Conclusion and thoughts
The DFI Xabre X400-T2, priced at around £60, is something of a strange beast. Whilst boasting some impressive features for what is essentially a budget card, it fails to live up to expectation once it's passed through our gamut of benchmarks. The most worrying aspect, though, is the use of poor textures to artificially inflate its scores. The default driver setting doesn't allow one to toggle with texture quality, so one would assume that it's set at a comparable level to both ATi and NVIDIA cards. The sad truth is that it's significantly worse, our Quake III picture bore that out. Once we compared it to the competition in the form of the ATi Radeon 9000, it lagged behind in each benchmark at the comparable TexTurbo 0 setting. We shouldn't have to delve into the registry to manually increase the image quality.
It'll be on the hardware side that the DFI card sells. Features such as DirectX8 compliance (hardware pixel, software for vertex), 8x AGP, DVI-out, and TV-Out will help it secure a place in a number of OEM systems. The relatively decent 2D on both VGA and DVI fronts will be received well. The problem for SiS and DFI is that the two industry giants, NVIDIA and ATi, already have reasonably cards available at the same price point. Whilst NVIDIA's GeForce4 MX line is a little long in the tooth with only DirectX7 compliance, it's a stout performer in today's games. ATi's Radeon 9000, as you've seen, is a better card in the performance stakes.
I'd like to recommend the DFI Xabre X400-T2 but find it difficult to do so. Whilst fully appreciating that the card has been available for some months now, it still doesn't detract from SiS not playing on a level playing field as far as drivers are concerned. The drivers, too, are a little basic compared to what we've come to expect recently. I applaud the fact that SiS and DFI have decided to take on the aforementioned two in the budget sector, but the final product will have to be substantially better if it's to give NVIDIA and ATi sleepless nights [ Note added 12th March, 2003. Newer drivers released by SiS rectify the lack of LOD adjustment available through the driver control panel. Whilst we applaud this, it doesn't detract from the fact that performance is in need of improvement].
Highs
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Boasts a decent array of features.
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Very quiet in operation.
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DVI output.
Lows
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Drivers are spartan compared to the competition.
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The drivers use a lower image quality level by default, thereby boosting benchmark scores.
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A hardware vertex shader would have been nice.
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Difficult to get hold of. Competition is intense in this sector with better cards available.
