Xabre Evolution
From what I have read in the launch information I’ve been given the Xabre 600 appears more of an evolution of the Xabre 400 than a completely new card. The Xabre 400 was let down in performance terms by its lack of Vertex shader and the main feature the Xabre 600 provides is the implementation of this onto the card. It implements the Hardware Optimized Vertexlizer Engine, which significantly reduces the strain on the CPU as the GPU can now process all but the very minor operations which are better served by the CPU.
In addition to decreasing load on the CPU the performance benefits of Hardware vs. Software are significant. I think it is shown particularly well in this graph from the SiS release information:
This shows how the Vertex Shader speed shows an improvement of nearly 40% and the total score increases by about 8% which is nice increase.
The SiS card is also the very first 0.13 Micron card. Now this is a real trump for SiS, as NVidias well talked about Geforce FX will be its first 0.13 micron process card and it is not expected till Early 2003. It is always nice to see one of the smaller makers pushing the boundries, well done SiS.
The only real other point of note that’s has changed since the Xabre 400 is the GPU and Memory clock speeds. The stock speeds for the Xabre 600 have increased to 300mhz Core and 300mhz (600mhz DDR) Memory. Also the actual memory is now Hynix BGA memory so hopefully that should allow for some nice overclocking as it should run cooler than standard memory. I also forgot to mention the rather splendid looking Gold coloured heatsink, admittedly not gold but probably anodized aluminium but it looks very nice.
The rest of the card is basically the same as the Xabre 400 so will not post it again, instead point you to the review.
