A New Graphics Kid on the Block: XGI Volari

Driver Impressions

The menus of our development driver made a pretty solid impression on us. As far as 3D operation is concerned, however, XGI's driver developers still have a lot of work ahead of them. FSAA and anisotropic filtering (max. 4x) were not yet enabled in this driver. The trilinear filter also needs some more work. While tests with Demirug's AFTester13a showed a clean, working trilinear filter, the driver defaulted to bilinear filtering in all of the games we tested. There also seem to be some problems with texture LOD, which resulted in washed-out, unfocused textures in 3DMark 2003. Our driver was unable to correctly display the scenes from our Aquamark 3 benchmark as well. The lighting is wrong and some of the textures once again looked washed-out. We'll comment on this more on the individual benchmark rundown.

Here are a few screenshots and comparisons:

AF Tester

Demirug's AFtester13a(Click on the image to open a window with a uncompressed PNG image)