![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , January 06, 2003
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
SiS Xabre 600 Review
Announced last November, the Xabre 600, successor to the Xabre 400, is poised to compete in the mainstream market, offering full DirectX 8.1 support. We examine the performance and "image quality" of this latest GPU from SiS.
Unreal Tournament 2003:
A full installation of Unreal Tournament 2003 with patch 2136 was used. For our tests, we're using our UT2003 Benchmarking utility. Resolutions of 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 were tested in High Quality mode in the Antalus and Inferno maps.
When comparing TT=1 Quality versus TT=3 Performance/Balanced, there is only a small difference at 1024x768. However, as the resolution increases the difference in performance does as well. At 1600x1200 the difference is 6.7 FPS. Either way, for the smoothest gameplay here, a resolution of 1024x768 seems to be the best in this map. The Radeon 8500LE outperforms it by a large extent at 1024x768, but as the resolution increases the gap closes. In fact, at 1600x1200 the Xabre 600 edges out faster in Performance TT=3 mode. As for image quality between all that, you’ll find out how that compares at the bottom.
Inferno is much harder on the system and video card. Here we see the difference between TT=1 and TT=3 is about 6 FPS at 1024x768 and lessens as the resolution increases. 1024x768 is playable here, but there might be some instances in this map that the FPS dips down pretty low causing lag or choppiness. The 8500LE outperforms it here at every resolution.
Here we are just comparing the Xabre 600 to itself with no Anti-Aliasing, 2X AA, and 4X AA in TT=3 Performance mode. There isn’t much change in FPS between 2X AA and no AA. In fact, it is playable at 1024x768 and 2X AA. However, 4X AA causes a huge performance hit due to the nature of supersampling. This map is not playable at all, even in TT=3 performance mode with 4X AA. At 1600x1200, 4X AA does not work because of the limited 64MB frame buffer size.
These are the same AA tests in the Antalus map, but with the quality set to TT=1 for the best quality. Performance is down some, but the difference between 2X and no AA remains very small, while 4X AA is completely unplayable.
In the Inferno map we find the same result we found in Antalus, with 2X AA not showing much performance difference with no AA. 4X AA is unplayable. In fact, it's pretty close even without AA in this map at being playable in HQ mode at 1024x768.
With TT=1 performance, it's even more dismal. In this map you would have to either go down to 800x600 or lower your quality settings to get smooth gameplay.
CPU Scaling:
Tests were run on the Athlon XP system with CPU speed scaling from 1.2GHz to 2.2GHz. TT=1 Quality setting was set in all the tests.
Here we see a very noticeable increase in speed as we scale from 1.2GHz to 2.2GHz. There is about a 13 FPS difference between 1.2GHz and 2.2GHz. It seems that between 2.0GHz and 2.2GHz, the increase in FPS starts to get much smaller.
At 1280x1024, there isn’t a big difference in performance from 1.2GHz to 2.2GHz. In fact, at 2.0GHz the difference is only .4 of a frame per second when compared to 2.2GHz.
At 1600x1200, the difference is so small it definitely shows the video card hitting some kind of wall here.
Overclocking:
Here we are comparing no AA, 2X AA, and 4X AA at default speeds and at overclocked speeds. UT2003 in DM-Antalus shows up to an 8 FPS performance increase at 1600x1200 with no AA. This brings it very close to the 30FPS mark, however it is still choppy during the demo run. Overclocking helps bring up the score at 1280x1024 as well. In fact, even in 2X AA and 4X AA, the performance is brought up slightly. But the fact remains that gameplay is only smooth at 1024x768 with no AA or 2X AA.
Image Quality:
One of the most important things we need to look at with the Xabre 600 is how its image quality looks. We know the Xabre 400 had bad filtering and texture quality, so let's see how it looks on the Xabre 600 with UT2003.
By default the quality slider is set to balanced. That shows a setting of TexTurboMode at a value of 3, which is the same as performance. Obviously, performance will be faster than quality, but what are you giving up in performance mode for that performance? Look above at the pictures. The first one is at the default TexTurboMode of 3. Notice how blurry the textures look for one thing. If you look closely, you can see where the mip-map levels meet. The next picture shows TexTurboMode at 1, which is the best quality the card has to offer. The textures are still very blurry, though a little smoother. To get a closer look at what is going on, we need to zoom in. The last picture is zoomed in at 300% and compares TT=3 to TT=1 side by side. What you will notice is that in TT=3 the textures look more pixilated and you can see the mip-map line. At TT=1 the texture is more smooth and uniform, albeit very blurry.
For the Anti-Aliasing comparison, I zoomed in on one of the spiky mine looking things in the sky in the Citadel map at 300%. The first picture shows you what it looks like with no anti-aliasing enabled. Notice all the jaggies running abundant there. The second picture has 2X AA enabled. What I don’t see however is any difference from the picture with no AA! With 4X AA enabled, we finally see some anti-aliasing going on.