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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."
"some very juicy details"??? Did the video card sleep with its cousin or something?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Surround video Pr0n...
It seems this thing will kick major (major) major ass...
The thing works with 10 bit resolution
has 5 outputs, and 2 display controllers (dunno how they will have 3 monitors attached)
There is a glyph antialiasing unit (ahem...)
DVD/HDTV decoder (10 bits) and also a 10 bit video digital interface.
more info at
http://ixbt.com/video2/parhelia512/chip_diagr.jpg
Is he using the card that came with his mac, running the OS that was preinstalled on it?
:)
no?, so he chopped and changed and got driver problems
The party who signed the NDA is required not to release information. Slashdot didn't sign a NDA, and can refer to what is now public information with impugnity.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
The only things that I can make out are :-
:)
1) It has some VERY fancy graphics tricks up its sleave.
2) 16xFSAA
3) 3 Head support for "surround gaming" which appears to be supported by the driver rather than requiring the developers to support it.
4) Support for 256mb of DDR ram.
The rumours I've head about this card are that its also FAST enough to give nvida some competition. Hopefully tom will have some benchmarks soon
Babelfish has a Russian English translator
Link
If the details are accurate, this could beat out the GeForce4 and bring Matrox back into the gaming market. Unlike the 550. Decent card, but 0 gaming potential.
The_Shadows, out.
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.
I can't envision hooking up 3 CRTs
I can, it's about to be winter down here.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
512bit GPU
tripple head
20GB/s memory bandwidth
256bit DDR(?) memory
bump mapped surfaces
DWR is Ajax for Java
The register has more details (and isn't dead):l
Go http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/25238.htm
DWR is Ajax for Java
80 million transistors
Technological standard 0.15 gm
Graphic nucleus/kernel and memory work with the clock frequency up to 350 MHz
Valuable is 256 bits (!) OF DDR the busbar/tire of the memory
The capacity of local memory on the order of 20 GB/sek
Capacity of local storage 64/128/256 MB.
AGP of 2kh/yakh/8kh including regimes/conditions SBA and FastShrites
4 piksel'nykh conveyors
4 textural blocks on each conveyor (!)
To fillrate:up to 1.4 gigas-peaktorrent and up to 5.6 gigas-flowtorrent
Apical sheydery of version 2.0 (Vertekh Syuader 2.0), four parallel fulfilling blocks
Piksel'nye sheydery of the version of 1.3 (Pikhel Of syuader 1.3), 4 textural + 5 combination stages on each piksel'nom conveyor, with the possibility of the association/unification of conveyors in pairs (we obtain 2 conveyors on 10 combination stages)
YEMBM and DOTE the imposition of the relief
Fixed/recorded T & L DKH8 (including the extended possibilities of matrix blendinga and skininga).Is actually special apical sheyder
Construction, storage in the local memory and conclusion/derivation to the monitor of image with the accuracy of 10 bits to the component of color (!). the technology of the 10- bits Of gigaCholor
Two built in the chip, 400 MHz, 10 bits to the channel RAMDACH, which use technology Of ultraSyuarp
Valuable of 10 bits.> 10 bits are tables for the arbitrary Gamma-korrekqii the concluded image
DVD and YUDTV of video decoder with the accuracy (at the output/yield) of 10 bits
Is supported the conclusion of image in the permissions/resolutions up to 20ya8khyshche'khe2bpp8shch Hz
Built-in the chip interface of TV -Out with 10 bit accuracy signal shaping
Two digital TDMS of interface for the digital outputs/yields or external RAMDACH.Is supported permission/resolution up to y920khy200khe2bpp
Two*** TRANSLATION ENDS HERE ***
There was also a mention of glyph antialiasing... And 64 / 128 bit per pixel colour...
I used to have a G400 and still use it. It used to be for my desktop and games, but I moved it to my Linux server. Still an awesome card.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
.ru link mirror here.
What I really would like to know is if Matrox is going to release a Free Software driver for this thing. If I remember correctly, they used to have a pretty friendly attitude towards GNU/Linux and Free Software. I really hope this hasn't changed as I'm sick and tired of Nvidia's proprietary crap and it would be nice to finally have good hardware acceleration on a Free Software system.
it only translates a little bit of the page.
:)
# Two digital TDMS of interface for the digital outputs/yields or external RAMDACH.Is supported permission/resolution up to y920khy200khe2bpp
# Two*** TRANSLATION ENDS HERE ***m 0; & #1080; CRTC
i guess you could chunk the page up into several smaller ones and then have the fish read them for you. i think the diagrams convey a wealth of information. Besides, the babelfish translations are so bad that waiting until tuesday to read it on tom's and anand's doesn't seem like a bad compromise.
That's the way Matrox's tech support procedures have been since the days of the g200. After you go through their faq, you'll find a tech support e-mail address, where you can ask for support. After it's been determined that the problem is not a result of user error, the techie(who responds from his/her own address within Matrox) can then give you a RMA number.
They're not trying to make anybody jump through hoops, they're ensuring that the user has done everything they can to get the card working before tying up their resources by processing an unnecessary RMA.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
Not really
Read it again, they are saying that Hoaxy stuff has been circulating, that's entirely different from the entire thing being vapourware.
What _should_ have tipped you off is that the 'hoax' material doesn't match the current leaks..
hell, one of them was claiming it supported 128bit colour.. uh.. NO.....
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?
Then Quit using windows (any version)
Matrox cards work much better under GNU/Linux and the X-window system...
Try the digit life article rewritten by the original author in english.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Heh, that made me laugh my a** off...
you are muxed up with "pugnace", it should really be impuNity
Theres already a fairly indepth technical discussion about this over at Beyond3D, with many translations from the Russian text.
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..
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
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 secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
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?
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?
and waited YEARS for an OpenGL driver, you'll understand my reservations about Matrox.
They promised an OpenGL driver before the card launched, but it was something like 2 years later before they finally got a crippled one out.
By that time, they had the G400 out, and it could do it (with somewhat reasonable framerates), so to me it looked like they fixed a few hardware issues.
For that reason alone, I won't go with Matrox anymore.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
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.
Perhelia? Sounds painful...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
There seems to be a growing trend to test market and trawl for ideas by supposedly leaking information.
/.'er could make up better kick ass specs. And hey, with CPUs being made with FPGAs (see recent /. article) certainly we are getting closer top homebrew graphic chips, too.
I'm sure many
Neighbor: "Hey WasterDave, we just got our new gas furnace installed, which is good because it's nearly winter!"
WasterDave: "Yeh, they say it will be a cold one too.."
Neighbor: "Yeh, my wife and I were wondering, how do you and the Mrs. WasterDave heat your home? Gas, electric?"
WasterDave: "Um, no."
Neighbor: *confused look* "You burn wood?"
WasterDave: "Um, no."
Neighbor: *really confused look* "You burn coal?"
WasterDave: "Um, no."
Neighbor: *annoyed* "How then?"
WasterDave: "Computers. Lots of computers."
Even the daunting DOOM3 or RtCW get handled quite well by a G3.
.plan updates, noted that was planning for the superior cards that would be available (not the GF3's, even) when Doom3 came out. A G3 will run it, but it won't neccesarily be the best card for the job.
I'd be very interested in how you determined that Doom3 runs well on a Geforce3, as the game is still in development. Carmack, in one of his
A Geforce3 will run your games, and will give you a hedge, but gaming is an expensive hobby. If you can't or won't upgrade, expect things to be kludgy until you do. Other important considerations, such as RAM architechture, CPU speed, motherboard, and bus width all come into play - nothing taxes the entirety of your system like a new 3D engine. The best rule of thumb is to buy the most expensive hardware you can afford when you upgrade - cutting corners now will simply make the period before you need to upgrade again shorter.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
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.
XP's problems seems to have no ends.
First it was VIA, then graphic sub-systems, then this, then that
I keep chasing after drivers, downloading newer ones all the time, hoping that miracles will happen.
Well
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I'll be buying one instantly! Otherwise I think I'll buy G450 instead.
I'll not buy a card that needs active cooling - my PC is noisy enough already, even though it is pretty quiet - I want my PC to be totally quiet!
We had no problems with Matrox drivers until Windows XP, either.
Good point. No one at Matrox or Microsoft mentioned this.
But, please don't call me a ding-dong. I'm trying to know 3 operating systems, and 3 computer languages, and I have other complex technical interests, and I have a life. It is easy to overlook something.
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.
The moderators live in a universe where time only moves in one direction.
Hence, they think that when you write a screenshot to disk, you must have already taken the screenshot, and so the act of writing it to disk cannot affect the image in the screenshot.
How does it work in your universe?
Bullshit! My G550 is working just fine on my WinXP box. If fucking with the IRQ settings doesn't do anything for you, try d/ling the beta drivers from the site & loading those up.
[o]_O
I've often heard tell in the past that Matrox has better image quality in 2D (which is what I work in). Is this still the case?
evanchik.net
Most software I've heard of actually obtains the data before saving it to disk...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Thanks for the tip about Windows XP. Is Windows XP the Windows ME of the NT series of operating systems? It would make my life much more pleasant if Microsoft would not sell products before they are ready; it's amazing how much Microsoft reduces the quality of my life.
We have a lot of experience building systems, but not a lot of experience with XP. It is a little difficult to sell Windows 2000 now, because customers demand the latest.
I'd love to sell only Linux or FreeBSD systems, but the user configurability just isn't there yet. I think it won't be long until Linux is ready, however. When it is, that will be a wonderful day in my life. (In my experience, FileZilla is an example of an open source project that is better than the closed source alternatives.)
We sell systems with Intel motherboards, both the Intel 845BGL and the Intel 815EEA2. Both systems have problems with slowness using Matrox video cards. We've tried only one ATI card; it was better, but there were still problems.
The Pentium IV machines (Intel 845BGL) have 2 GHz processors, and 256 MB of 266 MHz DDR SDRAM with ECC.
The Pentium III machines (815EEA2) have 866 and 933 MHz processors, and also 256 MB of memory.
We've tried G400, G450, and G550 Matrox cards, all with the latest Matrox drivers from the Matrox web site. All are unacceptable in the ways discussed in my original post.
We are using Promise FastTrak 100Tx2 controllers for mirroring two Western Digital 40 GB 400BB hard drives. The motherboard IDE controller has a DVD drive and a Plextor CD burner on one channel, and a Western Digital WD1200BB 120 GB drive on the other. This configuration works fine with Windows 98 SE (within the horrible limitations of the OS, of course).
We have tested the Pentium IV machines without the Promise RAID controllers, and the problems continued. I just realized that we did not uninstall the Promise drivers when we tried pulling out the Promise controller.
With 2 PCI ATI or GF4MX cards, you can get 2, 3 or 4 monitor support. Cheaper/faster and quite likely better 3D drivers than Matrox, based on past experience.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Thanks for this info. Obviously, something goes wrong somewhere when we do the installations. See my post #3506450 for more information about our systems.
We've been selling Matrox adapters since before the Millennium I. Never had any problems in either Windows or Linux until these with Windows XP.
I'm not laughing. I own a Vax. There were some volcanologist graduate students, that were poking around the neighborhood last summer, they thought that they had discovered some unknown thermal vent on an obscure satellite heat map. They were disappointed when I explained it was just the trusty MicroVax. I felt kinda bad, to tell the truth.
"I can't envision hooking up 3 CRTs, but using 3 17" LCDs side by side would definately kick some serious asses."
;)"
Hell, I _have_ three CRTs hooked up together, two on my Matrox G450 and one on a Riva TNT PCI that was laying around. 3840x1024 is sweet!
"Just hoping they will have drivers for my favorite OS though.
And yes, it works in X, so I assume that it'll be a priority to get X working on this new card. In fact, Matrox wrote the initial stuff for the G450, and I would think they'd likely continue this trend.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
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.
For the past year I've been using a Matrox G200 MMS Quad card. (yeah, it's PCI and only 8mb * 4, but all I do is code.) At the moment I've got four matched IBM digital flat panels hooked up. (note, this doesn't inspire too many kind words from my coworkers!) I like it, however, #1 doesn't get much use. In Win2k, I have the taskbar in #3, and so my vision is centered, with #2 and #4 peripheral. I'm actually seriously considering removing the #1 panel!
What I'd really like to see from Matrox, and the industry, is some improving on the 1280*1024 @ 85hz limit for DVI spec. AFAIK you can't get digital output from a card to a flat panel monitor at higher than this resolution. (IBM's top end flat panel uses all four channels of a modified G200 to get digital to it's 2560*2048 model.)
If Matrox's new card will support a high res digital panels on an agp interface, I'll be first in line to pick one up.
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.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Hey kid, FPS for trihead isn't the same as FPS for single head output.
Have a look at QuietPC. I bought a PSU and an Athlon CPU fan from them, and *what a difference*. During the day, you can't even tell if the computer is on, since everything else in the house is louder.
Thanks, it is valuable to begin thinking more clearly about interrupt conflicts. What you say makes sense.
I'm sympathetic. Microsoft and its uncaring ways have often devastated my weeks and weekends.