HIS 9550 VIVO
Jul 1st, 2004 | By Archive
HIS 9550 VIVO
Date
: 07/1/04 – 05:14:46 AM
Author
:
Category
: Video Cards
Page 1 : Introduction
Manufacturer:
Hightech Information Systems
Price:
$109 USD
Hightech Information Systems, HIS for short, isnt the most famous graphics card manufacturer in the world. They have, however, been around since 1987 and are Hong Kongs leading graphics board maker. In 2002, they partnered up with ATi and adopted the Excalibur coin for their ATi based video cards. The term Excalibur came directly from the sword of King Arthur. If you dont know the story, read the book or catch the movie coming out this summer in North America.
The
Excalibur 9550 VIVO
was shipped out from Hong Kong and it took less than one week to arrive at my door. Thanks to Federal Express, the package arrived undamaged. When I opened up the box, it was rather empty. There was no foam protecting the video card, instead the retail box was simply wedged inside so that it couldnt easily be moved.
This wont be an issue if you buy your cards from retail stores as HIS wont be shipping them one card at a time.
Lets see what this baby as to offer.
Page 2 : Specifications
Cracking open the shipping box reveals the retail box as well as some papers and a Press CD.
Nothing huge here, lets open up the retail box and see what is inside.
What you dont see here is the manual. Its actually part of the package, I just left it out of the photo by accident.
Here are the nitty gritty details on the card from HIS.
With SMARTSHADER 2.0 technology, Excalibur 9500 series supports Microsoft DirectX®9.0 and the latest OpenGL® functionality allowing gamers to experience complex, movie-quality effects in next-generation 3D games and applications.
Excalibur 9500 supports the AGP 8X standard, which allows large volumes of texture and vertex data to be transferred faster from system memory to the chip. With ATI's new VIDEOSHADER technology, Excalibur 9500 continues the tradition of providing industry-leading video and DVD playback and also offers FULLSTREAM-a new technology that removes blocky artifacts from video and provides sharper image quality.
Features ATI's TRUFORM2.0, SMARTSHADER2.0 and SMOOTHVISION2.1, and HYPERZ III+ technologies
SMARTSHADER2.0 technology supports DirectX®9.0 and enables more complex and realistic lighting effects
Sharper-looking 3D graphics with ATI SMOOTHVISION2.1 technology
TRUFORM2.0 technology that makes the outlines of 3D characters and objects look smoother and more natural than ever before
AGP 8X Support
Dual display support with HYDRAVISION
Integrated TV-Out support up to 1024 x 768 resolution
Integrated DVI-compliant TMDS transmitter
Graphics Processor
Powered by ATI RADEON 9550 Visual Processing Unit
250MHz Graphics Engine Clock
Memory Configuration
64/128/256MB DDR memory
64/128-bit memory interface
400MHz, memory clock.
RAMDAC
Dual integrated 10-bit per channel palette DACs
operating at up to 400MHz
Bus Interface
AGP 8X / 4X
Connectors
On board 15-pin VGA connector for CRTmonitor
On board S-Video connector for TV-Out
On board DVI-I connector for Digital Flat Panel
External DVI-I to VGA adapter for Secondary CRT monitor
Independent resolutions and refresh rates for any two connected displays
Drivers Included
Windows®XP
Windows®2000
System Requirement
Intel®Pentium®4/III/II, Celeron, AMD®K6/Athlonor compatible with AGP 8X / 4X slot
128MB of system memory
Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
DVD playback requires DVD drive
The latest incarnation of ATI's innovative higher order surface technology. It is designed to smooth out the curved surface of 3D characters, objects, and terrain by increasing the polygon count through a process called "tessellation". By taking advantage of the massive vertex processing power of the RADEON 9700, it delivers more natural looking 3D scenes without requiring any changes to existing artwork.
SMARTSHADER 2.0 technology allows users to experience complex, movie-quality effects in next-generation 3D games and applications:
Programmable pixel and vertex shaders
16 textures per pass
Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with 128-bit floating point precision
o Realistic lighting of any kind of surface
o Varying properties of a material across a surface
o Accurate modelling of objects with microstructure
o Horizon mapping
Vertex shaders up to 1024 instructions with flow control
o Procedural deformation
o Fur rendering
o Advanced keyframe interpolation
o Shadow volume extrusion
o Particle systems
o Many light sources
o Lens effects
o Advanced matrix palette skinning
Multiple render target support
Shadow volume rendering acceleration
High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer support
Supports DirectX® 9.0 and the latest version of OpenGL giving developers the freedom to create more complicated effects than ever before
SMOOTHVISION 2.1
Technology provides new levels of image quality using state-of-the-art Anti-Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) techniques.
Anti-aliasing enhances image quality by smoothing jagged edges on object outlines. SMOOTHVISION 2.1 uses an advanced multi-sampling technique that takes up to 6 samples per pixel, coupled with powerful loss-less compression technology for maximum efficiency and performance at any display resolution.
Anisotropic filtering improves image quality by sharpening blurry textures to bring out finer detail. SMOOTHVISION 2.1 employs an adaptive algorithm that takes from 1 to 16 filtered samples per pixel as required to achieve ideal quality, without wasting effort on parts of the image that would not benefit. Two modes allow this feature to be optimized for performance or image quality, as desired.
HyperZ III+
The latest generation of ATI's innovative HYPER Z bandwidth saving technology, HYPER Z III+ plays a pivotal role in allowing RADEON 9800 series and RADEON 9600 series products to reach unprecedented levels of rendering performance. It builds on earlier versions of the technology by adding a more flexible Z-buffer cache that is optimized for the rendering of dynamic real-time shadows. Shadows play a key role in achieving realistic and immersive virtual environments, and will be used extensively in upcoming 3D game titles.
HYDRAVISION
HYDRAVISION Multi-monitor Management Software enables you to tailor your desktop to the way you work, so you can manage increased amounts of information and improve your productivity.
Here is the front and back of the video card.
Just like the specs above say, this card is clocked at 250 MHz GPU and 400 MHz memory. If you look closely at the card, you can read the specifications on the memory.
Does that say 4ns? Potential for more? Well, we dont call this Overclockers Online for nothing. Well check out how hard I push the card a little later on though.
(RAM clock) x (RAM I/F) = (400MHz) x (128-bit x 2 (DDR)) = 400,000,000 x 256 (bit) = 102,400,000,000 bits/second = (102,400,000,000 / 8) = 12,800,000,000 Bytes/second = (12,800,000,000) / (1,024×1,024×1,024) = 11.92092896GB/second
I mentioned earlier that HIS is Hong Kongs leading video card supplier and this card also supports VIVO. If youre wondering how they make the output compatible to where you live, its done by a simple jumper.
You wont find this switch in the manual or anything; I had to ask HIS what this little thing does.
Page 3 : Installation
This is the easiest part of the review. There is a small manual (10 pages) on how its done. Take the old card out and slide in the new one.
If you want to connect two CRT monitors, you can attach the DVI converter packaged with this card. The little manual shows you how to utilize the VIVO feature, though it is pretty simple. If you want TV-Out, plug in either a S-video or RCA cable to the S-video out or the RCA out. If you want TV-In, plug in either a S-video or RCA cable into the S-video in or the RCA in.
Page 4 : Overclocking
If it has a processor and memory, the article would never be complete without some overclocking. To accomplish that, adequate cooling must be provided. This card doesnt offer much additional cooling. There are no ramsinks or massive heatsinks, just a simple iFAN. Im not really expecting much in terms of overclocking, but well see how far things go.
If you look very closely at the video card, you can see the contact made by the iFan and the GPU.
To find the maximum potential of the HIS 9550, I ran all the benches with the ATi Catalyst 4.6 drivers, then uninstalled the drivers and installed the Catalyst 4.6
Softmod
drivers. Using ATiTool, I played with the automatic overclocker and also manually overclocked. In the end, I stopped at
432/522
(GPU/Memory). If you ask me, thats not terribly bad. I was sort of expecting more from the Hynix 4 ns chips, but I guess the heat was too much. Even with a bit of air cooling, the RAM peaked over 41 degrees! Its fine time I invested in some ramsinks.
Page 5 : System Specs and Synthetic Benchmarks
Heres the test rig Ill be using. It hasnt really changed from the last review.
Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0
AMD Mobile 2500+ @ 210*12
Ultra 2x512MB PC3200> 2-3-3-7
astek KT03A-L30 water cooling
Maxtor 40 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
Windows XP SP1 + latest drivers
Like all video card reviews, I started with the basics.
3D Mark 2001 SE 32 Bit
Only 2X Anti-Aliasing could be achieved on the Ti4200 at 1280*1024 and 4X AA at 1024*768. Other settings resulted in abnormal operations of 3D Mark 2001 SE.
3D Mark 2003
There were no options for the Ti4200 to run at either 2 or 4X AA.
Comanche 4
Frames per Second
Triangles per Second
With the Ti4200, please note the changes made during benchmarking. At 1024*768, the test with anti-aliasing was run at only 4X AA, not 6X while at 1280*1024, it was lowered to 2X. Trying to run it any higher resulted in system instability.
Code Creature
Frames per Second
Poly per Second
For some bizarre reason, I dont have any idea why I could run the benchmark on 1600*1200 when not overclocked, but couldnt when I did. Everything was perfectly stable, I know a few of these benchmarks evolved into some mutated AI.
The Ti4200 ran at 1280*1024 2X AA not 4X, anything else resulted in random crashes.
Aqua Mark
Frames per Second
Triangles per Second
Note that when the third benchmark on the Ti4200 was at 1024*768 with 4X AA and 8X AF, with 1280*1024, it failed to run properly resulting in a Out of Video Memory Error. The indicated 1280*1024 6X AA benchmark is really 1280*1024 2X AA. Benchmarking at 1600*1200 on anything other than stock for the 9550 resulted in the program crashing.
Page 6 : Gaming Benchmarks
UT2K3
I know most people have used the HardOCP benchmarking utilities, but I decided to stick with the preinstalled gear.
Bot Match
Fly By
Call of Duty
Frames per Second
If it isnt one problem, its another. With my Ti4200, at 1600*1200, I was getting Out of Sync messages from my monitor!
Final Fantasy Xi
This is a new benchmark I found while looking for other things to test with. If you ask me, it doesnt seem like it conveys a lot of information. Here it is anyhow:
Page 7 : Conclusion
I think the numbers say a lot with this product. At just over one hundred dollars, it makes the card very affordable for anyone looking to upgrade from the old GF 4 MX card or ATi 7×00.
The performance difference from my old Ti4200 compared to the stock and even overclocked 9550 showed very little difference. The cards were equally matched most of the time. Where the 9550 generally pulls ahead is at the higher resolutions or when Anti-Aliasing is activated.
If you saw the overclocking results, the 9550 blew my socks away. A
seventy
percent gain on the engine and
thirty
percent gain on the memory. Not bad for stock cooling and no ramsinks.
Advantages
:
Easily affordable
Supports VIVO
Supports both Analog and Digital input
DirectX 9 Support
AGP 8X
Disadvantage
:
Not the most powerful video card available
Better cooling could probably result in higher overclocking