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."

Comments

VERY low FPS

[GutBomb]

Look closely at the lower right corner of this screenshot. This is the one without the 16xFAA too. Pretty disappointing really.

Here is the screenshot from 3DMark 2001.

For those too lazy to look it shows a paltry 3 FPS.

Major problems with Matrox drivers: Explanation.

[Futurepower(R)]

L33t haxx0r: Notice the on-topic first post above.

Matrox Driver Problems: We are experiencing major driver difficulties with Matrox products under Windows XP. All of these are with the most recent Intel motherboards and Matrox G400, G450, and G550 adapters. We are using the latest Matrox drivers from the Matrox website. We have also tried the Microsoft certified drivers, which are much worse. We have tested with clean installations of Windows XP, as well as upgrades from Windows SE.

Our Win XP clean install test machine takes 18 seconds to display 97 items when doing a DIR directory listing. This appears to be caused by bad interactions between the Matrox drivers (with a new Matrox G550 adapter) and Windows XP. We are testing with a 2 GHz Pentium 4 and a new Intel motherboard.

We often see artifacts in DOS windows. Little colored vertical bars are left on the screen after some operations.

When we reported these things by telephone, the technical support representative, Bob Alionis, was very reluctant to deal with any matter that could not be solved quickly. He told us to try a video adapter from another manufacturer. This was difficult for us, since we have been building computers only with Matrox cards. Also, if an adapter from another manufacturer worked well, why would we go back to Matrox?

We tried an ATI Radeon card, and it worked better. We would be reluctant to switch to selling ATI cards because of our perception that ATI often has driver problems.

We haven't tried nVidia yet. Do nVidia chipset cards display business applications crisply? None of our customers run games, so sharpness at 1600 x 1200 resolution on 19" monitors is the most important criteria.

There is apparently no e-mail address for Matrox technical support. Matrox did not respond to e-mail sent to sales. Matrox did not respond to e-mail about technical problems sent to the RMA department.

Things have changed at Matrox. They are apparently trying to keep the number of tech support calls down by making it complicated to report a problem. The paragraph below is an exact quote from a message sent by a Matrox RMA department representative. The phone number mentioned is in Canada. Apparently Matrox does not have a U.S. number.

Jump through hoops RMA procedure:

"You can obtain an RMA for your board through Tech Support. Just make sure that you have registered your Matrox board on our web site http://www.matrox.com/mga/registration/home.cfm and have selected the option 'Obtain your tech support client id number...' at the Registration Menu. Once you obtain the client id number, just call 514-685-0270, then select option 1, followed by option 4, and then finally option 1 to reach the Tech Support queue to speak to a technician. For additional information on the RMA procedure, e-mail rma@matrox.com or call 514-822-6000 and ask for the RMA Department."

We wonder if Matrox is unable to fix its driver problems, and they are trying to avoid taking calls about them.

Re:Triple head on the cheap?

[blankmange]

Check out Maximum PC's May issue: this freak has 4 LCD screens (1 AGP & 3 PCI cards) running from one PC -- looks like somethng out of The Matrix..... He had to do some custom fabrication on the screens, but pretty cool..

Good to see that Linux support is a given

[Kiwi]

It is good to see that, when a major new video card comes out, Linux support for the card is a given. Just four years ago, the prominent manufactor of video chips for Laptops, Neomagic, had a very hostile policy towards Linux users, which results in problems to this day.

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. In fact, NeoMagic's support web page srill prominently discusses Linux drivers.

- Sam

The big question

[Snowfox]

This is all exceptionally cool. If it's not a hoax, the specs are nothing short of amazing. I've been a big Matrox fan from day one, and it's hurt to see them relegated to a tiny side booth on the floor at GDC and Siggraph.

I hope they're getting ready to make an explosion at Siggraph this year. :)

But the big question is - where the hell did all this come from? Did they hire a few people away from nvidia? Did they run across some brand new wunderkind? Or is this what happens when you shelve new product development for a few years and focus on delivering a new product three years, not six months from now?

Is the architecture modular and well-designed enough that Matrox can continue to compete when the other guys catch up?

And is Matrox (I hope) back?

3 heads not only for gaming

[Sarin]

I've been using matrox dualhead videocards for quite some time now on my studio machines. It's really handy for extending the cubase desktop on various screens, because there's too much information for one screen.
It's very important that the computer runs rocksolid for high end audio-applications, even the chip-set on the motherboard can be the cause of a lot of problems, that won't show up during non-audio applications. Luckely the matrox drivers a really solid, compared to other brands.
I was just ready to order a non-agp dualhead card in order to attach more screens to this machine, but now this card shows up and I will deffinately buy it as soon as it comes out.

Way to go Matrox.

[MADCOWbeserk]

I've always liked Matrox cards, ever since the MGA and Millenium. They usaully have rock solid drivers, support for alternate OS's, and the best 2D picture on the market. Although the G450/550 might not be as fast as Nvidia/Ati offering, they only cost $100 or so. The features and quality of these card blows away anything that the the other guys offer at twice the price. Matrox dual monitor and TV out is way ahead, and the "headcasting" is very cool. As for XP driver support, I havent seen a problem with matrox cards yet. But every system is different and I have seen alot of XP driver problems in general. You could always try the WIN2k drivers. The only bummer about this card is the $500 price tag. Oh well.

Speed?

[Namarrgon]

This thing looks great on paper - depth-adpative displacement mapping, and enough vertex shaders to deal with the resulting critical mass of triangles. Quad texturing on each of four pipes, and the requisite 256 bit DDR memory bus to keep it fed. And all running at 350 MHz... sounds like a monster - but there's a couple of significant gotchas raised by the Digit-Life translation.

First, that massive 20 GB/s of bandwidth is going to be needed, every bit of it. There is no bandwidth-saving logic on the chip at all, unlike ATI & nVidia's latest. Since occlusion detection can make a significant difference, and Z compression & fast Z clear also help a great deal (ATI claims their 8.8 GB/s performs like a 12+ GB/s system, a 36% boost), the Parhelia could be considered to have only 55% more bandwidth than a GF4 Ti4600 instead of 110%. If the next-gen offerings from ATI & nVidia have similar memory specs, the Parhelia could be at a significant disadvantage almost as soon as it comes out.

Second, the Digit-Life article mentions that early scores (from very raw drivers) show a mere 20-30% increase in scores over a Ti4600. Now admittedly this should increase, but Matrox are not known for their 3D driver optimisations, and nVidia are. A unified driver architecture will give you a head start right out of the gate, as you can take some advantage of previous optimisations immediately, whereas Matrox will have more work in front of them to get their drivers performing near the potential of the hardware. Look at ATI; it took them 6 months of focussed effort (and the odd quality hack along the way) to get their drivers up to scratch. Matrox have not traditionally given their 3D side or their software side as much attention, in my experience.

To me, while the triple-head feature could be useful to some (though I dislike external DACs - it's difficult to sync them closely to internal DACs, causing monitor beats), the 10 bit colour is to be applauded, and the vertex handling sounds very nice, anyone looking for performance would be better advised to wait for R300 and NV30.

On a slightly different note, was anyone else disappointed by the quality of the 16x AA screenshots? I expected more. The edge-only AA feature sounds like a very good idea (though it will not help alpha textures, just like multisampled implementations), but I'm a bit jaded after the miracles promised by ATI's SmoothVision didn't exactly set the world on fire. Guess we'll have to wait for performance figures.

Also, I wonder what their yields will be like. 80 million transistors on a 0.15 micron process sounds like something that's difficult to do cheaply.