April 2002 3Digest - SIS 315 128 MBytes SIS 315 128 MBytes

This chip is presented by Joytech Apollo Thrill 3D (SIS 315) 128 MBytes, AGP videocard.

Features:

SIS 315 chip, 166 MHz clock rate, 128-bit engine;
128 MBytes SDRAM memory in 8 VData 6ns microchips, 166 MHz clock rate;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 333 megapixels/sec and 333 megatexels/sec.
Hardware TCL.

Overclocking is impossible.

The SIS company is present on the videochip market for a long time. It produces low-end solutions and it has never pretented to the place among popular 3D-accelerators. But the company tried to change the situation with the release of SIS 300/305 cards. Unfortunately, those cards turned out to have bad 3D/2D perfomance, and only low price helped SIS to be afloat.

And now the company releases a new product that may become a competitor of NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200 (like Trident Blade XP). I.e. 3D perfomance of SIS 315 is on the level of NVIDIA Riva TNT2Pro. New cards are designed for the cheap card sector of computer market. I.e. for office needs and also for playing good 3D games. The most attractive feature of a new card is it's price, that's less than the price of NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200 cards. You'll be able to read more about this card in the review. 128 MBytes memory is entirely a marketing step and doesn't do any good to this 3D-accelerator.

For the 10th of April 2002 the latest drivers versions from SIS are 2.04 and 2.05.

Rally Trophy disappointed us. Even lowering quality level very much to get some gameplay you get this horror: