Next generation wish list.

[space7]

Matrox SuperG12X Duel 256 bit bus
spec-------------------------------
Ramdac 500 Mhz Alti-Vec support
720Mpixel/sec
8MB Flash memory
Prorammable BumpMapping(Flash memory)
64 MB or 128 MB SG2RAM 2ns memory
Quadruple Head
3D Processing engin x2lk15G12X 300Mhz
Programmable form(Flash memory)
Pixel all ting Programmable(Flash M)
Integreted DSP 12g54G12X 24 bits
Digital Matrox own video and audio out
32 Mb Audio SGRAM 5NS RAM
IMAX 3D GLASSES

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My concern is with growth. You must grow to become one, to become whole, to become sane. I am not going to force sanity upon you. Rather, I am going to bring out your insanity. When it is pulled out completely, throw into the wind, sanity will happen to you, you will grow. You will be transformated. That is the meaning of meditation

Osho
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I will try to use a dictionary when I can't
(Corrected by Robert&Collins dictionary)


[This message has been edited by space7 (edited 11 November 1999).]

[Buuri]

Yes, eDRAM.. (drool)
The Bitboys Oy claims the fillrate for their product to be 1.2 billion pixels per second which equials of filling a 1600x1200 screen over 600 times a second. No need to argue about eDRAM's usufullness.

I mean think of it: with those speeds, the whole issue of fillrates will be trivial. Meaning that beyond that all cards are fast enough, so all that matters are the features.

_
B

[Echo|Fox]

Hmm actually another think I just thought of.
The return of Sync on Green!
The old Millenium boards supported this, and it would mean we'd be able to pick up those dirt cheap old Sun and DEC 21" monitors and such (can often be had for less than $200) and use em' for our secondary display.
Oh yes =)
I can dig it, can you?

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P3-450@558mhz@2.1v, ABit BE6, 128megs 7.3125ns PC133 SDRAM, SB Live! Value, G400 32meg Dualhead (@120%), Acer ALN-201 PCI 10bT NIC, 6.5gig Seagate Medalist Pro 7200rpm, 13gig Quantum Fireball CR, Yamaha 4416e Burner, Pioneer 10x DVD-ROM, Panasonic e70 17" Monitor, Antec KS-188 24" Tower, 6 year old Honeywell-SUH 101key Keyboard, Logitech Trackman Marble+

[Strider]

The next Matrox product should have everything it has already (dual head, bump mapping, etc.) but with high fill rate and the ability to do AA.
I also think it would be a mistake to ignore T&L even it takes a year before we see a large number of high polygon count games. The way I see it, we next Matrox card will be available some time in the summer, and most people will be looking to hold on to it for about a year (until the next matrox product). Without T&L the card might fall behind everything else by Chrismas 2000.

Add on T&L board might be an interesting option.

[Mark F]

Well anything I would add has already been addressed here. MORE, MORE, MORE, AA, T&L, RR compatablility (and/or upgraded RR), keep DH. Also nice but not high importance to me are hardware DVD, sure it's "better" but not sure about neccessary, and 3D GLASS, I would like to try some, but I beleive the curent push in general with them is toward cross (mass) compatability, so don't know if MATROX should spend their R&D time on this area, let MICROSOFT incorporate it into DX and the hardware will follow.

Just a few coments/questions:
-Pauly
---------------------------------------------
Aha! Someone else sees the need for tile-based rendering.
I think its really unlikely - as far as we know Matrox haven't done anything like that before.
---------------------------------------------

The MATROX M3D used tile based rendering


franksch3

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- Accumulation buffer, for advanced effects like anti-aliasing, soft shadows, motion blur, soft reflections, etc.
---------------------------------------------

Yes penaltyless full scene AA, would be nice, but as yet I have not seen any compelling examples of the rest yet. Of course what I've seen has been in screen shots, not in motion, so that might make a differnce. But I feel motion blur and depth of field should be left to HOLLYWOOD, time will tell.

-Strider

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Add on T&L board might be an interesting option.
---------------------------------------------

Hey don't give them any (mis)marketting ideas. Upgrade options tend to go unused because too oftain it's only a selling point (check box), and/or by the time (if) it comes out, the next card that has it standard is already out (or just around the corner)




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OH NO, my retractable cup holder swallowed a CD



[This message has been edited by Mark F (edited 11 November 1999).]

[Joel]

"The MATROX M3D used tile based rendering"

But the Matrox M3D was based on NEC's PowerVR PCX2 chip.

Joel

[JC]

How about real time full scene 10,000 object ray tracing ? Maybe not, but I would dearly love Matrox to produce a card whose performance shocks the hell out of every one.

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Primary System: P3@558 Vantec 5040 cooler, 128MB PC125 Ram, G400Max, HOT 661 MoBo, AWE64 Gold, 2940AU Scsi with 32x Reader and 4x4x16 Writer, Jaz and Zip, Card Cooler.

3DMark99 800x600 = 5765
Quake 2 Timedemo1 = 103.9 fps

Seconday System: Celeron 400, Gigabyte BXC MoBo, 64MB PC100, SLI Voodoo 2, Millenium 2, SB16 (eek), NEC 4x4 CD ROM.

3DMARK99 800x600 = 3217

[Mark F]

Well I'll reserve any judgement on them till there is some evidence that the card exists any were but on paper and in some people's imagination.

As for a CONSPIRACY THEORY:

BitBoys make a big stink over their technology. The Media (especialy on the Web) picks up on it. They become a somewhat known name. And get bought up by another bigger CO. with the means, who are scared of the technology or want to make a name for themselves (ala metabyte and alienware).
We will see.

Mark F.

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OH NO, my retractable cup holder swallowed a CD



[This message has been edited by Mark F (edited 11 November 1999).]

[franksch3]

A little bit for defence of Bitboys Oy. The EMBM we all love (but isn't yet supported that much :-( ) was developped by Bitboys Oy and licensed by Microsoft. Matrox was the first to implement it, because Bitboys didn't launch their chip. So, not everything is marketing crap on Bitboys part.

[Pauly]

Aha! Someone else sees the need for tile-based rendering.

I think its really unlikely - as far as we know Matrox haven't done anything like that before. But imagine, a fast card with Matrox's cool colour output.... I'm sold!

I don't think that per pixel lighting will be around for a while yet. The only way to do this would be to generate large numbers of light maps internally.

Accumulation buffers are 'interesting'. I don't they and tile based rendering go together. There isn't any persistance from one frame to the next with tile-based cards. IE - no where to put the frames you wish to accumulate. Well, except the framebuffer itself - I'll have a think about that.



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Paul Groves.
-
http://home.clara.net/paulyg
OpenGL for Beginners

[Pauly]

Bitboys' Glaze3D does have embedded ram. How much is this going to cost when we all play games that have textures coming out of their arse and back?

Even if they had, say, 8 megs embedded as a 'cache' it still would cost a lot of money and you'd lose some of the benefit.

No - I don't think eDRAM is the way to go. Reducing bus traffic, thus spending bandwidth more wisely is better.

The accumulation buffer will be useful when cards that have *mega* fillrate surface.
As an aside, whats the fuss about 3DFXs T buffer? How does that work? Can you use it in Direct3D and OpenGL as a 'normal' accum buffer?

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Paul Groves.
-
http://home.clara.net/paulyg
OpenGL for Beginners

[cjolley]

How about some stickers in the box!
chuck


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ABit BH6 w/ Celery 333@500, 128mb gh@cas2, 10gb IBM@7200, SB Live Value@44kh, noname CDRom@40x, Mitsumi CDRW@2x2x8, Zoom@56k, Princeton EO75@1024x768x32x85hz, USB mouse,Matrox G400 MAX!!!!

[KvHagedorn]

I would like to see a Marvel product which has absolutely everything the top-of-the-line MAX version does (fastest RAMDAC, most fast memory, etc., Plus the kitchen-sink approach the Marvels have taken, plus of course hardware DVD.

I do like the idea of having practically a dedicated cpu for graphics on board, though Nvidia hasn't implemented it as well as it could have.. Increase speed to the point where all the different textures and lighting passes can be layered in without dragging frame rates below tolerance level.

Using embedded memory sounds like a good idea, but it might be too soon for that to be practical. However, using an .18 micron process would be feasable in the next cards, or should be.

Dual Head should stay in both the Millennium and Marvel, but both heads should have more dedicated resources and have the same capabilities as far as refresh rate, resolution, etc.

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Kind Regards,

KvH

[Maggi]

It definitely needs more than two output, because I'd love it to feed video beams to produce what I found at the following link ...

http://hoback.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/caveQuake/

This will be the future too !

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Cheers,
Maggi
________________________

Working Rig:
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
Double Pentium III-450 @ 464 MHz
4 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead
Nokia 445Xi (21")
Nokia 447Xpro (17")

Home Rig:
Asus P2B-S Bios 1010 @ 100MHz FSB
Celeron 333A @ 500MHz
2 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead @ 150/200MHz
CTX VL710T (17")

[Buuri]

Yes, Glaze is going to have EMBM and maybe they will write the OpenGL extension for it..
As far as it comes to Mark's conspiracy theory, the product is claimed to come out Q1'2000 which starts in less than 2 months, so will see soon enough.

Oh, and why eDRAM?

The reason is simple. The old 3D-graphics rendering architecture has come to its end. As you might have noticed, the competition is struggling to find fast enough SDRAM chips for their graphics boards. There isn't much difference in brand X or Y - their performance is simply limited by the external memory bandwidth.

External memory bandwidth depends on two things - the width of the external memory bus and clock frequency of this bus. Current high-end PC 3D-graphics products are using a 128-bit, 200 MHz external memory bus. This gives a total of 3 gigabytes of memory read/write bandwidth.

If more performance is required, there are two solutions. Either the bus width or the bus operating frequency must be increased. But 256-bit or 400 MHz external bus is not practical or cost-effective.

But embedded DRAM provides the perfect solution. Bus width is no longer an issue. Glaze3D™ has a 512-bit memory bus. It could have a 1024-bit bus as well but the 9.6 GB/s memory bandwidth provided by the 512-bit bus is enough for the rendering core.

So while eDRAM offers a memory bandwidth of over 3 times vs. external bus, there's no way to get a gain like that by optimizing the bus transfers.

_
B


[This message has been edited by Buuri (edited 12 November 1999).]