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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...
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
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.
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
~~~
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
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
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.
Some reasons why this isn't implemented is answered in the faq
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
Sorry , in the Xlib spec only 24 bit colour is supported. 1 byte each for RGB.
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
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?
SGI's have supported more than 24-bit color for years.
Parhelia 512? Awfully strange name for a new Matrix film.
You don't know hot to cut 'n paste?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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
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.
Because the gaps aren't right in the middle of your field of view. With three displays, default pop-up behavior (dialog boxes and such) would occur on a single monitor in the middle of your viewing window without being split in half (unless it's one of those silly dialogs that's shown as a percentage width of the desktop).
There are, of course, ways to modify that behavior (using Matrox's own tools if you have one of their cards), but it would be nice to look straight ahead and get an uninterrupted center desktop. As it is now, I look straight ahead and see 3 inches of border and gap between desktops.
I spend all day now looking either to the left or to the right. Looking to the middle would be a nice change.
And the quip about reading the article was unnecessary. First, he could have tried to read the article and found the site suddenly unresponsive (as did I). Second, he could have been reading it for technical information instead of marketing info. It happens.
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
~~~
Regardless, I would expect many visual apps on linux to use OpenGL and I know that you can use more than 8 bits per channel with OpenGL as I have done that on SGI's.
What about in 3D? I would think going through DRI to the hardware and not through X you'd be able to use the gigacolor functionality. And that's where it would be most handy - I don't really care about billion-color icons on my desktop.
Ooh, on second thought, even 24-bit color doesn't do well on the gradients in title bars and background images sometimes....
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
[...] 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
- 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"?
The XAlloc*Color routines take a hex value of the form #XXXXXX or a colour name which references
rgb.txt which stores its colours in 3 decimal format. There are other formats you can pass to
these routines but AFAIK they get converted to 24 bit.
Straight from the newspeak dictionary found at:h tml
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns_frames.
Feminist:
Implied - One who wishes to be more feminine, and wishes to protect feminine ideas and custom.
Actual - One who wishes to be more masculine, and destroy differences between the sexes.
"It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a feminist philosophy, to treat everything as if it were a male chauvanist." - Abraham Maslow
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.
Did you actually bother to read a manpage?
Your wrong.
'man X', under 'COLOR NAMES'
The syntax is an initial sharp sign character followed by a numeric specification, in one of the following formats:
#RGB (4 bits each)
#RRGGBB (8 bits each)
#RRRGGGBBB (12 bits each)
#RRRRGGGGBBBB (16 bits each)
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.
Obviously your PHD is not in the realm of sociology or psychology. If it were you could easily formulate a theory that didn't require you to be insulting and patronizing.
I'm sure that if you really cared, and were not interested in showing off your superiority to us uneducated, bigger-fatser-better obsessed troglodytes, you could figure out the answer to your question on your own.
Rat
Wage Slave, Politically Incorrect, Male (who suffers neither liberal nor male guilt).
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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"?
That can not be correct. The XColor structure, which is used all over the Xlib API for communicating color values is 16 bits per gun, 48 bits total.
Try thinking that bit of logic over again. :)
Then try this experiment. Open a paint program, select a nice medium, fully saturated blue and paint 1/2 the screen with it. Now edit that color and change one of the color components by a single value. I.e. from FF to FE or something. Then paint the other half of the screen.
MOST people can see a mach band where the two colors that differ by only 1 value of one color component meet in the middle. (If you don't see it at first, try a slightly darker shade of blue) That is why you need more than 256 values per component. Even when you are only showing two of the 2^24 colors on the screen, the fact that there are "only" 2^24 colors becomes a limiting factor.
10 bits (1024 values) is reaching the level of human perception for the most part. BUT that's still not good enough because gamma correction in the hardware can reduce the actual color resolution back down to 8 bits pretty fast. Eventually we'll all be using 16 bits per component all the way through. (Well for graphics work anyway) That'll give enough user color matching and adjustment and hardware color matching enough "breathing room".
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
This microchip is just like all other microchips. It has certain physical and electrical properties. It helps render information on a computer. It does this slightly faster than previous microchips at a much greater price.
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.
This feminist opinionist is like any other feminist opinionist. They help to further equality of the sexes. She does this slightly better than previous ones while being much more boring.
What is so fascinating about this to young, white females? It presents itself in many scenarios: feminists that write bearly coherent jargon ridden articles in my morning paper 'DN'. Feminists that attack graphics cards trying to prove a point about genus.
Why don't you get that huge chip of your shoulder, enjoy life. Equality will happen more and more. Enjoy the journey. Your cause will be completed in time, for now just enjoy the scenery.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
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.
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.
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?
And you think I give a rat's festering gonads about the opinions of an anon?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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?
You are mistaken. There is no such limitation
in the X11 specification. Even XFree86 supports
10:10:10 framebuffers on some 3DLabs cards (see
the man page on "glint").
All the X11 specification says is that there
can be no more than 32 bits per pixel. This
limitation only applies to core X11 rendering.
Extensions like OpenGL do not have these
limitations.
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.
IANOVPE (I am not a visual processing expert) but for an example of the difference between us and machines in this area take a whole screen of white noise. How cut out a random square. Now tile the square (or probably any tesselating shape for that matter) and look at the resulting image. A child will see the "grid" pattern. Now try and get a computer to work it out.
Our capacity to distinguish "difference" is such that for us absoluteness of colour is almost irrelvant it is change in wavelenth to which our cones are focused.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."