LOSTCIRCUITS

Xabre600

Certainly the most interesting card in this roundup is the new SIS Sabre 600, at least with respect to its novelty factor and the lack of concrete technical information. We have some marketing infomercials and a ton of buzz words. Probably the most interesting feature in this regard is the so-called Vertexilizer introduced earlier with the Xabre400

Briefly, instead of using hardware vertex shaders, the Xabre family uses so-called hardware optimized vertexilising, meaning that most of the vertex shading is carried out in software emulation, that is by the CPU rather than the GPU. The key feature is that, unlike in any GPU using hardware vertex shaders, vertex shader operations of the Xabre family of card will directly scale with the performance of the CPU. In plain English, the faster a CPU, the higher will be the performance of the vertex engine. In addition, SIS claims that the Vertexilisers can be upgraded in software to become compliant with future versions of vertex shader specifications, e.g. 2.0. One big improvement over the Xabre400 is the inclusion of the XiminatorII driver set to support the vertex shaders on the driver level instead of relying solely on DX8.

The Xabre600 Reference board featuring 128 MB of 2.8ns Infineon DDR and the SIS 301 TV-out companion chip.

Standard VGA, DFP and S-video out

For now, the burning question is rather where the Xabre 600 will be positioned in the phalanx of ATI and nVidia solutions. The specs look rather impressive, 600 standing for two times 300 MHz for the core and DDR, that is, with the DDR frequency designating the clock rate for a data rate of another 600 MHz or Mbps (Megabit per pin and second) in current tech parlance.

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