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Matrox's New Three-Head Video Card
This Anonymous Coward was one of many readers to point to sites with information on Matrox's upcoming Parhelia-512 graphics card: "It appears that some foreign hardware sites have violated NDA and posted some very juicy details on Matrox's next generation hardware. iXBT's review can be found here(1), and a MURC posting with some other pics from China can be found here (2).
It looks like the real deal. Will Matrox wake up from their long slumber in the 3D gaming market, or will this card be another stopgap like the G550 was?" Update: 05/12 14:07 GMT by T : Alexander Medvedev of ixbt.com points to the English version now online as well, and notes : "Please note, we can't violate NDA becouse we _do _not _sign _anything
with Matrox Graphics. And never receive any info from Matrox."
It has 10 bit ramdacs, nothing close to that has come to the consumer market. The 2D has been raised a notch or two and NVIDA and ATI both have no real way of countering the 2D performance at this stage. The 3D is going to be good perhaps better than ATI and Nvidia but Matrox has like 2-3 year product cycles, they can't can't compete forever on 3D performance unless they restructure their company and change their engineering philsophy.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Alright, now something on-topic: do any games support more than one monitor? I remember F/A-18 for the Mac could make use of three monitors, one for the front view and one for the left and right views each. This greatly increased the feeling of realism, and was especially useful during dogfights.
I suppose flight simulations and racing games would profit most from this.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Will this card need noisy annoying little fans ? I hate it when a computer sounds like a vacuum cleaner... And what about the power consumption ?
I'm looking into getting myself a new computer. What choices at a video card do I have, if I want something that's not a big fucking nuclear reactor, and yet runs all the newest games for at least 2 years ?
They have a few screenshots of different games which they've tricked into supporting it at the first link above. And I have to admit - it makes me a little drooly. :)
It's also a brilliant move for Matrox: If they keep throwing out 3 head cards at a premium price - after buying one Matrox 3-headed card, who's not going to keep purchasing Matrox cards? If you got this set-up, would you disable one or two of your gaming monitors just to get the new nvidia whizbang that might be 10-20% faster?
Neomagic, however, eventually learned the folly of having an anti-Linux policy, and were forced to leave the Laptop chipset market altogether; I am sure that the various laptop makers did not appreciate all of the returns from people who wanted to use Linux.
You want to back that up even just a little bit? I love Linux and I'm running it on this Compaq EVO N160 but to think that a video *chipset* manufacturer even sees laptop returns due to Linux is absurd. In fact if you look at the page you provided, the drivers are done by Precision Insight; Someone over there probably talked them down into allowing source release, not hordes of Linux users who demanded their money back from the laptop vendors, who got so upset that they called Neomagic.
"follow of having an anti-Linux policy" -- geez do you believe the crap you write? Yes Linux is great in servers and it's making headway (very great headway) in the desktop market but it hasn't got clout like you try to attribute to it.
I mean, if you look at the performance charts at end, you'll notice that they are cheap Excel graphs. Personally, if I were as big a company as Matrox I'd use something better than Excel to make graphs. Or at least, they wouldn't be that crappy.
Spoken like a person who has no idea how computers are used in the real world. Yes, there are programs that use 3D, including modelling and games. They continue to form a very small part of the market.
In evidence I present the Matrox G200 MMS; a four-head video card based on the marginally 3D-capable G200 chip. Matrox sells these by the bucketload into businesses like finance, who give some value to a card that can present four screens of 2D information. I also present the 10 Top Selling Games of 2001. There's exactly zero games in there that can't be played on a G400, and one that would like a more powerful card (Black and White).
Yes, Matrox realizes that they cannot compete in the high-end 3D gaming market with the G550. What you need to realize is that most of the computer users in the world don't need any3D, let alone more than what a G400 can deliver.
"Neomagic, however, eventually learned the folly of having an anti-Linux policy, and were forced to leave the Laptop chipset market altogether; I am sure that the various laptop makers did not appreciate all of the returns from people who wanted to use Linux. "
No. It was ATI and nVidia making mobile editions of their chipsets that pushed NeoMagic out the door.
Linux is far less relevant than you desire it to be.
The Matrox cards have always been considered the top of the line as far as image quality goes. Sure their 3D performance lags behind nVidia and ATI, but the images are very crisp and sharp - something very important to those who do non gaming work at high resolutions such as programmers and graphic artists. The 10 bit DAC is very important - it allows you to calibrate the gamma of your display without losing colors. After gamma calibration, an 8 bit DAC will not allow you to use all 8 bits for displaying colors. This means you will not be able to see all 16 million colors for a 24 bit image. The matrox's 10 bit DAC doesn't have this limitation and will always display all 16 million colors even with gamma correction.