ECS Xabre 600

Bennett Ring felt the need to rattle his Xabre, so he did.

The Xabre series from SiS launched in the last half of 2002 promised so much and yet delivered so little. It was SiS' chance to regain some streetcred as a provider of decent gaming video cards, but poor performance and even worse image quality left it chewing on the PCB dust left by its NVIDIA and ATI rivals.
Will the Xabre 600 rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the dismal flop that was the original Xabre launch?

We were supposed to see the Xabre 600 in Q3 2002, yet samples of the card have only now become available. And when a card gets pushed back this far, it's usually not a good sign.
 
The Xabre 600 has some very interesting technology, and in fact leads the opposition with the first 0.13-micron video card on the market. Hell, even NVIDIA couldn't get its 0.13 product out earlier, so it shows SiS has nailed the 0.13 production process at its own fab plants. Thanks to this SiS is now bandying about the idea of contract manufacturing for other companies. Anyone for a SiS GeForce FX?

One of the stranger technologies employed by the Xabre 600, common across all of the Xabre range, is the Vertexilizer engine. It's basically a cut down vertex engine that relies on the user's CPU for certain operations, and according to the SiS whitepaper '...the GPU will process most of the runtime instructions; except and only for some minor operations which were much more efficient by the CPU.' With this in mind, we tested with a P4 3.06GHz CPU, as we didn't want the Xabre 600 to have any excuses that it was held back by a slow CPU.

SiS has gone to town in the buzzword department, with a plethora of gimmicky terms used to describe the other features found in the Xabre 600. Duo300 sounds like some kind of condom suitable for 300 shags, but actually refers to the fact both the memory and core are running at 300MHz (being DDR-RAM, the memory has a theoretical speed of 600MHz). Pro8X8 isn't some kind of new extreme sport involving eight-wheeled vehicles, so you'll probably be disappointed to hear that it really just means the card has 8X AGP and DX8 support. The Pixelizer engine is simply the term used to describe the DX8 compliant pixel shader, while the Xmart features refer to dynamic contrast balancing and core speeds.

We put the Xabre 600 to the test in a grunty 3.06GHz P4 system, with the MSI 845PE Max 2 motherboard and 512MB of DDR-RAM. Yes, these are faster components than our usual testbench gear, but as explained above, due to the reliance of the vertex shader on a decent CPU we thought we'd help it out as much as possible. To see how the Xabre 600 compared to a similarly priced component, we also benchmarked a RADEON 8500 with the new ATI Catalyst 3.1 drivers. DirectX9 was used for all testing, as was Windows XP with service pack 1.

Take a quick look at the graphs and you'll see immediately that the Xabre 600 just can't compete with the cheaper RADEON. In 3DMark2001 SE the gap between the two hovers around 20% in the RADEON's favour at 1,024 x 768, which blows out to around 30% at 1,280 x 1024. You'll notice the Xabre has both performance and quality settings - and let it be said that the texture quality in performance mode is shocking. In fact, it's even fairly bad in quality mode, at least when compared to the excellent image quality of the RADEON. The UT2003 results don't look as bad until you realise the Xabre can only keep up with the textures set to extreme ugly mode. Turn these textures back to a decent level and the Xabre trails behind the RADEON.

When you remember a RADEON 8500 is actually cheaper than the Xabre 600, only a total and utter sadist would ever consider this product. Sorry SiS, regardless of the fact you somehow managed to nail the 0.13-micron manufacturing process, it's back to the drawing board for the Xabre architecture...