The basic comparison is that a V3XT is like a Radeon 9250 as we ship in the ODW currently.

The Volari V5 is comparable to a Radeon 9500 and the Volari V8 is comparable to a Radeon 9800.

There is a dual GPU version ("V8 Duo") with 512MB which bridges some gap between top end 9800 performance and ATI's next cards.

We have driver capability for all of the above, plus the register documentation.



We do, as always.

Genesi still holds good relationship with ATI and we are working with them on Linux drivers, but the ball is in their court.

Do you know if all nextgen products (XG45/50/60) are cancelled or are they still going to appear?

that's marketing. i've read quite a lot of tests on these cards and all testers agrees on the fact that these comparisons are quite overrated and that the XGI cards have poor performance against the ATI cards, and buggy drivers (with cheats into the drivers to provide beautiful screen captures in games while the games look awful in "real".)

I still cross my fingers for ATI to move on with linux drivers. I have nothing against XGI if they prove that they improved but for now they have disappointed most PC users and testers.

I do know that the performance of the Volari's suffered due to the weakness of their drivers - maybe Genesi has fixed the problems inherent here. Considering that they are looking mainly at the embedded portfolio of XGI, it would seem that they know something that we do not.

The next couple of months should be quite interesting for us.

very true, but hopefully we can get some mainstream support from one of the GPU giants.

Some facts:

- XGI cards have an mpeg decoder on board which works on PPC linux

- XGI cards have great deinterlacing features (5-field motion and edge adaptive deinterlacing), component out, High-Def (1080i) support even in the lower-end cards. These features are not found on either ATI or Nvidia cards.

- Linux has few applications which can take advantage of the really advanced (and expensive) features found in state of the art Nvidia and ATI cards ( think SLI ). On PPC Linux, 3D ( think XGL, OpenGl games ) is important, but features such as SLI are simply not needed at this time. Afaik they cannot even be used on x86 linux.

- XGI makes very affordable power-efficient graphics chips and 2D-only chips as well ( which is important for our embedded partners )

- XGI has open sourced the 2D part of its driver and does not require the community to reverse engineer its cards. Various of our Efika developers have received register-level documentation already.

That's interesting, but where can we get these ?

Just give bill or me a ping.

OK, "ping pvdabeel" then ;-)

see your email 8)

'ping pvdapeel' id like to see this information.

Ping = send me an email

no worries, my email's creaturisms@yahoo.com

While it's true they have a weak shader model support compared to ATI cards, they perform better in other areas (the chips do a heck of a lot more than 3D, at fractions of the power consumption, and price). This gives a broadly averaged score in benchmarks (you can reproduce that graphic Arno posted very easily..)

Concerning the discussion about the performance of the XGI cards I'd like to say that a comparison with a Radeon 9800 sounds really good (and since blender isn't using most of the "cool stuff" most of the newer cards are overpowered ;-) ). I'm looking forward to it.

But just to understand the other statements about the documentation etc.: will there be some opensource drivers supporting 3D on the XGI cards? Not necessarily from Genesi, but also from other devs (who got the necessary docs from Genesi). Or will the 3D part still be kept closed?

I don't need so much 3D performance, but still beeing able to use this card after 5 years with the newest linux kernel to get a nice XGL-desktop with working suspend would be worth a try. :-)

SHORT: Will an opensource driver for the 3D part of the XGI cards be available?

Thank you for clarifying this. Oh, and many more thanks for your great work guys! :-D