View Full Version : Matrox Parhelia-512 Questions
Dave Baumann
15-May-2002, 20:12
As I mentioed a few posts ago John will be handling a call from Matrox over the announcment of their new Parhelia 3D chipset later in the week.
If you have any questions you'd like answered about the chipset then just pop a comment here and we'll see what we can do about getting them answered. If we don't get them answered straight away then we can always try to arrange an email interview.
Question away...
John Reynolds
15-May-2002, 20:24
The call is actually scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, so please post any questions you might have. I'll definitely keep an eye on this thread until then.
About their anisotropic filtering: How many texture samples can they take per pixel, or asked differently, what is the maximum degree of anisotropy parhelia can do together with mipmap interpolation?
Reverend
16-May-2002, 02:14
Can they send us a board or two? :D
Anonymous
16-May-2002, 02:20
Hehe, I don't think John's too pleased. You manage to use the word "chipset" not only once, but TWICE in one post. :D
Gunhead
16-May-2002, 04:12
Matrox has mentioned VIVO, but can we expect a Parhelia card with a TV tuner (TV in) too?
What exactly are the artifacts that result when FAA is used with a game that uses stencil buffering? (We know we can turn it off and switch to 4X MS AA.) Or is it just "no effect"?
What is the texture compression method? DXTC?
Will the cards have another name than the chip (Parhelia)?
Any ideas yet for a software bundle? (Except a surround screensaver full of delicious reef bass. I did like the G400 fairy a lot.)
Was it the east or the west coast team who developed Parhelia? What is the other team doing now? (HeadCasting with Displacement Mapping? [No, don't ask this!])
Is each TMU (one of the four per pipe) capable of bilinear only, so that Parhelia very cleverly combines 2 TMUs to do trilinear or 8-sample anisotropic, and combines 4 TMUs to do 16-sample anisotropic?
Has Parthelia's enthusiastic reception been a booster to everybody over there?
Was it SGI who co-developed the OpenGL drivers?
Does GlyphAA work with ClearType, or exactly everywhere else?
Is the memory controller more granular than 256-bit?
Can Parhelia take advantage of the N-patches that ATi pimped into some current games?
Have you had anything whatsoever to do with Bitboys during the past two years of Parhelia development?
You say that game developers can use the tessellation unit to save Z-buffer bandwidth. How exactly? Can they detect and cull occluded triangles? How is this related to the Depth Adaptive Displacement Mapping hardware?
Does it look like professional modeling packages (3DSM, Maya) will incorporate patches to use Displacement Mapping? When should we expect those? How actively are you working with those software houses?
What is 347 + 165?
Running out of ideas, apparently...
Anonymous
16-May-2002, 08:16
When will you be able to buy a card? ETA...
Is the reason we have to wait another month for review cards because of hardware or software constraints?
Are they projecting gamer-quality (GeForce) or workstation-quality (Quadro) drivers?
Can they give us VillageMark numbers? :D
Definitely press for that underwater screensaver. :)
Anonymous
16-May-2002, 09:41
Displacement-Mapping
It definitely looks nice but are there some problems for game developers concerning collision detection, e. g., letting vehicles drive exactly over the created unevenness?
Target Market
Which market does Matrox aim at? Such a high pricing as expected let me only think of hardcore-gamers and for workstation-use.
Competetors
What about competetors like nVidia and ATI in general and 3DLabs in special? 3DLabs' upcoming chip "P10" with it's VPU has a great power indeed...
Anonymous
16-May-2002, 11:31
Where is the Parhelia chip manufactured? (NEC?)
The 60 Mio transistor GF4 is still a rather expensive chip. The Parhelia is 80 Mio transistors and must have a much higher pincount due to its 256bit bus. They are both produced using the 0.15 process. What has Matrox done do keep the cost of the Parhelia down?
I read that reference boards for the Parhelia was 8 layers, is it at all possible to route a 256bit bus on less than 8 layers?
Anonymous
16-May-2002, 14:40
Displacement Mapping- Given its similarities to bump mapping and the length of time that's been around and the fact its barely ever been used in any real games how do you expect displacement mapping to fare better? Also how are things like collision detection handled?
Why no bandwidth saving technology? The fact that you're going for brute force rather than clever tecnology about your memory bandwidth doesn't give a good impression for your product.
What does the depth acceleration part of your chip do?
Will displacement maps be valid render targets?
Will Matrox provide some OpenGL 1.x extensions for working with displacement maps? What about OpenGL 2.0 support?
How will OpenGL support be? As Matrox never exposed EMBM in OpenGL in the G400 days (still not supported!) while EMBM was the most important feature and hyped up features I wonder how they will do this time around with displacement mapping and other features. I would like to know what OpenGL extensions will be supported by the shipping driver, preferrably I'd want to see a complete list of them if possible, or at least the most important ones.
Could i come and pay a visit to their office? take pictures
and maybe get a free card as a goodbye gift ?
Anonymous
17-May-2002, 04:27
Will matrox used their own OpenGL extension for the shader programing? or will they use ATI/NVDIA extension instead? or will this card has shader supported in OGL? or will there be OGL support for this card at all?
Anonymous
17-May-2002, 17:33
I doubt you could sell this card lower than £400.
0.15 for a 512bit-based card?
Which century are YOU in?
You'll have heat problems - what's the cooling solution? Liquid Nitrogen?
The size of the GPU must be the biggest problem.
SDR memory clocked at 300mhz - erm, you get a bucket of water free with the card...
It'll take more than a "512bit" to convince people to believe Matrox have a 3D graphics card that doesn't also function as a marshmallow toaster.
Tagrineth
19-May-2002, 03:15
I doubt you could sell this card lower than £400.
0.15 for a 512bit-based card?
Which century are YOU in?
You'll have heat problems - what's the cooling solution? Liquid Nitrogen?
The size of the GPU must be the biggest problem.
SDR memory clocked at 300mhz - erm, you get a bucket of water free with the card...
It'll take more than a "512bit" to convince people to believe Matrox have a 3D graphics card that doesn't also function as a marshmallow toaster.
Get out the wrong side of the bed this morning? Sheesh...
1. TSMC's .13 isn't mature enough yet.
2. 21st I'd assume
3 / 5: Why should it be that hot? We don't even know the rated clock speed, but nVidia's GF4 can do >300MHz with the same process and not *much* less die space... I'd imagine Parhelia would output perfectly fine heat @ 250MHz or so.
4: WTF? for one thing, it's DDR, and for another thing, nVidia's top part uses 325MHz RAM without RAM sinks, and most of them can overclock 50+MHz!
iampedro
21-May-2002, 14:38
1. Dose the second display contain overlay that people were needing for video and highend graphics.
2. Will the first card be 8x AGP compliant?
3. When will there be benchmarks of this card compairson to a GF4 4600 and the ATI 8500?
4. Will this card be produced solely by Matrox?
Anonymous
22-May-2002, 11:22
Will they be making linux drivers available? and if so, will they be open source?
Anonymous
11-Jun-2002, 19:19
The only thing i want to know, is:
will there be a performance hit with triple head?
i want to be able to run DOOM with triple head, decent resolutions w/ 19"ers, and max quality....
if it can do that, i wont mind paying $350-400 for it...
Yes there will be a performance hit with triple head. No one can answer how much because it will vary from game to game. I doubt even Matrox knows what the hit will be for Doom3 since the game isn't out yet. If the bottleneck is the CPU or vertex engine then triple head might not slow the frame rate down very much. Your question should not be will it take a performance hit, but will the performance be playable. We should have these answers for current games by the end of the month.
Anonymous
15-Jun-2002, 01:23
Who the fuck -- seriously -- among the audience will care about triplehead? Zil, zippo, nearly zero per cent. Why do you even bother to mention it?
Other than that, Gunhead had the best guestions.
mboeller
15-Jun-2002, 07:52
I doubt you could sell this card lower than £400.
0.15 for a 512bit-based card?
Which century are YOU in?
You'll have heat problems - what's the cooling solution? Liquid Nitrogen?
The size of the GPU must be the biggest problem.
R200 @ 0,15µm runs at 275MHz and can be overclocked to >300MHz, with 60Mio transistors. So it is no big stretch to come up with an parhelia @300MHz.
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