Here's what we told Tom:
With regard to 3D features, the Parhelia-512 is positioned between DirectX 8.1 and the next version, DirectX 9. The quad vertex shader (v2.0) corresponds to DirectX 9, whereas the pixel shader still follows DirectX 8.1 version 1.3, as used by NVIDIA in its GeForce 4. At first glance, this is an odd combination, since vertex shaders can be emulated by the driver, while the emulation of pixel shaders can only be achieved with extreme loss of speed. Matrox argues that this is exactly why a modern vertex shader unit is worth it in practice. Game developers can use vertex shaders via emulation, without fearing that the functions won't work with end users. Therefore, it can be expected that the the newest versions of shaders will always be used in games. With pixel shaders, however, the developers have to be more careful because the latest versions of these functions can only run on a few cards. Pixel shaders from v1.3 and up will be most widespread among games, and in the future, they will become somewhat of a standard.
