A little discussion on Radeon 9700 and Parhelia

[GT98]

Originally posted by Wombat
I really get tired of going over it again and again, but clock speed means <I>nothing</I> people. They're different architectures, and they are <I>designed</I> to run at different speeds.

So your saying M engineers suck compaired to ATIs? Or should it be nice Try Matrox....try again?

[Blackphoenix]

If clock speed means nothing why can the Radeon 9700 run Q3 at 1600 by 1200, 32bit, AF, and 4x AA, yet still get around 60+ frames? (Info from hardocp.com)

They both have about the same memory bandwidth, but ATI works smarter with their's to allow better scaling and extra eye candy.


The parhelia is a nice card, but if the core was increased from 220mhz to say 270mhz or even 250mhz I think we'd have a closer game, but the fact of the matter is that it's not and the parhelia doesn't perform nearly as well. Sure in some cases it may still look better with 16x FSAA, but for what I've read about Smoothvision 2.0 it looks really good.

[TdB]

I guess matrox just took a different approach than ATI, when they designed the parhelia, perhaps they had a different goal.

AFAIK the ever existing "Who-gets-the-highest-framerate-in-benchmarks" race, has never been an important focus for matrox, as opposed to ATI which has been trying to win that very same race for years.

my own interpretion of this is:
Matrox´s focus: quality first, quality sells.
ATI´s focus: speed/features, speed and features sells.

So far ATI, is doing great from an economical point of view, they got a huge OEM marketshare, and enthusiats takes them seriously.
Matrox targets the market, that contains of enthusiasts that are more picky about quality than speed, and AFAIK they are still number one in that market, even though ATI seems to be catching up.

[Pace]

Wombat's point is good, Parhelia performs well for a 220MHz card. Not even getting into gear ratios and stuff, but as he says, Parhelia is 220MHz, Radeon 9700 is 300-325MHz.

We should maybe be asking why Matrox can't get up to 300MHz. Bad architecture?

[The_King]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm about half way through the anand article and I haven't noticed any new features . Is it just me? Everything the card has is to improve speed and thats it. Dont get me wrong, I would prefer this card over anything else on the market, but speed only gets you so far....I mean theres a limit to how many times you can run 3DMark(or is there...?)

[Indiana]

What about floating point precision?
What about FullStream or the Video Shader functionality (did you look at the pictures??) What about independence of those annoying overlays and have several HQ video streams playing back at once. Hassle-free, low CPU-usage video-playback? advanced video delacing?
What about better image quality through better antialiasing and anisotropic filtering algorithms?

And all that at better speed so you can really leave it activated all the time and not have drops below 50fps?

[az]

DVD features such as iDCT and Motion Compensation are done in the shaders. This may not seem like a big innovation, but it means video acceleration is much more flexible. They provide a deblocker for Real movies, and want to provide hardware acceleration for MPEG 4, too.

AZ

[The_King]

As I said I was only half way through the article...

[Pace]

I think its got HDM, Anand just mentioned it.

[Joel]

If you mean Hardware Displacement mapping then that is not possible. Matrox holds the patent on that and AFAIK worked with Microsoft to have it implimented in DX9.

Joel

[Wombat]

Sure it's possible. Why would Microsoft encorporate it into a standard if only 1 manufacturer could <I>ever</I> use it? Either the other companies are supposed to get licenses from Matrox, or MS's license offers a way. If they <I>really</I> want it, they could try to knock out Matrox's patent, and that all comes down to a battle of pocketbooks.

[CHHAS]

And if Matrox holds the patents and won't let anyone else use it, what are the actual chances of it ever being used in a game or the likes ?

[Joel]

Others can use it, they will just have to do through software.

Joel

[TdB]

can´t ATI be doing DM through their vertex shaders, or just use a different implementation than Matrox?
from http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1656&p=7

The R300 also supports the Vertex Shader 2.0 specification, which is a part of Microsoft’s DX9 spec. Along with this, the Hardware Displacement Mapping technology from Matrox’s Parhelia is also supported by the R300, though it will go unused for a while until developers begin taking advantage of it.

that being said, I don´t see any mention of DAT in there, perhaps parhelia is the only one with depth adabtive tesselation

[Joel]

Haig could probably answer all of that better than me. I'll ask.

Joel