Club3D Volari V3XT

Final Thoughts...

The Club3D Volari V3XT has been something of a disappointment for us, with some issues that either relate to hardware or to the drivers. With the card being designed with Home Theatre PC's in mind, we would expect video play back to be smooth at the least. The CPU usage can be lived with, but choppiness is unacceptable in our opinion.

In both WMV HD and DVD play back, we experienced large amounts of lag, which rendered the films un-watchable. We were not experiencing lag from the sound source - that came across fine and if you weren't looking at the video, you would assume that it was playing back smoothly. However, this was far from the case, with a very consistent lag being apparent throughout playback. We even went so far as to download a second WMV HD Showcase from the WMV HD website to establish whether we were seeing something that was unique to the chosen video stream.

The gaming performance was poor to non-existent in the latest titles, but we did manage to play some Counter-Strike 1.6 without too many hiccups. Half-Life 2 ranged from unplayable due to poor frame rates; to unplayable due to Windows Blue Screen Of Deaths right the way through to unplayable due to extreme display corruption. Doom 3 was remarkably unplayable - achieving a massive thirteen frames per second at the minimum possible detail settings. FarCry was the most playable out of the three big titles from last year, and even that was unplayable during portions with extreme vegetation or trees present in the scene. We put this down to a lack of vertex/geometry processing power, due to the video card only having the one vertex shader.

Features such as the on-board video decoder and HDTV-Out ports are great additions, as is the inclusion of support for DirectX9.0 class shaders. This goes one better than the Radeon 9200 SE, and also one better than the GeForce FX 5200, as they both only support DirectX 8.1 shaders. The image quality in 2D was very good, and we didn't notice any massive problems in either Doom 3 or FarCry - the image quality in those two titles was generally very good. There were big issues with Half-Life 2, but we've already discussed them above.

The problem here is that the XGI forgot one major factor with the Volari V3XT. Performance. It's a big shame, because the video card looks to be a very promising one on paper. However, it is all well and good being great on paper - execution is another matter altogether. The shader performance that this card delivers is poor, and two fragment pipelines proves to be too little to deliver anything close to a smooth gaming experience in today's games.

Now, we know this card is not designed for gaming; it's designed with the Home Theatre in mind. The video card is quiet and picture clarity is great - both are important factors in making the right choice for your Home Theatre PC. However, the factor that seems to have been forgotten again is the performance that the video card is capable of delivering - the playback quality was very poor to be quite frank.

We think it is fairly clear that this video card needs further driver development before it is capable of competing with the likes of the Radeon 9200 SE in the bargain basement for HTPC-suitable video cards, never mind in the gaming arena. The focus for XGI here should be to sort the video playback out before attempting to resolve the problems in games, seeing as the video card is primarily targeted at the Home Theatre PC enthusiast.

- Tim Smalley