August marks the arrival of a possible third player in the pc graphics arena, dubbed XGI, eXtreme Graphics Innovation, this Taiwanese manufacturer announces a dual processor videocard which is fully DirectX 9.0 compatible and should offer performance similar to Ati’ Radeon 9800 Pro or Nvidia’s GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. XGI also offers other videocards based on a single XGI Volari processor. Although the name suggests an entirely new company, its employees have a long history working for the graphics division of SiS which has had moderate success with their Xabre graphics processors. It won’t be until September, during Computex before we can see their products in action and get a feel for the actual performance.



Fig 11. The default 3Dmark2003 benchmark score for the Volari Duo V8 Ultra on a 3GHz Pentium 4 system.
On the web things heat up considerably as the W32.Blaster and Sobig.F viruses infect many computers around the world. Especially the W32.Blaster wormvirus wrecks havoc amongst Windows PCs and servers which their lazy users or administrators have failed to patch properly. Ironically Microsoft itself is also affected by the wormvirus, apparently their system administrators did not do their homework properly. Computers with the Unix, Linux or Solaris operating system fortunately keep on running without a hitch, which is what most experienced system administrators use anyway.