A little discussion on Radeon 9700 and Parhelia

[a_passive]

The R300 supports the full DX9 feature set in hardware.
That includes displacement mapping.
Maybe they have to license it from M, but it's there.

As for the car comparison, that is quite misleading, because different engines are tuned for different revs, and running one at the revs of another is in no way equivalent to a clock speed comparison.

Clock speed is simply cycles per second.
Processor architecture is not optimized for a clock speed. The processor itself will scale perfectly linearly with clock speed.

And for many comparisons clock speed is over-rated (because the Athlon has a better set of execution units than the p4). But in this case the architectures are fairly similar in terms of peak potential performance, so there is something to be said for clock.

Anyway, isn't it interesting how big of a jump this is over the competition, compared to previous releases? The last time we had a jump like this was just after Matrox released their last core....

[Slougi]

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

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.

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

From Anandtech:

The R300 supports Microsoft’s Pixel Shader 2.0 specification, also a part of DirectX 9. There are a number of improvements this new Pixel Shader specification offers, the below table provided by ATI helps summarize things:

[TdB]

hmm! I must be blind or something, I posted that pic myself in another thread.

[Evildead666]

If microsoft has put Displacement Mapping as a component of DX9, then Matrox can't disallow other companies to use DM in hardware.
Its a REQUIREMENT for DX9 compatibility. So Matrox can not have the unique patents. Maybe to their way of implementing it......

[Joel]

E-mail has been sent asking about this but I won't be able to check for a response til this afternoon when I get home from work. Will let y'all know what I find out if Haig or someone else doesn't respond before then.

Joel

[R.Carter]

Basically what they are talking about is TrueForm 2.0.

TrueForm has also been refined but is pretty much the same technology as we saw in the Radeon 8500. Specifically, TruForm 2.0 smoothes out low polygon count characters and objects generating a more natural looking shape with N-Path Higher Order Surface techniques. Displacement Mapping was first shown to us by Matrox with the Parhelia. Essentially, since this is now a feature set of DirectX 9, ATi supports it with the R300. We were told that there is hardware support on chip but that some of it has to be done in software, since the part of the technology is Matrox proprietary. Regardless, we were ensured that the performance was more than acceptable with Displacement Mapping technology running on the Radeon 9700.

[TdB]

so matrox is forbidding the others to do displacement mapping in hardware?
thats not very nice!
but then again matrox did all the work designing this, hopefully the other can figure out how to do it their own way too (that is, if they are allowed to).

[R.Carter]

Oh, the article I got that from was from Hot Hardware - The ATi Radeon 9000 and Radeon 9700 Preview.

[GT98]

Originally posted by TDB
so matrox is forbidding the others to do displacement mapping in hardware?
thats not very nice!
but then again matrox did all the work designing this, hopefully the other can figure out how to do it their own way too (that is, if they are allowed to).

I think its more along the lines if you want to use it you have to pay us a Royality on it

[Joel]

I think its more along the lines if you want to use it you have to pay us a Royality on it

Which would be only right since they did put all the work into developeing it as well as helping MS to impliment it into DX9.

Joel

[Wombat]

Or it could end up in cross-licensing. No doubt nVidia and/or ATi have patented technologies of their own that Matrox wants.

[TdB]

Ahh!
I see, I misunderstood the whole point and thought matrox would forbid the competition to make true hardware accelerated DM, Im glad I was wrong.

you are right matrox do deserve something for designing DM, I guess the competition can buy it from matrox, just like matrox bought EMBM from bitboys.