XGI Volari V8 versus Deltachrome S8
Jon 7 Oct 2004

Conclusion

Volari V8 : An interesting piece of hardware

The Volari V8 certainly proved to be a very interesting piece of hardware. This card has pretty good performance for the average gamer as we can see and proved to be a worthy alternative to the Radeon 9550 and GeforceFX 5700 LE which are both in the same price range. Its performance seems to match the Radeon 9600/9600 Pro too.

We did not mention about overclocking in the review. The Volari does have some overclocking potential though : we were able to clock the card from 300/300 to 395/390. As a result, we were able to reach a score of 3118 in 3D Mark 2003.

But what really separates it from all other graphics architectures is that it natively supports outputting to your HDTV. This gives XGI quite an edge over the competition: could you imagine outputting straight from your PC or laptop straight to your HDTV? The Volari supports resolutions of 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p through the component as well as the S-Video output. As a result, the Volari's 2D and video capabilities make it an excellent candidate for use in a multimedia box such as a small form factor system that’s being used as a home theater PC, or a micro-ATX case that’s used to perform similar duties.

Overall, a good card with good performance at a good price and certainly something many gamers will be interested in as not everyone can afford a X800 XTPE just for playing games. My only real gripe is the fact that the card is not readily available everytwhere in the world. As we mentionned everywhere, the card can be found in certain parts of Europe and Asia only, and therefore many of you out there may have difficulties in finding one. Hopefully this will change soon. 

Here are my ratings out of 10.

Product Excellence

Deltachrome : A complete disappointment

The Deltachrome turned out to be a complete disappointment. The card does offer some interesting video features (Chromotion) which may be interest some of you such as the real time artistic effects such as "emboss" and "neon", but it's really more of a gadget than anything else and it slows things down a lot. The card was stable in normal normal desktop use and the card was perfect for this purpose. Unfortunately that’s where the positives end.

As it stands the Deltachrome's drivers are acceptable when using the most heavily used benchmarks (3D Mark 2001, 2003 and Aquamark 3). For the less thorough reviewer or one with limited time, this would almost certainly make the card look like a reasonable performer. However, when running titles such as Quake 3 or Call of Duty, performance would start falling far behind all the other cards. 

When we compare the benchmark performance to real games and see that none of the games we tested ran without issue (if they even ran at all), it seems S3 has got some serious driver rewriting to do. It's quite tough to say if the hardware itself is good, there are so many driver issues that you don’t even get to see the performance of the card. It's worth pointing out that all of our game tests featured up to date games, some of the best sellers from the past few months. Another point worth mentionning is that any attempts to use FSAA above 1024x768 would result in immediate program crashes.

Testing older games was no fun either : we tested some all time classics and also encountered issues. Microsoft's Age of Empires 2, one of the most compatible games and one of the least system demanding titles, refused to run and reported some error in initializing Direct Draw. EA's Sim City 4 ran but suffered from graphics corruption. 

Though these issues will no doubt be corrected through future driver updates, there is no indication that driver improvements will be fast in arriving…all of the issues we experienced with games such as in Age of Empires 2 were also present in the WHQL driver released back in January 2004... As it stands, you could not purchase a Deltachrome S8 and be confident that any recent game (or even classic titles) will run on your card.

Here are my ratings out of 10.

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