Review: SiS Xabre 400

So what of Xabre performance on the whole? Putting aside the driver issues we saw and having faith in the SiS driver team to sort things out we can say that Xabre 400 is quicker than NV17 in MX440 guise. The fact that it does DirectX 8.1 Pixel Shader 1.3 in hardware helps a lot in our first 2 benchmarks and in the others, performance is pretty much neck and neck.

So depending on the games you like to play, Xabre 400 will either perform on a par (barring driver issues) with GeForce4 MX or beat it quite handily if certain parts of the hardware can be utilised that NV17 just doesn't have.

Nice 3DMark performance, nice Aquamark performance, solid Quake3 and Serious Sam 2 performance and a dismal display in Comanche 4 is what we saw. Take a look at the benchmarks and make up your own mind but it's clear that some faith in the driver team at SiS is needed before we can call it an across the board victory for Xabre. Preliminary thumbs up, especially given the price!

More on that and a look at the other small points in the conclusion on the next page!