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Matrox Parhelia 512 Preview
SpinnerBait writes "Finally, you don't have to sift through all the unreleased and unauthorized
bogus information around the net about Matrox's upcoming 3D Graphics chip,
called the Parhelia 512. Matrox has taken the wraps off their next
generation GPU and
this Preview over at HotHardware goes through its feature set with a fine
toothed comb.
They also give you a very rare glimpse inside Matrox's Montreal Headquarters,
as well as a look at some very impressive technology demos, rendered on their
new chip. Looks like impressive stuff for sure."
Too bad Matrox cards don't play with Macs - nVidia GeForce 4 Ti for me them.
PS Frist P0st
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
This Graphic card as almost more processing power then my two PC's combined! The only thing I wish is that Matrox could come back a bit in this market. They had made some good card in the past. More choices can only be good. And, do they have a good record of supporting Linux in the past? Funny, they are located in my town and I know less about them then all those US based company :)
I'd rather be sailing...
Bet CounterStrike will cruise on that puppy!!!
Kyle over at [H]ard|OCP has quite a load of info on the card:
h tm l
i s. html
http://www.hardocp.com/articles/parhelia/index.
http://www.hardocp.com/articles/parhelia/analys
In the article they say:-
"Gigacolor", as Matrox likes to call it, is otherwise known as full display of over 1 Billion colors. Before you peg the "Marketing-Hype-O-Meter" too far, believe or not, the human eye can definitely tell the difference between 16 Million and 1 Billion colors
now if I remember correctly there are less than a dozen monitors that can produce this kind of detail(please correct me if I am wrong) and no-one can reallistically tell the difference (once again...please correct me if im wrong).Anyhow i can see something more than 5.2 on the marketing hype-o-meter
The Borg assimilated my race & all I got was this lousy T-shirt
...to release decent drivers. Tested and stable would be nice...
Good job my pc Blew up the other day, I now have a great excuse to upgrade..
Or more seriously, I wanted to upgrade before (from my G400) but GForce / ATI have poor 2D performance and some bad filters on there cards which require a bit of hacking to sortish out, and Matrox didn't have a viable home/gamer solution, sure there 10bit medical cards look nice, but not quite for me.
The only problems i have had in the past with matrox cards are,
Poor OpenGL support, though the drivers seemed to have been fixed as of Feb this year.
There Linux support is a little, well patchy. they do provide drivers, but there only half open and a bit of a pain to get working corretly, some of the problems may have been down to old X4 versions though.
Well I'll Buy one in the next couple of months and try to post a more informed comment!!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
This stuff sounds very much like Sutherlands stuff he was playing with. Very fine grain asynchronous pipelines with very high throughput.
Evans & Sutherland were the people who made the military simulators long long time ago
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Here are some more links with Parhelia info:
h tm l
w z? cid=3&aid=425
h om e.cfm
http://www.hardocp.com/articles/parhelia/index.
http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/articles.h
http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/parhelia512/
I hope they make Linux drivers for it. Hardware text AA seems kinda cool.
Here
The summary mentions quite a few interesting notes regarding the effect this card would have on current games.
- In "simple" games like Quake III Arena, the Parhelia-512 will definitely lose out to the GeForce4 Ti 4600. By simple we mean games that generally use no more than two textures and are currently bound by fill rate. NVIDIA's drivers are highly optimized (much more so than Matrox's) and in situations where the majority of the Parhelia's execution power is going unused, it will lose out to the Ti 4600. This can change by turning on anisotropic filtering and antialiasing however, where the balance will begin to tilt in favor of the Parhelia.
- In stressful DX8 games, Matrox expects the Parhelia-512 to take the gold - either performing on par or outperforming the GeForce4 Ti 4600. Once again, as soon as you enable better texture filtering algorithms and antialiasing the Parhelia-512 should begin to seriously separate itself from the Ti 4600. The quad-texturing capabilities of the core as well as the 5-stage pixel shaders will be very handy in games coming out over the next several months.
So from the look of it, Parhelia does not wipe out Nvidia (though I would like them to), but is a worthy competitor to nvidia in current games. It would be interesting to see how ATI and Nvidia match up to this new competitor in the coming months.
Be afraid. Be vewy vewy afraid.
Rapid Nirvana
Well from reading a few artivles about needing more than 8bit per channel, its all down to bleading.
It's a bit like using 24bit sound recordings to mix and then downsampling them to 16bit.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I wonder if their new Parhelia can deliver on its promises? Have Matrox's openGL drivers improved significantly over the past few years? Poor openGL was what killed G200's promising future, and I would hate to see a repeat performance.
It's really nice to see all sorts of nice specs in a preview, but it doesn't really tell us much of anything about actual performance - especially gaming performance. People trust nVidia previews because nVidia has had a good run of high performing gaming video cards. Matrox can add a flux capacitor to their cards and still have a worthless gaming card. Specs and previews mean nothing. Final hardware and drivers are everything.
The 16 sample AA shown here looks nice and there's a bit of detail on a few of the features like the hardware displacement mapping. Very nice looking.
w z? cid=3&aid=425&page=1
http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/articles.h
Well, it looks like Matrox may be back into the mainstream. To most consumers, they're an unknown. To techies, they're the little company that refused to die, and to businesses, they're the best supplier. We'll see which of those three items changes.
Michael C. Hollinger
What is so fascinating about this to young, white males? It presents itself in many scenarios: cars are "tweaked" at the cost of hundreds of dollars for tiny percentages in "performance" (read: "speed") gain. Cooking appliances are bought that shave seconds off of cooking time. It's ridiculous.
Slow down, enjoy life. You'll get there when you get there. Enjoy the journey. Your graphics will be rendered in plenty of time, for now just enjoy the scenery.
Angela Taylor, PhD
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Feminist, scientist, scholar, woman
It looks like that there is another dog fighting over the same bone now. At last some real competition in the market.
This is what is really needed in the industry. nVidia has and ATI has been the top dogs for a while and the new releases have been a little stale. Sure the GeForce 4's have been nice, but there are those out there who think that the GeForce 3's give better image quality. Then there's ATI and it's new Radeon 8500 128mb cards...it's just a 8500 with 2x the memory.
Matrox entering the ring again with this new chip and it's abilities should rattle the windows for a bit and we'll see nVidia and ATI scrambling for the next gen cards to out perform Matrox.
It's a competitive situation that promotes quality product for everyone.
Now if only M$ would get the clue eh?
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
I hope it's better than their sorry excuse for a TV card that never worked right. It was a few years old, but it was an add-on board to one of their video cards(VFW), and the framerate changed wildly, if it worked at all.
Ok.. so it has AGP 8x. Nifty! What motherboard do I buy that has AGP 8x? I just bought an Abit KR7A-RAID with Via KT266 chipset, thinking this is a pretty decent board, but I doubt it supports AGP 8x.
Now we move on to monitors. Could someone recommend a monitor that I can use to accurately resolve 1 billion colors? I tend to run my 2 Viewsonic PT775's at 1600 x 1200 so I've grown accustomed to that much "real estate".
This sounds like an awesome card, but I really don't know where to go or what to get to reap all the benefits of it.
Lastly, precisely when and where can a fellow technogeek acquire one? Since the HotHardware site seems to be experiencing some serious "Slashdot Effect" I was unable to finish reading the entire article. MRP $$ and a release date would be very useful.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Seems to me that the hardware they use for running their website is not so hot. They're fried already.
all i can say is wow. finaly a geforce killer. When i looked at the last review of geforces, i noticed that there was very little difference between a GF3 and a GF4. i mean im still using my GF256 thats been goign strong for 4 years now. its the oldest component in my pc and it performs beautifuly even on the newest games. after seeing this review however, i must say that i know what my next GFX card purchase will be. did you see those tri head shots?
wow
of course since its not out yet i dont know actual prices but if its priced comparitivly with a geforce 4, or even a little higher i would so jump on it. Matrox is back people.
-
Any one seen any pictures of the card and the connections possible. I would like to see a picture of the bundle and various connectors included.
The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colours. But it's more sensitive to some frequencies than others, so sometimes 24 bits (16 million colours) may not be enough.
For example, most people can distinguish between two very similar 24-bit medium greens but not between three or four similar 24-bit dark blues.
That said, no monitor can accurately represent 16 million colours, let alone several billions. Even if they could, the dynamic range of monitors is very limited compared to the range our eyes can see (ie, monitors have very limited brightness compared to the normal sunlit world), so most of those colours would be wasted.
Higher colour precision is good because it minimises round-off errors, but this applies mainly to internal calculations (some operations are done directly on the final framebuffer, but very few). For display, 24 bits (and a good monitor) are more than enough.
RMN
~~~
Why? Because X11R6 only supports a maximum of 24 bit colour. I've always thought X11R7 or X12 was
long overdue, perhaps this might provide an added impetus to bringing the spec out.
Worried execs decided to announce the launch of the GeForce 5 later this year.
I kid you not!!!
Looks like a good card, but there's still no mention of support for non Windows, non x86 or non DirectX support.
In some of the earlier 'previews' there was talk of OpenGL 2.0, which I'm sure this card will theoretically be compliant with (once the ARB settle on the specs of course). But what of support for Linux, BSD, OS X. Does the hardware support both big and little endian?
It's fair that Matrox are pushing the DirectX 8.1 (and 9 no doubt) and Windows thing now, but when will we hear about other possibilities?
Toms Hardware also has a review of this card; however, it's not actual silicon -- he just reviews the spec sheets that Matrox has given them.
h tm l
www.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020514/index.
Beware -- I was just trying to get to the 3rd page in the review -- it appears to be getting slower..... ?
Karnal
me thinks there should be a slashdot cache to protect the sites that undergo the slashdot effect.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
I'm currently running an AGP Matrox G450 with 32mb of RAM with two CRTs. I like the card because it allows me to go up to 3200 x 1200 resolution with 32bit color.
...
I really like the prospect of having three monitors to eliviate the issue of having a giant gap between displays due to the thick boarder of any display. However
This new card claims it only does 3840 x 1024 resolution on three cards. It still has the max color depth, but the resolution has to drop. By going to this big fancy new card I'd only gain 100,000 pixels, which in reality is next to nothing.
Is it a driver limitation, or does it take more than a 512bit dual 400mhz 256mb video card to push 4800 x 1200 for simple 2D functions?
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
This is the only picture I could find of Parhelia.
Look at the massive heatsink on that baby... Ooooh mama...
Rapid Nirvana
For those of you who don't already know, professional TV standards (specifically, D1, also known as SDI, though SDI is technically different) use 10-bit YCrCb video.
This means that any particular pixel may have up to 30 bits of color (even though the maximum difference between colors of pixels is less than that.
Obviously, this is not something that is easily accomplished with standard 24 bit/32 bit rendering. If you convert the SDI into something that can be represented in the frame buffer of the video card, then you've lost precision. This is unacceptable for broadcast! (And no, overlay isn't generally good enough since you want to capture the pixels for output though SDI)
Admittedly, this card isn't perfect- It would be nice to have 8 bits of destination alpha (for a key channel). 4 shades of keying just isn't enough...
In any case, having a card (finally!) support 10 bit rendering (especially the 10 bit rendering in openGL) in hardware will be wonderful!
Link
We know you've been waiting for this, haven't you? Of course you have. Since the launch of the Matrox G450, we don't know of any hard core PC Hardware Enthusiast that hasn't been waiting for Matrox to step back up to the plate, with a new high end 3D Gaming Graphics card. It was then that Matrox Graphics made a conscious decision to step back from the ridiculously competitive 3D Graphics scene and watch as giants fell. Perhaps their next generation 3D Gaming chip was not ready for prime time or perhaps they just didn't want to duke it out in the down and dirty retail space. Either way, Matrox was content, at that point in time, with various OEM design wins for their mainstream "Dual Head" capable "Business Class" chip, where only casual gamers need apply. There was no AA support for the G450 at the time and frame rates versus NVIDIA's current powerhouse, were none too exciting for the avid gamer. Regardless, Matrox survived a severe industry down turn and weathered the storm, sustaining on their Business and Professional Graphics offerings.
On the other hand, at the time of the G400 and G400MAX, Matrox was fairly successful at evangelizing hardware assist for Environment Mapped Bump Mapping, an effect that is now a check list item for most all modern 3D Graphics cards. It was this kind of innovation in image quality that Matrox garnered a strong following of loyal end users and enthusiasts. There was always one simple constant with Matrox product back then, top notch 2D and 3D image quality. Matrox always produced a sharp, stable display with vivid accurate color, no matter what the application.
Well then, certainly it seems not much has changed for Matrox in their mission statement for this long awaited product launch. However this time, the all new Matrox Parhelia 512 is targeted toward the high end 3D Graphics Enthusiast or Professional and as always, delivered in Matrox "High Fidelity".
Let's take a look!
Specifications and Features of Matrox Parhelia 512 Graphics Processor
A 512 bit GPU - Fat Pipes and a boat load of bandwidth
World's first 512-bit GPU
- 80 million transistors in 0.15 process
- 256-bit DDR memory interface
- Up to 20 GB/s memory bandwidth
- Up to 256MB DDR unified frame buffer
- 10-bit Gigacolor Technology
- 10-bit per channel RGB rendering and output
- Over one billion simultaneously displayed colors
- 10-bit precision for 2D, 3D, DVD and video
- 10-bit frame buffer mode for ARGB (2:10:10:10)
- 10-bit RAMDACs with full gamma correction
- AGP host interface designed for up to AGP 8X bandwidths
- AGP Fast Writes support
- 8-way parallel DMA streaming engine
- OpenGL 1.3 and DirectX 8.1 compliant 3D engine
High Fidelity Display Engine
- DualHead
- HF Display Technology
- Fourth-generation DualHead
- Dual integrated 400MHz 10-bit RAMDACs
- Dual independent RGB outputs
- Up to 2048 x 1536 @ 32bpp on each RGB output
- Support for two digital TMDS transmitters
- Dual independent DVI outputs
- Up to 1920 x 1200 on each output **
- Single dual-link DVI output
- Up to 2560 x 2048
- Integrated 10-bit high-fidelity TV/video encoder
- NTSC/PAL output
- Direct encoding of native interlaced YUV
- Perfect full-screen DVD playback via DVDMax
- TripleHead Desktop
- Support for 3rd RGB output
- Three display desktop at up to 3840 x 1024 @ 32bpp
- 10-bit gamma correction
- Per-layer gamma and color correction at full speed
- Dual independent, gamma correctable hardware overlays
- Hardware accelerated multi-screen OpenGL support
- Support for true multi-display under Microsoft Windows
2000 and Windows XP
UltraSharp Display Output Technology
- Highest-quality analog, digital and TV output
- Ultra-crisp display quality at high frequencies
- Highest-quality design, electronics and filters
- 5th-order output filters
- Highest-fidelity frequency and transient response
for optimal signal quality
- High signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) with super-low
PLL Jitter
High fidelity 3D Rendering Engine
- Quad Vertex Shader Array
- Four vertex shader units (DirectX 8.1 and beyond)
- Highest sustained complex vertex shader performance
- Parallel processing of up to 16 vertices
- 512 instruction on-chip cache
- 256 constant registers
- Quad texturing per pixel, per clock cycle
- 64 Super Sample Texture Filtering
- Highest quality trilinear and anisotropic filtering
- Sustained performance
- Dynamic allocation of texture units
- 8-sample anisotropic and trilinear filtering on
4 dual-textured pixels/clock
- 16-sample anisotropic filtering on 4 single-textured
pixels/clock
- 36-Stage Shader Array
- Most complex rendering engine ever built
- 4 pixel pipes
- 4 texturing units per pixel pipe
- 5 pixel shader stages per pixel pipe
- Support for up to 10 pixel stages per pass
- 4 pixels/clock throughput with quad texturing and 5 pixel
shader operations
- Hardware Displacement Mapping
- Compact encoding of high-resolution geometry data
- Patent-pending Depth-Adaptive Tessellation for continuous
level of detail (LOD) geometry
- Vertex Texturing for dynamic generation of geometry using
texture maps
- Support for Bezier curves and N-patch (PN-triangle) evaluation
Surround Gaming
- Support for games rendered across three displays
- Ultra-wide field of view (FOV)
- Side displays for peripheral vision
GigaColor Gaming
- 10-bit source texture support and precision
- High-precision ARGB (2:10:10:10) frame buffer
- 16x Fragment Antialiasing (FAA-16x)
- 16x supersampling quality on edge pixels only
- Avoids blurring of internal pixels
- Low performance overhead
- Support for Full Scene Antialiasing (FSAA)
Texturing Support
- Support for all texture formats including:
- 32-bit source textures
- 10-bit per channel texture support
- All DXTC formats
- 2D, 3D (volume) and cubic textures
- Non-square and non-power-of-2 textures
- Planar and packed YUV textures
- Up to 2K by 2K source textures
- Support for projected textures
- Support for texture swizzling
- Render-to-texture support
Other 3D features include:
- Depth acceleration unit for advanced Z processing
- 32-matrix Matrix Palette Skinning (MPS)
- Particle acceleration
- Full sub-pixel and sub-texel precision
- Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM) and DOT
Product-3
- Planar, cubic and spherical environment mapping
- Fogging, alpha blending and specular highlighting
- Flat and gouraud shading
- Independent intensity, Z and texture depths
- Antialiased 3D vector support
High fidelity 2D engine
- Fastest and highest quality 2D display engine ever built
- GigaColor Desktop
- All drawing operations at extended 30-bit color (10:10:10)
- 10-bit per channel frame buffer
- High-quality dithering for lower bit depth output
- Glyph Antialiasing
- Hardware accelerated text antialiasing
- Programmable gamma correction
- Full acceleration of Windows XP GDI and DirectDraw functions
- GDI+ v2.0 ready
- Programmable, ultra-fast bliter at up to 16 pixels/clock
- True-color full-screen overlay plane with 8-bit alpha
- Alpha cursor support
- 32-bit ultra-fast VGA core
High fidelity video engine
- PC Theater DVD Playback
- 10-bit DVD playback
- 10-bit advanced filtering and scaling
- 10-bit DVD output via TV encoder
- Independent gamma and proc-amp controls
- Full quality output using DVDMax
- Programmable overlay processor
- Video overlay with programmable proc-amp and independent
gamma correction
- Video mixing engine in overlay processor
- High-quality horizontal and vertical scaling
- Up to 4x4 filter kernel with programmable filtering coefficients
- Full-speed bi-cubic filter
- Fully VMR-compliant front-end scaling
- Advanced de-interlacing with sub-pixel positioning
- VIP2.0 compliant video input port
Industry compliance
Operating Systems
- Microsoft Windows
- Linux
Platforms
- X86, X86-64 and IA-64compatible
- AMD 3Dnow!
- Intel MMX, SSE & SSE2 optimized
- AGP 8X, 4X, 2X and 1X Compliance
- PCI 2.2, AGP 2.0 and AGP 3.0
- PCI Bus Power Management 1.1
- ACPI
- DirectX 8.1, PS1.3, VS1.1, VS2.0
- OpenGL 1.3
- DirectX VA, VMR, WDM
Matrox Parhelia 512 Block Diagram
Click image for full view
Processing power and the memory bandwidth to support it:
As you can see, this isn't your Dad's old G200, now is it kiddies? Talk about having a wrap sheet a mile long! There is more to know about this new graphics power plant from Matrox, than anyone ever imagined, when rumors started circulating a few weeks ago. We'll try and break things down for you piece by piece, in the following pages. However, remember two very important aspects of this new technology from Matrox. First, this is the world's first 512 Bit Graphics Processor. Second, this is also the worlds first implementation of a 256 bit DDR Memory Bus on a Graphics Processor. Drop in some high speed 650MHz DDR DRAM and you are looking at a staggering 20GB/sec of memory bandwidth.
There are also a few more very unique attributes of the Parhelia 512, namely its integrated 10 Bit 400MHz RAMDACs and the fact that the GPU is AGP 8X compliant. AGP 8X is obviously the next generation AGP graphics interface, with 2.1GB/sec of bandwidth, more than double that of AGP 4X. What are more impressive perhaps, are the very high quality Color Palette DACs running at 400MHz, with full 10 bit resolution. Again, these are hardware firsts for graphics technology. Finally, we'll put the size of this chip into perspective for you. A Pentium 4 Northwood CPU has about 57 million transistors in its die. The Matrox Parhelia has 80 million transistors. So, you see now what we mean by "Big and Bad". Now we'll show you how "Pretty" Matrox is trying to get with the Parhelia 512.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
Since the sight seems to be slashdotted, you could try Tom's hardware guide. http://www.tomshardware.com
Than.
...more processing power THAN my two PC's combined!
...I know less about them THAN all those US based company...
Thanks for your attention.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
The main effect of offering 10 bits per channel colour will be to reduce banding. For example, your current card can only display 256 shades of pure red: 0xff000000 to 0x00000000. This produces significant banding.
On still images the difference between 8- and 10-bit colour is not that significant; the human eye does a decent job of interpolating the bands. Where the 10-bit really shines is in moving pictures, eitehr in games or movies. When the Bands move across the screen because the camera is moving past a star, the bands are really evident in 8-bit.
Careers should combine three things: what you can do, what you want to do, and what you can get paid for.
that's write, buy/bulleave EVERYTHING you see/hear fromnowon.
now that gov. bush has quashed those evile axisers, & the FraUDs on wall street of deceit have apologized to each other, we're all on a grand upwords slide again. how exciting IT is.
you should have known that all that keyrap about gnu penguins making IT easy for po' folks wa just a bunch of hobbyist whiner hooey. IT's gooed to see US back on track to Godless greed/fear based sellfishness. gaud help US.
I've been using matrox products since the Millenium II (I'm on a G400 32mb now). Always rock solid 2D performance, and quality. Their 3D is usually a little different then everyone else's (i.e. environmental bump mapping), but solid. It's nice to see their going to be ahead of the curve in release the the next, next generation video card. I think this will give them a jump start in sales, for the gamer that hasn't used matrox before. The users of current Matrox cards will also be a huge market, as there customers are extremley loyal to them. All this goodness, and their still a Private company (and Canadian no less).
Just when I thought that my workplace would never spring for a card with these features, up popped Page 6 (just ignore all those pictures of people playing games with the card) with Glyph Antialiasing for "business appeal!" Three monitors, here I come.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Over the years I bought the hype that Matrox was dishing. This is just more of the same. All would be fine, if they delivered on the **software**. It took them more than a year after Win2k was released to release a final driver for the G200-TV card. The beta driver sucked (*lots* of BSOD). Their forums were clogged by people complaining about the lack of Win2k support. Either their driver group is incompetent, or Matrox corporate had other priorities. Either way, the situation sucks.
/.'d right now.
I think the problem is the graphics card biz is a low margin business, and the first thing they skimp on is software. *Sigh*
Also, they're so cheap their site is completely
Feature checklist comparing Parhelia, GF4 and Radeon 8500
Oh Sh*t it's a double wide card!!!!!!!! And you probable need to reserve a third for airflow!!!!!!!!
Hopefully Matrox will discontinue the DualHead, TripleHead, etc., naming conventions before they get to the sixth generation (for the same reason that Intel didn't release a Sextium).
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
I've used Matrox cads before and while I can't fault the 2D image quality, i've had trouble with drivers especially OpenGL ones.
-- "Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
Take a look at this explanation which explains what a parhelia is =)
interesting stuff
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
How does having a third monitor eliminate the problem you describe(gaps between monitors)? If ANYTHING it would just make things worse, not better - that is unless you also switched to borderless lcd panels. or removed the casings from your crts.
If you need more than 3840 x 1024 across three monitors you need to just drop $1k on a card that can support 4 or 8 monitors(which Matrox makes).
Matrox isn't putting this card out to gain more footing in the high perf. 2d market - they are looking to score big in the 3d market(which they've fallen behind in lately), so I doubt improving already better than average 2d perf. (for an under $500 card) was a big issue with them. They would much rather have you purchase one of their professional 2d cards - combining the best of their 2d and 3d cards would probably push the card out of most people's price range for a gaming card.
it's all about the market they're looking to grab.
did you even read the article?
The G200 delivered beautifully on everything it promised. It allowed me to run 4 monitors. It wasn't a gamers chip, it was intended to help show more info than previously possible. Using the PCI version in Win2K with a special patch, I saw one PC that had 16 monitors attached. Amazing.
Do you want to remove linux?
Parhelia 512? Awfully strange name for a new Matrix film.
This card looks really sweet, and Linux could really use some competition to NVIDIA in the 3d card market, I hope the Linux drivers are up to par.
If they're binary only, I hope they put as much effort into them as NVIDIA does.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
We can see wavelengths ranging from red to blue (well, it's more from magenta to magenta, actually, but you know what I mean). Green happens to be at the middle of that range (aprox. 535 nm), so naturally we have better colour accuracy in those wavelengths.
For all I know, some food may have lovely ultra-violet or infra-red shades mixed with their yellow or green, but we just can't see them (some animals can). In fact, if we could "see" much longer wavelengths, we'd have heat vision. Cool but probably a bit confusing.
It's also interesting that, while our eyes have receptors that are sensitive to YGBL (Yellow, Green, Blue and Luminance), we tend to think in HLS (hue, luminance and saturation).
Our brain "constructs" the red parts of the image from the other signals. If our eyes see something that has high luminance, some yellow, very little green and no blue, we perceive it as red (note that here when I say "yellow" I mean "something that is detected by our 'yellow' receivers", not pure yellow).
This is actually similar to the way TV signals are transmitted (a black-and-white signal plus two "difference" colours signals, so it's compatible with both B&W and colour TVs).
And, of course, not everyone's eyes are calibrated the same, so what is brownish green to one person can be greenish brown to another, and so on.
RMN
~~~
Are you complaining about the OpenGL spec compliance or the fact that the G200 was inherently a shitty 3D card and didn't produce good Quake framerates?
Man made Beer. The earth made marijuana. who do you trust?
The earth also makes a bunch of nasty sulfurous compounds in volcanos, but I don't want to smoke them.
[...] but when you want to have a nice background, top is plain blue (#0000ff) and botton is black (#000000), then there are only 254 levels between those. And I can clearly see those lines where the blue color value changes.
Actually, you should make that black to blue to white. And while you'll manage to distinguish the colours at the centre of the scale (near "pure" blue), I doubt you'll be able to distinguish the colours at the top and bottom (near white and black).
The limitations of 24-bit colour can also be dealt with with dithering. Most high-end animation programs render internally at 48 / 64 bits per pixel (16 bits per component) and then dither the image when they convert it to 24-bpp (8-bpc). This would result in a much smoother transition from black to blue (and then to white), with no visible banding.
Most modern graphics cards already do real-time dithering, but only in 16-bit modes (which still work internally at 24 / 32).
RMN
~~~
Matrox has a history of abandoning large sections of their users. They left owners of the Motion JPEG hardware high and dry when they decided that it was too difficult to get the hardware working correctly, and that it was better to run it without the hardware acceleration. Those who had spent hundreds for hardware-accelerated video recording were left with a system that was comparable to ones available for $30 or $40.
The Tech Report with their in depth preview http://www.tech-report.com/etc/2002q2/parhelia/ind ex.x?pg=1
Even if X can only display 2^24 colours at a given time it doesn't matter because not even the :) Duh.
highest resolution screens have anything close to 2^24 pixels
- First off, Q3A is used as THE single standard metric to see how a card will perform under a common load. It's a very good way to judge the raw speed of a card overall, and often provides good pointers as to overall performance in fancier modes or other games, but it certainly doesn't mean every game you play will be 100+ fps.
- Second, that figure is an AVERAGE. When actually gaming, the average framerate is not the issue - the MINIMUM framerate is the killer. 60 fps average is fine, but when the framerate drops to 10-15 fps in a heavy firefight, you're in trouble. A higher average framerate usually translates to a higher minimum as well. In fact, many sites have taken to quoting minimums as well, or even showing a complete framerate graph.
- Third, the ability to manage 100 fps at e.g. 1024x768 means only around 40 fps at 1600x1200, if your monitor extends that far, or perhaps only 30 fps at 1024x768 with 4x AA if it doesn't. Your card will need to score 200 fps if you want to improve your resolution/AA, or maybe even 300 fps if you want to do that and still keep your minimum fps above 60.
- Fourth, the same argument applies to other quality improvements like trilinear and anisotropic filtering. Taking 32 texture samples instead of 4 can really kill your framerate, so you better hope you're getting enormous framerates with non-anisotropic filtering if you hope to get acceptable speed with anisotropic filtering enabled.
- Fifth, Q3A is not the only game out there. There are a lot of more demanding games available today, even those based on the Q3A engine like RtCW, that will give you much lower framerates.
Combining two or more of the above factors can bring the fastest graphics card to its knees, even if it scores 200 fps in Q3A. We'll have to wait until we see scores of 300 or 400 before we can expect to play Jedi Knight II at 1600x1200 with 9x AA and 16-sample anisotropic filtering, while never dropping below at least 30 fps. But boy, will it look good when we can :-)
Ideally, a review will give individual scores for all the above - high resolution, AA, anisotropic filtering, a range of modern games, and all combinations of the above. But since this would entail a vast amount of testing and a huge array of numbers, most reviews settle for a few known tests that are indicative of performance in other tests. And the most popular of those is good old Q3A.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
And my question to you: Can an idiot be terribly ashamed or is that an oxymoron?
The AC Phsyciatrist
The human eye can only see around ten million colors. This makes it sound like 1 billion colors is overkill. But, consider the following facts. The human eye is much more sensitive to changes in luminance than changes in chrominance. The JPEG standard utilizes this fact to allow for enormous compression ratios, by performing much more greater lossy compression of chrominance values(hue/saturation) than luminance (lightness) values. In fact, the human eye is so sensitive to changes in lightness that we can, on average and with good vision, see approximatelly 7,000 to 8,000 distinct shades of gray. 24 bit color, as found in all popular modern video cards is only capable of displaying 256 shades of gray. Even 30 bit color, as found on the new Matrox card, can only represent 1,024 shades of gray, almost 1/8th of what the human eye can see. We would need at least a 39 bit color scale (13 bits per color = 8,192 shades), to provide a neutral gray lightness scale that matches what the human eye can see. Note that although the discussion so far has been about the human eye's capability to see shades of gray, the human eye is much more sensitive to the color green than either blue or red. In fact, we can see much more than 1,024 shades of green and "green-like" hues, although the exact number has not been scientifically researched. For colors like blue, to which the eye is least sensitive, on the other hand, 1,024 shades may be more than enough. I hope this explanation can once again dispel the confusion between the 10 million colors that the eye can see and the 1 billion colors provided by this card being overkill. To summarize, keep in mind that the color gamut representing human vision is very far from linear. A one billion color card with equally weighed red, green, and blue components is overkill in certain parts of the gamut, and not nearly enough in other parts. Of course, keep in mind that the capability of modern monitors will also factor into all of the above.
Matrox doesn't actually have a good history of getting cards out in a decent time frame. Figure that by the time this card is actually available (anyone remember the g400? how many months did it take to get one after it supposedly became available?) it will be irrelevant.
The next problem is that Matrox ruined their reputation in my eyes with the G200 by lieing about OpenGL. Lieing about how they were going to have it in November, then December, and so on... they kept this up until they announced the G400 and then suddenly the g200 was a no-go.
Ever since the G400 series it seems Matrox has been coming up with feature laden cards... trouble was no one asked for the features they chose to offer. Now they added even more features and a buttload of performance to boot. Yet as before, GF5 will be announced about the time this card is supposed to ship, and most likely be in stores at the same time.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
No-one even bothered to address the fact that Matrox has gone to great lengths to offer quantitative data as to why their card is much sharper at higher resolutions than the notoriously blurry GeForce and Radion cards. People on newsgroups have complained about said blurriness ad nauseum, but mostly from subjective viewing. I use 2,048 x 1,536 resolution on a Viewsonic 817 monitor, at home. Most users, even gamers, spend a lot of time staring at a 2d desktop, sometimes at resolutions in excess of 1,280 x 1,024 where sharpness matters, especially for long term viewing. I have always and most likely will always use Matrox cards, because when it comes to sharpness at higher resolutions, they cannot be beat. To read the quantitative tests performed by Matrox about 2d quality, see: http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/tech_info/pdfs/ parhelia/us_displ.pdf
They really had problems with W2K there, and XP subsequently.
There's another (recent that is) product that they don't support (m3d). Everything else it very good, I am happy with support of my G400.
The AVi links have been removed from the site because of the /. effect. Go get them from the original site ...
I hope matrox can deliver these cards with solid drivers. If that happens, we'll see prices drop for all high end video cards. There are some impressive specs. Now if only I wasn't so cheap and broke, I'd upgrade. Until then, my TNT is just fine, thanks.
It looks like they just stole 6 bits from the alpha channel and added it to the RGB. So only four levels of Alpha with 10 bit color?
As someone else pointed out, 10 bits of RGB does not equate to 10 bits of YUV. The Parhelia will give great 10 bit RGB previews (completely independant of output quality), and will even output a 10 bit YUV video signal - but only via S-Video, where the two colour signals get encoded together anyway. You need 10 bit component output, or 10 bit SDI, neither of which can be done by the Parhelia. It's more aimed at the 10 bit DVD market than a professional output solution.
The two-bit alpha limitation is largely irrelevant. For display on a monitor, RGB is all you need. Processing of deep-colour images should be done with at least 16 bits per component (including alpha) in memory for best results, then dithered down to 10 bit RGB for display. Key channel output requires a second video connector, so it won't do that at all.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I wasn't able to find any info from the hothardware or matrox sites. Any rumors as to when this is coming out, and how much it's going to cost?
Everything on HOCP is available from Matrox directly here.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Which means, if you want to run all monitors at the same res (required for "Surround Gaming", really), you're limited to the resolution of the external DAC, which probably struggles to do 1280 x 1024.
It's nothing to do with the driver, and you can always add a second PCI gfx card for more monitors to get all the area you need. Try 5 x nVidia Quadro4 400NVS cards, each with 4 monitor outputs capable of 2048 x 1536, for a total of 61 million pixels - 16 times what you have now :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Someone who actually did a little research before opening his/her mouth.
Their edge-AA functionality would lend itself well to font rendering. It's debatable whether it'll help the speed or even quality of current Windows font rendering, but so long as you're not forced to use it, it can't hurt. The hardware gamma correction is good, and it does "de-gamma" the background before blending in the text (which should be done with linear data).
My question is, does it correctly support hinting? It's not much use unless it does.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Oh well, it's mine now... Heheheheh... >:)
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
That Matrox has all sorts of nice pictures to show off their 10-bit technology? But when you view it with your own video card, the most you'll get is 8-bit color. So what's the point of all the pretty pictures? Talk about the marketing folks not getting the point!
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I demand Nerdity points for counting down last night the hours (minutes) until the NDA ran out.
:)
And sending all of my friends half-hourly updates.
Unfortunatly I did have to go to bed and was thus unable to be the first non-NDA'd person to read the previews.
Product name too hard to spell, help!
I will just keep on refering to it as the G1000, SOOO much easier, heh.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I have been resisting buying an nVidia card since 1999, been on G200 since 1998.
Matrox cards are just bueatufully supported with Linux.
Woohoo. I have been looking for a card that would support at least 2 monitors, hell three is better. My current setup has a Geforce 2 MX dual head card, and the output to the second monitor is limited to 1280x1024@75hz (ouch) Having to run my 21" monitors at 1280x1024 bugs me, and the fact that the second head can do 100hz.
:-\ Thats like $1500 bucks... sad sad sad ;)
Hopefully this new card will allow me to run 3 21" monitors at 1600x1200@100hz. That would seriously rock. Now, how am I going to afford another 21" monitor and a new $450 video card
Welcome back Matrox
Does this mean it will work out of the box?
with all the Xlibs and Xvideos and X...
and DRI?
When it first came out it was heavily marketted at the gaming market.
I notice that they make a big deal out of the fact that this new chip has 80 million transistors, and compare this to modern CPUs. This is quite a lot of transistors, but says nothing of the wiring cost. I would think that the regular structure of a GPU would make wiring costs much lower than on a CPU.
Does anyone know what the die area of Matrox's new chip is? I am curious how that compares to CPUs, and if graphics processors are much more dense than regular CPUs.
Gamers Depot also has a great look at this killer GPU: http://www.gamersdepot.com/hardware/video_cards/ma trox/parhelia_release/001.htm
Extremetech checked out 3Dlabs offer instead:9 6,s=1017&a =26271,00.asp
7 &a =26865,00.asp
http://www.extremetech.com/article/0,33
Which in my eyes sounded a lot better than Matrox offer since it was much more general-purpose. But on the other hand Matrox knows what features are really needed, and the PS2 showed that general-purpose features won't get you anywhere if they are hard to use. Featurewise it's a draw, but they are two different kind of beasts.
Extremetech also has a thorough discusson of the Matrix release:
http://www.extremetech.com/article/0,3396,s=101
And don't blame me if that site don't have persistant links.
http://www.matrox.com/mga/start/newsletter/may_200 2/parhelia512.cfm
And what are these features that know one wants?
Nope. Cones are sensitive to red, green and blue (hence the use of RGB in TVs). [...] Luminance really isn't that important.
I recommend reading a bit more on the subject before making such definitive statements. You can start with this:
Spectral sensitivity of the human eye
As you can see, at 650 nm (pure red), the cones are almost blind. The brain combines this information with what it gets from the rods (luminance) and realises that there is some colour there. And since it has no blue, almost no green and only a little yellow, it's translated to "red".
TVs use RGB (red,green,blue) just as they could use CMY (cyan,magenta,yellow) or any other group of complementary colours (of which there is an infinite number - any three colours that are 120 apart in a spectrum wheel will do). It has nothing to do with the actual wavelengths that the receptors in our eyes are tuned to.
You may also want to read some more about how TV colour signals are encoded (messy but interesting) and why current standards are as they are. Do a quick search on the internet and I'm sure you'll find plenty of pages about it.
RMN
~~~
I think his point was that we evolved this way because blue (and red) are less "important" than green in the natural world. Which might be the case, who knows? Personally I think a lot of things that can be "explained" by evolution are more likely the product of chance.
Things like earlobes, pubic hair, and the fact that Windows 2000 is actually quite stable.
RMN
~~~
I only see two monitor ports on the back of that puppy...(and oh the agony of knowing I already have a G450 running dual under Linux....)
The screen caps make me drool
What is your Slash Rating?
Evolution IS chance, it's just that the ones lucky enough to get the good changes breed more.
:) If this were not true, then there would be more people who were not more sensitive to it.
The reason we are more sensitive to green is because there was something related to it that allowed our ancient ancestors to get laid more
One of these likely advantages would be the ability to more easily distinguish between plants that would kill you, and those that are nutritious.
Of course, "related to" does not imply "caused by". It's equally possible (though I think much less likely) that predators found people without this mutation more tasty, and due to that, ate them all, leaving only the ones more sensitive to green alive to breed.
While they have that shit hot driver writing team. They are constantly 'leaking' the latest detonators, each time improving performance on Geforces across the board. Plus, the have a large slice of the OEM pie. Matrox are interesting because they are challenging, but this is only the begining, lets see whats going on six months down the track.
Matrox promised OpenGL support for g200 and finally produced a substandard driver supporting OpenGL months after the card was released. g200 drivers never reached stability and matrox basically quit supporting the g200 Mystique line since it was less popular and only supported the Millenium line.
They can tell me all the new features of this chip but unless Matrox has some decent drivers at launch they will end up still being the underdog.
Evolution IS chance, it's just that the ones lucky enough to get the good changes breed more.
:)
:-)
No. Evolution means improvement. The theory of evolution through natural selection (which is what most people mean when they say "evolution") says that species tend to improve naturally when those improvements increase their probability of reproducing successfully.
But it's not always clear if a certain change will improve a species chances of reproduction and / or survival.
And when a certain characteristic has little or no relevance in survival and reproduction, then it will stay or go based purely on chance.
The reason we are more sensitive to green is because there was something related to it that allowed our ancient ancestors to get laid more
And if you can find out what this was, your theory may be right. Personally I cannot. That's what I meant when I said that there's a certain tendency to use the theory of evolution through natural selection to "explain" things that do not fit its definition.
If this were not true, then there would be more people who were not more sensitive to it.
The reason why we are more sensitive to green is a natural consequence of two things: 1. green wavelengths are at the middle of our visible spectrum and 2. our photon receptors aren't 100% accurate, so they don't react to just one wavelength. The result is that the blue and yellow receptors are also partially sensitive to green, so there's an increase in green "resolution".
It's sort of the way single-CCD cameras work (two in each four pixels is green). This translates not only to better spatial resolution but also to better colour accuracy.
One of these likely advantages would be the ability to more easily distinguish between plants that would kill you, and those that are nutritious.
You can't distinguish between poisonous and edible plants based on colour. There are poisonous and edible plants of just about every colour and shade.
Most animals are colour-blind and are quite able to distinguish what they can eat from what they cannot. Smell (and experience) are much more important than colour.
In fact, it works the other way around. Since almost all insects can see colour, it plays a major role in plant reproduction and survival, because the plants with the most striking colours will attract more insects and therefore reproduce more.
Human vision could be improved by covering a slightly wider spectrum, but there's no "natural" incentive for that to happen, so it doesn't. Women won't magically fall in love with me and ask me to be the father of their children just because I can see ultra-violet light (er... will they?).
When something is good enough, it'll stay that way for a long time. Nature is lazy. Which makes me a naturist.
RMN
~~~
I think the professional graphics focus of Matrox shows in their products. They still make a variety of PCI cards that can be plugged in for multiple monitor support. I can certainly see the quality on my Mill 400 DH, and I apreciate it. My last card was a GF MX, so I'm looking forward to hooking up with Matrox again. If they can deliver, it will be a professional card. Look for it populating the Pixars of the world.
It's spelt lying not lieing.