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."

Comments

Don't forget...

[supercytro]

...to release decent drivers. Tested and stable would be nice...

The G200 looked impressive too but didn't deliver

[MacBoy]

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.

Re:Is this crap?

[hbackert]

24 bit (16 million colors) are a lot, and I certainly have difficulties to find the difference between color #70e0e0 and #70e1e0, 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.

And that's where the more colors shine. Just using 10 instead of 8 bits reduces those color bands by a factor of 4.

Instead of not using those alpha bits at all (in 32 bit color mode), one might as well use them for nicer colors. Now which OS supports that mode? X11?

Harald

It is.

[Rui del-Negro]

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
~~~

Parhelia Shots : Come and get'em here..

[cOdEgUru]

This is the only picture I could find of Parhelia.

Look at the massive heatsink on that baby... Ooooh mama...

Re:Hmmm

[statichead]

I have had nothing but good luck with matrox and linux. I was running open gl with glx at first, then moved to DRI, which has now been integrated into the kernel, it has been getting easier and easier. Also matrox does provide a support forum specifically for linux which has helped me with more then one issue. You may scoff at the binary only drivers that matrox releases, however they are easy to install and provide some nice tools, to make configuration easier. What other manufacturer of video supports linux to this extent?

Return to castle wolfenstein on a two plus year old card (g400max) with reasonable framerates, I'm ok with that and am looking forward to a new matrox.

Re:What Supporting Hardware Does One Need?

[damiam]

You just did it.