Given the Driver Situation,
right now , that's (partly) correct of course.
As I said earler, plain Gamers cannot go wrong with the established Cards to avoid Problems; but do note a mere 2 weeks worth of Driver work got about 5% out of it throughout the envelope + likely some more bugs fixed (didn't test in Detail)
The way I see it, it is just an interesting piece of Hardware that is slowly being given the right Drivers to show its performance, a completely natural development.
The process naturally puts the Hardware far below envelope at first, and it is in the process of achieving progressivly higher performance almost every month.
Bottom line :
It's getting there, it's just not quite there yet=====================
If we didn't honor that, hardly any 3D Accelerator would have seen the light of the day, and we'd still use our ET4000/6000 in highly optimized VESA Modes :P
And as this is S3's first serious step into performance 3D since a
very long time, it has to take the hard road of gathering experience with the Rules of optimizing and closely collaborating with the Gaming Industry.
(while the big tiers already can utilize their >5 years worth of know-how in that field)
Putting that in perspective (which I found many people and reviewers simply don't do), it remains a solid piece of Hardware,
for those that have the time to spare to get into it.
If we would put that attitude "everything must run bug-free right from the get-go at max. performance and Quality" towards all pieces of Hardware, we'd probably wouldn't even have 3D Accelerators, nor a PCI/AGP Bus or some other HighTech bits right now... All put down and failed prematurely because of initial bugs or problems.
What you (and other Critics) need to understand, is that the Radeon 8500 (as an example) has absolutely topped off by all means (Drivers, Performance, Support, Optimization), while the Deltachrome in turn is just beginning to catch serious throttle in all of those fields.The Kyro1/2 had exactly the same Problems at first, were put down because of Drivers and still working with SD-RAM.
The end we know, they actually turned out as excellent and highly efficient Gaming cards in the end (for those that knew what they were doing).
==============
Mind you, I might test the freshly arrived XGI counterpart later today ;)
(looking at the Retail Box, the Game of
Marketing those guys already play very well *g* )
And yes, this
is serious fun for me, that's what I got those Cards for ;D
PS.
It's a 256MB Card, don't actually know why 3D Quark insists on claiming it was 512MB
http://www.falconfly.de/img/crazysmile.gif
