Thoughts
Sometimes, just sometimes, a product comes along with a specification to make you wet your lips in anticipation. XGI's Volari Duo V8 Ultra is such a product. Paper specs. are suitably impressive, with fantastic pixel-pushing power and excellent memory bandwidth. There's more to a top-end graphics card than just that, though, and it's only after careful scrutiny that cracks in XGI's copper-laden card begin to appear.An obvious problem with running a dual-chip design is performance efficiency. That's the card's Achilles Heel. 3DMark03's tests show the Duo trailing ATI's Radeon 9800 XT 256MB by a significant margin. That's one nail in the coffin. The other presents itself via XGI's poor 3D image quality. Time and time again we saw a lack of general detail that's exacerbated by blurry antialiasing performance.
Considering the points made above, it's hard to recommend XGI's top card with the current driver set. The company needs to bolster image quality before concentrating on all-out performance, really. A promising product that's severly let down by inadequate image quality.
