G800 rumors...anyone...pleeeease :)

[Zyn]

I agree with this dude, ATI is coming out with everything matrox has and more, sooner.
They will probably ship sooner, have better drivers and be more compatible, with even more power to push that framerate right past matrox. Have to give it up for that quick tidbits.. Charisma, dualhead,embm,dot bumpmaping, cube mapping, full hardware t&l, all sorts of texture compression, already announced.. with faster fps then the current ati MAXX which is pretty damn fast already.

Anyone get my drift..I think we are heading for some real competition from ati. they also sport the hardware dvd which looks great! more over I think matrox currently can only beat them in 2d highend desktop. I think they have absolutly everyone beat in that category.

------------------
G400 on a G400

[red2]

Of course the rumours also said that Matrox had a few "extra special enhancemants" besides T&L. Texture morphing? Clip mapping?

Also lets speculate about clock speeds.

Current G400 Max-150 mhz .25 micron
Almost a year old

Many chips able to go up to about 170 from what I've read here. Yes there are those that go higher but this is without ridiclous cooling.

G450 .18 micron 28% decrease in die size from .25

From what I've read of FCRAM, we are talking about some seriously fast RAM next to RAMBUS.
So let's say at least a 250mhz core to use RAM of that speed. Because why release a chip that is only marginally faster than your last? unless of course it is only an OEM chip. I also read that .18 micron could maybe even handle up to 300 mhz using the current two TMU's.

Also, this chip should be able to do hardware transforms at this speed since WARP is already capable of it.


G800 .18 micron

Matrox also said that their next gen chip should have a fill rate "significantly over 1 gigapixel" so let's assume 1.2 gigapixels per chip.

Of course someone more technically knowing than I can speculate better.

[superfly]

I know this isn't directly related to the G800,but check out this article at ixbt-labs that details some of the new features that 3dfx's new card may feature(rampage),at least one of which will surprise you as much as is did me,the link is: www.ixbt-labs.com/news.shtml#952883786 .

[Homercles]

Speaking of that rampage article, what do you people think of the g800 having a voxel unit?? wasn't that part of the original rumours for the g400 ??

If you think about it, don't you think that the polygon crazy we're seeing now won't last too long, and the real long term solution lies in the voxel idea ?

since it seems like a g800 has the rgb, tv and dvi encoder all on chip, would it be possible to have 4 displays from a dual g800 card ?

[Elie]

ATI in it's history NEVER produced a video card with the quality of any matrox cards in both 2D and 3D.
Matrox was always many steps ahead of ATI and I think that trend will continue forever

Rock on Matrox

Elie

[Himself]

G450 .18 micron 28% decrease in die size from .25

From what I've read of FCRAM, we are talking about some seriously fast RAM next to RAMBUS.
So let's say at least a 250mhz core to use RAM of that speed. Because why release a chip that is only marginally faster than your last? unless of course it is only an OEM chip. I also read that .18 micron could maybe even handle up to 300 mhz using the current two TMU's.

Don't know about you, but a faster card is not as appealing as more features. More filrate than a G400 is only good if you have a fast enough cpu for it to matter. I have to catch up to what the G400 is capable of, let along it's replacement. T&L on the other hand could make all the difference.

I'll believe the rest of it when it shows up.

Also, this chip should be able to do hardware transforms at this speed since WARP is already capable of it.

I don't think that will ever happen. It's the point of a new chip, going from condor 1 to condor 2 (well, if any of this is true that is). Having the capability is no good if it's not enabled, and with the DX8 talk, it's not likely to be an issue for the duration of the G450.

[The Rock]

ATI having better drivers than Matrox?? Surely you jest, or at the very least have never owned an ATI card. I could eat a jar of prunes and crap out better drivers than ATI can write. They still haven't figured out how to make fogging work properly with the Rage 128 chipset. Fogging ain't one of the more complex 3d effects; ya get my drift?

The Rock

[Elie]

You tell em Rock

Besides that's if ATI ever released their drivers to begin with.
If I recall ATI used to release drivers once every 3 to 4 months with minor updates or fixes.

Cheers,
Elie

[superfly]

In my view more fill rate is always welcome and let's say for sake of argument any cpu running at 500mhz,you know that that's enough cpu power to handle any game,now granted the cpu is holding back the video card at low resolutions(especially with modern video cards),but that doesn't matter really since most likely you're doing 90/100 fps anyways(640/480 or 800/600),imagine doing those fps at 1280/1024 or even 1600/1200 at high quality settings(provided your monitor can handle it of course)which mostly eat up fill rate like mad(both single textured or even worse multitextured and anti-alisased),even developers are using effects in their games that are mostly fill rate dependent because bus speeds are not nearly fast enough(on motherboards)to have extemly high polygon counts(like you see in movies)one developer i talked to even went on to compare modern cpu's and video cards as supertankers trying to transfer oil to one another through a pipe no bigger than a milkshake straw(was very funny by the way lol).so the only way that we'll be seing video cards doubling their performance every six months,is by making the video card handle more and more of the work,removing work from both the cpu and motherboard(64/128 meg of memory,T.L,antialising,bumpmapping,vertex handling,etc...).