In the end of 2003 this was XGI's flagship. XGI tried to be a competitor with ATi and nVidia. Some early results showed potential but when the product hit the market it wasn't really what people hoped for. Actually, the distributor for Club3D in the Netherlands only shipped 12 (!) cards to resellers. I wonder how many of those 12 cards were sold to customers. Probably not much, making this boxed Club3D card pretty exclusive.

To give an impression of what was going on back in 2003 I've set all the details in a timeframe:

20 May 2003
XGI (Xabre Graphics Inc.) was spun-off from SiS. SiS has some experience with 3D-chips like the SiS Xabre 400. The company will be run by Michael Chen and Chris Lin and will remain property of SiS.

It's assumed that XGI will continue with the SiS chips.

12 June 2003
XGI acquires the graphics division from Trident (about 30% of Trident).

29 August 2003
XGI announces that it will approach ATi and nVidia with a new graphics architecture. Both design teams from Trident and SiS have been combined together to create a 3D-chip that surpasses the old Xabre chip. UMC will manufacture XGI's first chips (XG40, XG41 and XG42). Specifications aren't known yet but there are rumors that a mobile chip will be made which is based on the Trident XP4.

3 September 2003
XGI will show products on Computex. nVidia will also show their NV36 and NV38-cards (GeForce FX 5700 and 5950 Ultra) but it's unknown if ATi is going to show the R360 (Radeon 9800 XT).

19 September 2003
Some 3DMark03 benchmarks appear. The Volari V3 scores more than thousand points, Volari V5 about twice as much and V8 somewhat over 3000. A VolariDUO V5 Ultra goes for more than 4000 and the VolariDUO V8 Ultra scores 5600 points. These results are very promising but some have doubts if they are real. As these benchmarks are done with early hardware and drivers there are chances that performance can be improved in the retail products. For comparison: at that time a Radeon 9800 Pro would score about 6000 3DMark03's. The results are probably from the XGI labs (Chris Lin).

There is also a picture of a XG40 GPU. It's A0-silicon dated 0323 (32th week of 2003).

24 September 2003
ASUS, Abit, Gigabyte and Club3D might sell XGI cards in the near future. In the meantime a hardware reviewer is testing XGI products and gets 5370 3DMark03's with a VolariDUO (probably a V8 Ultra) which is a little slower than a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and Radeon 9800 Pro.

27 September 2003
XGI shows working hardware on Computex.

29 September 2003
Chris Lin says that XGI will make profit in 2005 and have high market share in 2007.

3 Oktober 2003
Club3D announces that it'll sell XGI-based graphic cards.

24 Oktober 2003
XGI will deliver various PCI-Express cards in Q2 2004.

3 November 2003
A test with VolariDUO V8 Ultra sample pops up. The card fills the gap between the 9800 XT and FX 5700 Ultra with Quake III and 3DMark03. This is with early drivers, a card with 450MHz (DDR2-900) RAM and the image quality wasn't tested (Image quality and driver cheats were hot at that time, so people were curious about it).

8 November 2003
Tom's Hardware reviews a sample of the VolariDUO V8 Ultra and says that the cooling isn't so good and is very noisy. This sample also has 450MHz RAM (DDR2-900). De drivers do not allow Anistropic Filtering (AF) or Anti-Aliasing (AA) settings or trilinear filtering. Some errors with scenes in 3DMark03 and Aquamark 3 are also noted. The VolariDUO V8 Ultra is getting along with ATi and nVidia in terms of performance but image quality falls behind. The card seems to have a hard time with Pixel Shader 2.0 (PS2.0) and stencil shadows. As both hardware and drivers are in development-stage, some people still hope for somewhat better results.

2 December 2003
VolariDUO will be launched on 8 December.

3 December 2003
Club3D will launch a VolariDUO V8 Ultra soon. It'll use 0.13 micron chips that are manufactured by UMC. The chips will run at 350MHz and the memory will be clocked at 400MHz (DDR2-800).

8 December 2003
A Club3D VolariDUO V8 Ultra review popped up! The card has been released officially and Club3D is the first manufacturer to release the XGI cards. The reviewer notices that the chips run at 328MHz and that the RAM is running at 450MHz (DDR2-900). It seems that the VolariDUO is running very hot and that the fully copper heatsinks are really necessary. Depending on the application the VolariDUO is either quite alright or very weak. Vertex shaders and raw filtrate are quite fine but pixel shaders run very slow on the VolariDUO.

My VolariDUO doesn't have a PCB date (some do have, but some don't), but I guess the card is from late 2003 or early 2004.

10 December 2003
XGI says that the lowered clock-frequency of the VolariDUO (328MHz rather than 350MHz) doesn't affect performance much and that the promised 500MHz RAM (DDR2-1000) isn't not possible because the DDR2 memory needs more power than the normal DDR memory. At the time a document from Micron stated that DDR2 is more energy efficient. Full Screen Anti Aliasing (FSAA) will be available in the next Reactor 1.01.05 version.

15 December 2003
A French hardware site has tested the Volari V8 Ultra. This is a card with only one chip and it's tested with a rather slow system for it's time (Athlon XP 1600+). With both 3DMark03 and Aquamark 3 the card performs good but the 'X2 - The threat' scores are appalling. It's unsure if the slow CPU is causing the lower score so it's still not clear what the XGI really does.

17 December 2003
Someone has analyzed the XGI drivers and found a lot of executable-names in a file. As driver-cheating was quite an item in 2003 people were suspicious pretty quick. At this time some people start to see patterns in benchmarking methods. The Volari's score fairly good with 3DMark03 and Aquamark 3 but in some specific games it falls behind quickly. This might be due to the synthetic rendering that 3DMark03 / Aquamark 3 has. Every benchmark run is always identical so drivers can manipulate these renderings by fading out details or pre-render parts of the scenes.

18 December 2003
XGI says that there are no cheats in their drivers. They say that the list of filenames was used for driver developers to see what behavior each game has. This list isn't necessary in the final driver and XGI claims it's a human error that this list still existed in the Reactor driver.

19 December 2003
Vice-president from XGI's sales department says that four to five million graphic cards will be shipped in the next year (2004). About 200.000 chips are sold in 2003 of which a lot are mobile chips.

20 December 2003
According to a French hardware site there are cheats in the XGI Reactor driver. As expected the list of filenames is used to detect which application is used. The hardware site renamed the 3DMark03 executable to 3DMurk03 and the score in the Mother Nature test dropped from 20.6 to 8.8 FPS. The same trick for Unreal Tournament 2003 showed a drop from 88.2 FPS to 18.7 FPS. Quite a difference!

30 December 2003
Abit and Chaintech might sell XGI cards. Chaintech sold SiS cards in the past and Abit is mentioned as sponsor on the XGI website.

4 Januari 2004
XGI released new drivers and a German hardware review site benchmarked the VolariDUO again to see what scores it'll get. In most games it's a bit slower except for 'X2 - The Threat'. The Radeon 9800 Pro, which costs 80 euros less, is often twice as fast than the VolariDUO V8. Only with the 'High Polygon Count (8 lights)' benchmark from 3DMark2001 the VolariDUO is able to win.

16 Januari 2004
Despite that XGI has difficulties to set feet on the ground in the killing 3D card market, the company announces the XG45 GPU. This will be a Pixel Shader 3.0 (PS3.0) compliant chip and it will be manufactured at both 130nm and 90nm. The chip will be based on the V8 chip.

4 February 2004
A market share analysis appears indicating that XGI is gaining share in the desktop and mobile market with integrated chips and will loose with standalone chips. The article indicates that most of the profits are from Trident, a company of which XGI acquired the graphics division.

10 March 2004
A rumor appeared: ATi wants to acquire XGI. Analysts say it's unlikely that ATi will do it.

8 June 2004
Information about new XGI cards: The Volari PCIE (in V3, V5 and V8 model) will be a regular Volari but with PCI-Express bridge. The bridge chip will be installed on the PCB and won't be integrated in the chip. XGI says this is a little step they take before implementing a PCI-Express interface in their chips. The PCI-Express chips should appear in the end of 2004 and have PS3.0 and twelve pipelines (in their high-end model). The cards will use GDDR3.

Dell orders SiS and XGI chips. SiS is supposed to ship 100.000 chipsets per month starting from Q3 2004 for Dell Inspirion 1000 laptops. The XP5-chip from XGI will be used in Dell Inspirion 5150 laptops.

18 July 2004
After a lot of commotion about the VolariDUO V8, a review of the Volari V8 is posted by PCstats. The V8 is a mainstream card but slower than the GeForce FX5700LE.

6 March 2006
ATI Technologies announced the acquisition of MacroSynergy, a chip designer and XGI Technology alliance company. They also took over personnel from XGI Technology's Santa Clara inCalifornia.

17 October 2006
RealVision announced forming technology alliance with XGI to use the XG47 chip for medical applications.

27 May 2010
Silicon Integrated Systems (SIS) absorbed XGI.

Today
XGI no longer exists but few of their products survived. The VolariDUO turned out to be a very rare product that only shows up once every few years on second hand markets. If you do obtain one please check the brownish KZG capacitors since they usually fail.

As for performance see the benchmarks down below. The performance claims prior to the release of the VolariDUO in 2003 weren’t met. In older games it’ll score in the ballpark of a GeForce4 Ti. Of course there are exceptions since this unique card is not one-to-one comparable with regular cards.

As for drivers and compatibility: digging through the old comments on forums and discussion sites you’ll often find people noting that drivers are very bad. I found that this isn’t the case when using the latest Reactor driver. I guess all those people were referring back to the original launch reviews (with driver 1.00.00) and even never owned an XGI product in the first place! Back when this card was fairly new I tested all kinds of games and submitted problems on the XGI Developer Site and they fixed it in the next version. All in all drivers are basic (forget about AA/AF) yet stable.

Is this a card for a retro PC? No, this interesting piece of history is way too loud, consumes a lot of power and ATi/nVidia (GeForce4 Ti, Radeon 9600 Pro to name a few) offer better graphics, better (aftermarket) cooling options, newer drivers and are far easier to obtain . > Read more

Despite that both the VolariDUO and Volari V8 cards have been for sale in the retail market, not much XGI cards are around. I found this Volari V8 on a Dutch auction website long time ago and bought it immediately. The seller indicated that the card was from a friend who reviewed/tested graphic cards. Take a good look at this card and notice the little white sticker. All the review-cards (and lot's of product on CeBIT for example) have these stickers.

For more information about XGI see the Club3D VolariDUO V8 Ultra page. > Read more