAL TV codec with Macrovision 7. 1. L1, a TMDSTM with bilinear scaling to output to LCD monitors and a RGB port for conventional VGA monitors.
SiS301 allows to use 24-bit, 18-bit and 12-bit LCD monitors. Maximum resolution - 1280x1024@60 Hz. Some companies like Triplex ship their cards with DVI-VGA adapters enabling to hook up a second CRT monitor to the video card. The slow 135 MHz RAMDAC substantially limits the maximum resolution and refresh rate. The maximum value is 1280x1024@75 Hz. Although at 1280x1024 the image is well defined, some shady lines are seen. The maximum acceptable resolution for the second monitor is as high as 1024x768 with 32-bit color depth. So, as regards to signal quality the second output is far better than the first one. Using Xabre to handle two monitors is unlikely to appeal to you.
To activate the TV-out, plug the cable into the card. After rebooting, the TV-out will be recognized by the drivers. Admissible resolutions for the TV-out are 800x600 and 1024x768. Regarding quality, there are pros and cons. First, the "cons: on activating the TV-out the host monitor should run atthe same resolution as the TV-out does. You won't be able to use TV-out to expand the desktop. Besides, fonts on the VGA monitor turn bold. So, SiS should spend a while to fix that. One more mystery - at 1024x768 you were not able to select 32-bit color, although no problems with it were at 800x600.
Now, the "pros": there are numerous image settings on the TV-out. You can move and scale image along the vertical and horizontal axes. The image can be scaled to 20 pre-set positions, so you can fit it seamlessly to your screen. The driver also suggests the overscan mode. nVidia specialists will find much to be surprised about SiS drivers.
The SiS driver also suggests a mirror mode in which the second display duplicates the host. There is also a multimonitor mode in which the desktop is stretching over to the second monitor (only CRT or LCD monitors can be used as the second monitor). Joint use of TV-out with the second monitor is impossible.
3D Quality
SiS Xabre400 seems to have problems with playing 3D images. As is most likely the case, the problem is drivers. As you have just seen, the drivers do not allow to change 3D settings - by default they are not set to the best quality. That is understandable: SiS company needs to advertise the Xabre400 speed at a sacrifice to graphics quality.
For instance, let's take a look at Quake III Arena. With Xabre, this game looks poor. What especially catches eye is the awful sky resembling those when 16-bit color and texture compression were common.
It's not only the sky that mars up the impression. Besides, it's the texture filtering.
As you see, the filtering is bilinear, that's a past century's way of making graphics. However hard we tried to enable the trilinear filtering, we failed to do it. When I saw that sky and the filtering I recalled I had already seen both flaws somewhere. Guess where? Yes, right you are - in SiS315! Things haven't gone to the better since the chip appeared, and Xabre inherited all the worst traits of its predecessor.
Quality in 3DMark2001SE
We wished the image quality in Direct3D were better, but our hopes failed to come true. To be more precise, it's not quite so. An image in Direct3D looks blurred and indistinct. That must have been the filtering settings in the drivers which caused the first MIP-level start up too close to the spectator, and we see the filtered textures closer than they should be. Here is what we finally got: have a look at the first test 3DMark2001SE.
You see that with Xabre400 the textures are heavily blurred compared to the reference and look dimmed. The same was observed in other games.
Full Scene AntiAliasing
The most interest things are with the full-scene antialiasing. Xabre has evolved further compared to SiS315 and now supports two antialiasing methods: supersampling and Blur. I think it`s not necessary to explain what supersampling is - it`s the good old rendering at a higher resolution with further reduction, but the "Blur" is something new.
It may seem by appearance that the 2x + Blur gives the same anti-aliasing quality as FSAA4x does, but that`s not quite so, because the image in fact is dithered with the 2xAA method, whereas "Blur" simply blurs the whole scene, labels failed to read and the image looked mean.
SiS Xabre, 2xAA +Blur
SiS Xabre, NoAA
The upper image displays a car with the "Blur" applied, the lower one - without it. Even if the "Blur" by default makes the image more blurred than the reference, the "Blur" makes the image look more blurred. It`s no longer a fun to play at such quality. Now let`s see how enabled anti-aliasing affected the speed.
As you see, the speed decrease with the full-scene anti-aliasing is excessive. At the 2xAA, there is a two-fold drop in speed (so is for for image quality), but at 3xAA and 4xAA the drop is 3- and 4-fold, respectively. Since it`s not possible to enable the 2xAA without soaping the "Blur", then the minimum anti-aliasing that would suit the quality fan is the 3xAA method with a 3-fold drop in speed.
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