At first, S3 Graphics and XGI Technology were planning to deliver high-end offerings and conquer the graphics cards market from top-to-bottom. But neither of the mentioned succeeded in delivering even proper mainstream graphics product with appropriate drivers not talking about high-end offerings. Now each of these two companies is trying to address mainstream and entry-level markets first.

Phoronix web-site has posted an article containing some information about Volari 8300 graphics chip from XGI Technology. While this review lacks benchmarking data of the graphics card, it contains an in-depth description of the architecture used.

?The Volari 8300 may sound appealing on paper for the value-ended casual gamer and especially video junkies, we will need to wait until our samples arrive (which unfortunately didn't arrive on time) before we can draw any decisive conclusion as to XGI's next generation GPUs. Although it may sound horrid that XGI's flagship product may perform like a NVIDIA 6200 or ATI X300SE, the Volari 8300 may make a special niche for consumers when it comes to servers, notebooks, and especially home-theatre users. XGI engineers believe the video processing capabilities of their latest product supersede that of NVIDIA's PureVideo as important features such as 3:2 Pulldown bad-edit correction and inverse telecine were removed from that technology. Not only will this low-wattage GPU make it possible to have a reliable video system while sticking to passive cooling, but also if everything turns out the XG47 may be a fabulous overclocker,?writes Phonix.

• Phoronix: XGI Technology Volari 8300 (XG47) Review.