Xabre400 and the latest games..

[oymd]

My friend has a northwood 2GHZ...with 512RDRAM..and a Power Color Xabre400 128MB on an MSI 850 mobo and a 400 watt P.S.
All previous games run perfectly on his PC..well up to GTA3...ALL the NEWER titles either run horribly or crash his PC after a few seconds of play...!
I'm the one who setup his PC..all his drivers are upto date...
Every time WINXP crashes..and restarts..i get this error about the display drivers { the XABRE ofcourse } being the cause...bla bla...and the serious error thing.
For the past 2 months there are NO NEW drivers on the XABRE site or on the POWER COLOR site.
Well...i took out his card and put in my Radeon 64MBDDR VIVO...and voila..all the new games are running perfectly...so it must be his card.
The card itself cant be defective..cuz all older games run perfect..so it must be the drivers...i wanna help him out...what am i supposed to do??
Games working ok:
GTA3
SOF2
AvP2
Mafia
MOHAA
Jedi Outcast

Games that DO NOT WORK at ALL..crash and restart:
UT2003..{ works very very slowly...~ 5 fps} for 5 minutes then restarts
NOLF2
Need For Speed HP2
Hitman 2
Battlefield 1942

Anyone can help on this one..or anyone with a Xabre and having no problems with the newer games..


P.S. in case u r wondering why he bought that shitty card with his expensive setup...he's waiting for the NV30

 

[Insomniator]

While the xabre is nice on paper, it is rather lame in performance. It also has about 1% support, so many
of the problems with the games you mentioned may be due to the fact that the game doesn't fully suppot the card.
SIS is not a good company in terms of video cards... and if they don't update drivers, your friend will be in hell for the next few months.

What did he pay for the card? The nv30 is only a few months away and a 50$ geforce 2ti would play games fine till then, well alot better than the xabre i bet.

I guess i wasn't much help..

 

[Soulkeeper]

Yeah that's the price you pay for a cheap budget card
it's SIS's first attempt at mainstream 3d cards can't expect too much
i would sell the card to some sorry sap and pick up a radeon 8500 or GF3 ti200 or higher card
like Insomniator suggests, if that radeon you got in there now is fine then you could wait till NV30 comes out then throw in a top of the line card

 

[holdencommodore]

Has your friend tried the 3.06.55 performance driver for the Xabre (released 3rd October 2002)? He could also try doing a clean install if that hasn't already been done.

Cheers

 

[oymd]

thanks for all the replies guys....

yeah..he's using the latest performance drivers...

 

[NEVERwinter]

well, it's promising... but current games havent fully supported it. So we must give it some time before all games supports it.

remember when the first VooDoo released? on that time, there were no real 3d games to play with. hehe....

 

[nemesismk2]

I've tested the Inno3D Xabre400 using the latest v3.07.55 drivers and have found the video card to offer good performance and image quality (when using the quality setting), it's also been very stable and didn't crash even once.

I tested UT2003 and found that if you use normal settings and disable detailed textures you can get good performance from the Xabre.

 

[EdipisReks]

all those games work fine with my 64 MB SIS Xabre400.