XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra AGP 256MB GPU Retro

erek

erek

[H]F Junkie
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Dec 19, 2005
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I remember being really optimistic about this card being able to compete with ATI and nVidia of the day.

Oh well, an attempt was made!

Anybody else remember the Matrox Parhelia? :D
 
I always find these kinds of products fascinating. They took some odd design choices and risks. With 20/20 hindsight it's easy to see that it never would have worked out but it's still fun to look back on them anyways. Parhelia's weird Vertex Shaders vs Pixel Shaders being one of those oddball designs. Why were the Vertex Shaders SM 2.0 capable but the Pixel Shaders only 1.3? :D

EDIT - anyone else feel sad and nostalgic about these years? It was a great time to be a gamer/PC enthusiast. Doom 3, Half Life 2, FEAR, the original Far Cry? Etc. etc. I feel like ever since we got into the Xbox 360 mainstream generation of PC gaming it just kind of lost its way. Oh well - sorry - this is not one of "those" threads. :)
 
Ah, yeah, I remember the Volaris. I was in touch with someone in their U.S. office and had the opportunity to beta test drivers on hardware they'd have provided me free of charge, but I passed on the opportunity after an extended family member passed away and I was trying to finish my undergrad degree. Things I remember:

* XGI's single-board SLI/Crossfire solution was contingent on a modified "MuTIOL" chip originally used as a high-speed interconnect on SiS motherboards between the northbridge and southbridge, but its bandwidth was insufficient for alternate frame rendering. This manifested as awful frametimes and negatively non-linear performance scaling relative to other multi-GPU solutions from 20 years ago.
* The single chip Volari V5 I owned for 24 hours advertised support for Windows 2000, but the driver INF didn't contain the information necessary to install on that OS. Curious, I took the test machine and installed a fresh copy of XP, and the driver installed without a hitch... and the 3D quality and performance were awful. Visible mipmap cheating was evident everywhere, and weird bugs abounded. Half-Life 2 was slower than a GeForce FX 5200SE with half the memory bandwidth and periodically showed rendering errors, and trying to shunt the game down to DirectX 7 mode with mat_dxlevel 70 resulted in all in-game entities simply vanishing. Doom 3 ran in the ARB compatibility mode without other rendering errors, but after the fact I determined that the card should have run in ARB2 mode but was temporarily being disabled by checking the executable name... no idea why. For what it was worth both 2D and video playback on the V5 were adequate to good by 2005 standards. I returned the card and put a little money on top for a Radeon 9550 that may not have been the fastest card out there, but was passively cooled and practically in a different dimension by comparison.
* Driver support evaporated outright by around late 2006, to the point that there were never WDDM-compatible drivers released. I can't imagine spending the $400-ish dollars it'd take to get an Volari V8 Duo Ultra with Cheese and getting that experience for the money.
 
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Halon said:
Ah, yeah, I remember the Volaris. I was in touch with someone in their U.S. office and had the opportunity to beta test drivers on hardware they'd have provided me free of charge, but I passed on the opportunity after a family member passed away and I was trying to finish my undergrad degree. Things I remember:

* XGI's single-board SLI/Crossfire solution was contingent on a modified "MuTIOL" chip originally used as a high-speed interconnect on SiS motherboards between the northbridge and southbridge, but its bandwidth was insufficient for alternate frame rendering. This manifested as awful frametimes and negatively non-linear performance scaling relative to other multi-GPU solutions from 20 years ago.
* The single chip Volari V5 I owned for 24 hours advertised support for Windows 2000, but the driver INF didn't contain the information necessary to install on that OS. Curious, I took the test machine and installed a fresh copy of XP, and the driver installed without a hitch... and the 3D quality and performance were awful. Visible mipmap cheating was evident everywhere, and weird bugs abounded. Half-Life 2 was slower than a GeForce FX 5200SE with half the memory bandwidth and periodically showed rendering errors, and trying to shunt the game down to DirectX 7 mode with mat_dxlevel 70 resulted in all in-game entities simply vanishing. Doom 3 ran in the ARB compatibility mode without other rendering errors, but after the fact I determined that the card should have run in ARB2 mode but was temporarily being disabled by checking the executable name... no idea why. For what it was worth both 2D and video playback on the V5 were adequate to good by 2005 standards. I returned the card and put a little money on top for a Radeon 9550 that may not have been the fastest card out there, but was passively cooled and practically in a different dimension by comparison.
* Driver support evaporated outright by around late 2006, to the point that there were never WDDM-compatible drivers released. I can't imagine spending the $400-ish dollars it'd take to get an Volari V8 Duo Ultra with Cheese and getting that experience for the money.
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Great to hear the memories of experiences like this. Without posts like yours, the history of these devices will vanish as there's nothing in print that will stand the test of time offline.
 
SamirD said:
Great to hear the memories of experiences like this. Without posts like yours, the history of these devices will vanish as there's nothing in print that will stand the test of time offline.
Click to expand...
Weird thing is, looking back at my posting history on these forums I've gone off on the Volaris at least twice prior. Something about being promised a legitimate third contender in the GPU space back then and being handed trash that worked with heinously low reliability rubbed me wrong. Probably best to let that go this many years later, but I feel bad for anyone who bought one hoping for a path forward and then getting that.

Meanwhile my Intel Arc A770's wildly exceeding my expectations...
 
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