saaya
11-22-2003, 06:29 PM
2d quality is fine, havent noticed any diference at 1024x768 32bit 85hz refreshrate to my radeon 9500@9700pro.
only in videoplayback you will see that strong red, green, yellow and blue colours look a little weird on videos encoded with old mpeg codecs, and of course the card has no ps 1.4 it could use to remove the raster effect from bad quality videos like the latest ati/nvidia cards.
but at 1024x768 and 100hz and at 1280x1024 85hz the screen gets quite blurry/unsharp wich is due to the bad dacs i think. there are new bios files for the card wich are supposed to improve if not fix this issue, but i havent tried them.
about 3d quality, you know how every card seperates the image in several areas, the are closest to you in the games is rendered in higher quality than the rest of the game. i dont know the names for this stuff, but i hope you get what i mean...
well on the xabre card the first area closest to the spectator looks just fine, but the more i played i noticed that the second area is very close to the scpectator, closer than on other cards from my feeling, and it is a lot worse, quality wise. its a lot unsharper than the first area with makes the border quite easy to see in games with a fine structure wich is present in both areas.
its not really distracting in games though, it took me some time but now i see how much unshaprer the textures of distant objects are.
afaik you can change the texture quality in the registry though. it is set to 3 in registry when you set it to quality or balanced in the drivers (known bug) or to 4 when you set it to performence (wich will make the whole image look terribly blurry like all textures were fresh painted and it just started to rain :D)
well you can set the image quality to 2, 1 and even 0 in the registry and im sure that if you set it to 0 you will get the same if not higher quality pictures than on a 9800 set to quality. the performence diference between 3 and 1 is around 10-15% ...
the card defiantely has a very interesting design, and if they would have improved the pixel shader units to make them run faster it could have been a real alternative to geforce 3/radeon 8500 cards!
i get ~15fps in c&c generals zero hour at 800x600 with everything set to max quality/effects wich makes the game a little slow but its defiantely playable! i was really suprised about this!
the card loves high resolutions, switching to 1024x768 only costs you 2fps! this doesnt depend on the game, in every game and benchmark you will see that the xabre loves high resolutions and only loses very few fps percentage-wise compared to all other cards.
the drivers leave a lot of room for improvement. i could only run 2k3 and aquamark at all with the latest drivers, and i got a lot of artifacts in both benches (i really wonder how madonion can verify the xabre drivers... they are not cheating, but they are full of bugs... welli guess they dont wanted to hurt little sis :D)
besides the artifacts the card passed the benches pretty well, i scored around 500 points in 2k3 :D its a joke, i know but 100 higher than a g4mx ;) and 10255 in aquamark (CPU: 8172, GFX: 1095) wich is exactly the score a geforce4mx 460 @stock would score with a 10x200 axp! and the xabre drivers are in no way optimized for this benchmark at all!
the driver panels are very very basic and look really crappy, the drivers themselves leave the impression only a few people if not one guy alone was working on them ^^ and they/he basically worked on bugfixes for new games to make the games work at all, and didnt have the time to improve the performence wich is very sad as this card definately has a lot of potential!
only in videoplayback you will see that strong red, green, yellow and blue colours look a little weird on videos encoded with old mpeg codecs, and of course the card has no ps 1.4 it could use to remove the raster effect from bad quality videos like the latest ati/nvidia cards.
but at 1024x768 and 100hz and at 1280x1024 85hz the screen gets quite blurry/unsharp wich is due to the bad dacs i think. there are new bios files for the card wich are supposed to improve if not fix this issue, but i havent tried them.
about 3d quality, you know how every card seperates the image in several areas, the are closest to you in the games is rendered in higher quality than the rest of the game. i dont know the names for this stuff, but i hope you get what i mean...
well on the xabre card the first area closest to the spectator looks just fine, but the more i played i noticed that the second area is very close to the scpectator, closer than on other cards from my feeling, and it is a lot worse, quality wise. its a lot unsharper than the first area with makes the border quite easy to see in games with a fine structure wich is present in both areas.
its not really distracting in games though, it took me some time but now i see how much unshaprer the textures of distant objects are.
afaik you can change the texture quality in the registry though. it is set to 3 in registry when you set it to quality or balanced in the drivers (known bug) or to 4 when you set it to performence (wich will make the whole image look terribly blurry like all textures were fresh painted and it just started to rain :D)
well you can set the image quality to 2, 1 and even 0 in the registry and im sure that if you set it to 0 you will get the same if not higher quality pictures than on a 9800 set to quality. the performence diference between 3 and 1 is around 10-15% ...
the card defiantely has a very interesting design, and if they would have improved the pixel shader units to make them run faster it could have been a real alternative to geforce 3/radeon 8500 cards!
i get ~15fps in c&c generals zero hour at 800x600 with everything set to max quality/effects wich makes the game a little slow but its defiantely playable! i was really suprised about this!
the card loves high resolutions, switching to 1024x768 only costs you 2fps! this doesnt depend on the game, in every game and benchmark you will see that the xabre loves high resolutions and only loses very few fps percentage-wise compared to all other cards.
the drivers leave a lot of room for improvement. i could only run 2k3 and aquamark at all with the latest drivers, and i got a lot of artifacts in both benches (i really wonder how madonion can verify the xabre drivers... they are not cheating, but they are full of bugs... welli guess they dont wanted to hurt little sis :D)
besides the artifacts the card passed the benches pretty well, i scored around 500 points in 2k3 :D its a joke, i know but 100 higher than a g4mx ;) and 10255 in aquamark (CPU: 8172, GFX: 1095) wich is exactly the score a geforce4mx 460 @stock would score with a 10x200 axp! and the xabre drivers are in no way optimized for this benchmark at all!
the driver panels are very very basic and look really crappy, the drivers themselves leave the impression only a few people if not one guy alone was working on them ^^ and they/he basically worked on bugfixes for new games to make the games work at all, and didnt have the time to improve the performence wich is very sad as this card definately has a lot of potential!