September 2002 3Digest - SIS Xabre200 64MB

This chip is presented by Gigabyte Xabre400 64MB DDR, AGP card.

Features:

SIS Xabre400 chip, clock rate reduced to 200 MHz, 256-bit engine;
64MB DDR SDRAM in 8 Hynix 4ns microchips, clock rate reduced to 183 (366) MHz;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 800 megapixels/sec and 1600 megatexels/sec.
Hardware TCL.

Overclocking is impossible.

Just after the announcements of Matrox and 3Dlabs, we were presented a fast one from SiS - Xabre. It's another effort of a successful chipset company to expand its presense on the graphics market.

The company plans to release the folowing line based on Xabre GPU:

Xabre 80 - AGP4x, 200/166 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit SDR
Xabre 200 - AGP8x, 200/166 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit DDR
Xabre 400 - AGP8x, 250/250 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit DDR

The most powerful solution of this line is currently available:

Xabre 600 - AGP8x, 275/275 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit DDR.

Of course, the new SiS family doesn't pretend to heights and records of performance and architecture. But it proves the noticeable breakthrough comparing to previous products and features a considerable architecture advancement, uniavailable for all this-level rivals - pixel shaders hardware support. This alone might become a nice reason to praise SiS that stands alive on its own place, shaked by brand wars. Three factors are the most important in this sector: minimal price, good price/performance ratio, easy installation and working with.

You can get more details about SIS Xabre400 from its basic review, and from its logical continuation - Joytech Xabre 128MB review.

On the 10th of August 2002 the latest drivers version from SIS is 3.03.51.

Performance readouts are in the summary diagrams.

You can compare screenshots taken on this card with reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3. As we've already said a lot in the mentioned review about Xabre's 3D graphics, we won't repeat it here.