Today SiS has taken the wraps off their newest value line GPU, the Xabre600 with 300MHz core and memory clock, and the folks from Lost Circuits are here to tell us all about it in their extensive review.

Suffice it to say that from a technical standpoint, the Xabre600 with its Vertexilizer technology and XiminatorII drivers is a very interesting solution. The concept certainly appears to work, at least in conjunction with a 3 GHz P4 and, moreover, the vertex shaders are not locked in hardware which means that the GPU can be upgraded to future versions of vertex shader specifications. The question is, will anybody really need that. It was only 18 months ago that the GeForce3 was released and where is it now? The GeForce4 along with the RADEON 8500 and 9000 don't qualify as state of the art anymore but that is only in the face of the RADEON 9700 and the upcoming GeForce FX. Bottom line is that the graphics market is moving extremely fast and, therefore, software upgradeability may be interesting but become applicable at a point where the rest of the hardware is already completely obsolete.