New drivers
SiS has revamped its Xabre drivers, and at least on the surface, fixed a lot of problems with previous versions. Those initial drivers required a registry hack to enable anything other than a low texture quality setting for 3D applications. This was a particular sore point in our initial Xabre400 review, but these new drivers let you adjust DirectX and OpenGL texture quality with an easy slider right in the driver control panel. That's really the way it should be; having to resort to Regedit to unlock high quality textures is unacceptable.

In addition to adding a texture quality slider, SiS has also include an application that lets you automatically throttle the Xabre's clock speeds when you're not using 3D applications. It's an interesting feature, but one that's probably better suited for mobile or small form factor applications where power consumption and heat are more of a concern.

Our testing methods
Our test systems were configured like so:

ProcessorPentium 4 2.26GHz
Front-side bus533MHz (133MHz quad-pumped)
MotherboardSOYO SY-P4X400 DRAGON Ultra
North bridgeVT8754
South bridgeVT8235
Chipset driversVIA 4-in-1 4.43
Memory size512MB (2 DIMMs)
Memory typeCAS 2.5 PC2700 DDR SDRAM
Graphics cardSiS Xabre400
SiS Xabre600		NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4200 64MB
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460		ATI Radeon 9000 Pro
Graphics driverXminator II 3.07Detonator 40.72CATALYST 2.24, 2.23
StorageMaxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X 7200RPM ATA/133 hard drive
OSMicrosoft Windows XP Professional
OS updatesService Pack 1

We don't have any official pricing from SiS on the Xabre600, but according to SiS' roadmaps, the card should be priced to compete with ATI's Radeon 9000 Pro, and NVIDIA's high-end GeForce MX and low-end GeForce4 Ti 4200. The Xabre600 is the only AGP 8X card of the lot, but that shouldn't make a huge difference in the benchmark results.

You'll notice that two sets of CATALYST drivers were used for the Radeon 9000 Pro. For some reason, the Codecreatures test just wouldn't run with the latest 2.24 drivers, even after a fresh, driver-less re-imaging of the test system. Because of this, I tested the Radeon 9000 Pro with the 2.24 drivers for everything but Codecreatures, where I used the 2.23 drivers.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.