G800/G450 April Announcements?

[AJ]

http://www.3dchipset.com/news.asp#1107
And the April 8th news on: http://www.hothardware.com/

Any info on this chipset? I heard that it will have TnL (good move). Any word on clock rates, number of pixel units/texture units (ie fill rate potential)?

I hope it has more than one pixel unit/2 texture units or is clocked _real_ high. I like Matrox products and would like to see them stay in the game (but damn, they sure are the stealth marketeers of the vid card biz!).

-AJ

[Mark F]

Cut 'n' Paste, before the M Police have it removed:

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Got some more rumors for ya. The word through the grapevine regarding Matrox and their dual and single video cards based on the G800 will be announced at the end of the month:

With the announcements coming from Ati and Nvidia regarding their next chipsets, sources say that Matrox will make the plunge and open their doors to their next wave of technology. On a side note, the elusive G450 as some people have been hearing rumors about was not mentioned in the announcements of things to come from Matrox. The single and dual chip solution will be announced, with the dual chip being released later Q4. Expect to see the G800 (singlechip solution) as early as Mid June. You heard right about the connection with DX8 release and the G800.

With the big guns launching high end graphic cards as the ATI 6 and the NV15 with the proclaimed rumors of 1600mp fill rate. Matrox will be left in the back yard if they do not release a fast card soon. I can understand why the G450 might have not been announced because of what has been happening in the last month. But hey! I could be wrong.
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We'll see!
Mark F.



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OH NO, my retractable cup holder swallowed a DVD...
and burped out a movie

[Patryk - PM]

From what I know, Matrox will not announce its "G800" this month.
The wait should be worth it... ;-)

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PlaneteMatrox.Com
Le site dédié aux cartes de Matrox.

[RAB]

Its looking more and more like the G450 is Matrox's K6-3+. A few OEM's might see it, but the general public never will. That's OK as long as the G800 is reasonably priced and gets here within the next month or so. But if the G800 is $250, it would be nice to have the option of a $150 G450 for older, slower computers that wouldn't benefit as much from the G800.
RAB

[AJ]

http://www.ga-hardware.com/article.c...343&category=1

Well, from Patryk's post and this it looks like the g450 will be announced at WinHec, but not the g800. Hmmm, I'm leaning towards upgrading my cpu this summer and waiting till the winter to upgrade my vid card (I was going to do the reverse).

If the previous rumors are true and the g450 is just a tweaked g400 with a 200mhz clock, it's going to look a bit lame compared to the V5, NV15 and the new ATI card. It may keep up with a V4, but they need to get this part up to 250Mhz or add another pipeline to have something remotely competitive. The g400 has excellent image quality and the drivers are starting to shine, but without a much higher fill rate it won't do well enough on current and soon to be released FPS games to get much attention (IMO).

If the g800 isn't out for 6+ months Matrox would be hurt, since that's about the same as forever in the hardware biz.

Hopefully the g450 will have a few surprises!

-AJ

PS I do think that the card will be available at the retail level, several earlier rumors indicate that the g450 is replacing the g400.

[YoKoMo [1]]

Well, Whenever they do release something new it will take a long time for it to show up in quantities high enough to fill demand. I just hope they don't do that pre-order nonsense again that caused so many so much frustration. If the specs on the G450 are true, it will just be a tide me over kinda card til they actually release their new innovative chip. But by that time we could be looking at an NV20, 3DFX Rampage, whatever S3's Project X is, and maybe even a Glaze3D hahahahahahaha. As long as I can play the games I want to with the G400MAX I will stay with Matrox, but if the situation changes and games become so advanced that the G400MAX becomes a slide show projector (that's a big if) then I will have to decide as to whether or not the wait will be worth it for a G800, If it's out in a timely fashion then I will buy one immediately, if not, I'll weigh my options and do what is the best at the time.

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PIII 650E at 805Mhz, G400Max, Asus P3B-F (ain't none better!), 384MB PC133 Memory, 2 Seagate 18GB Cheeeeetazzzz.

[YoKoMo [1]]

But I want to stick to Matrox hint..... hint...

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PIII 650E at 805Mhz, G400Max, Asus P3B-F (ain't none better!), 384MB PC133 Memory, 2 Seagate 18GB Cheeeeetazzzz.

[paulcs]

I don't see anything becoming a slide show on the G400 anytime soon. I wouldn't expect to see anything from S3 anytime soon, unless VIA seriously unloads some dead wood.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[YoKoMo [1]]

I really dont see it happening either, but there is always a chance. I also said in another thread that I wouldn't want to have to live through playing a game where I had to turn off all the goodies to have playable framerates. I should have been more specific, when I meant slideshow I meant having all the neeto stuff on dragging down the grafix card.

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PIII 650E at 805Mhz, G400Max, Asus P3B-F (ain't none better!), 384MB PC133 Memory, 2 Seagate 18GB Cheeeeetazzzz.

[AJ]

Well, Tribes, on a low end PII is pretty much a slide show ( ~12fps in game, PII 266, vanilla 16mb g400, 640x480, turboGL 1.3). I currently use a MillII w/Voodoo2 and a 400Mhz Celeron and get 30-40+ fps at the same res. If I put the g400 on my 400Mhz system, I'll probably get high teens instead.

I had tried UT with the g400 and Cel 400, pretty bad in D3d and OGL, so again the voodoo2/MillII combo won out.

Since Tribes 2 will be OGL only, I need either a faster Vid card, or hope that moving to a PIII 600+Mhz cpu will improve framerates dramatically (may work, since TurboGL uses the SSE instructions on the PIII). I don't want to upgrade my cpu and find out that I still don't get high enough frame rates to Tribes/Tribes 2 to be playable (a g400 and voodoo2 don't play well together and the V2 OGL performance is worse than the g400 ).

I also want to be careful since I want to stick with a 12-18 month upgrade cycle for my vid card and cpu (longer if I buy a more expensive unit).

I lean towards Matrox because of the excellent image quality on every card of theirs that I've used (MillII, G200, G400). To date I haven't used a card that compared, no matter what various reviews say about the visual quality of other cards (heck some of them said the V3 looked as good as a g400, I beg to differ!).

_IF_ either the V5 or NV15 actually do have 2d visual quality comparable to the g400, then I may rethink my loyalty.

-AJ

[Damien Green]

I think that the G450 won't be a particularly significant upgrade - certaininly not worth the upgrade from a G400 max. It may be a little faster, but the smart money should be spent on the next generation card - the G800 which will probably see some large performance gains and improvements.

The G800 will almost certainly have to have hardware T&L to omit this future would probably be sucicide for Matrox - especially with announcements from software houses suggesting that future games will make heavy use of this feature in the latter part of this year.

[Greebe]

Now just go back and edit, then delete the unneccessary ones please

[paulcs]

AJ, I think the G400 on a slow processor is just bad news. If you intend to keep your current setup, look carefully at the reviews. If you see Matrox's next card making significant leaps in framerates as it scales with the CPU, stay away from it.

I think if Tribes is very important to you, you should look very carefully at the Voodoo 5

I still think Matrox isn't as concerned about keeping up with nVidia and 3dfx as one might think. While they clearly have to watch their competition, they've certainly shown no inclination in the past to parrot nVidia's release schedule, and the fact that they had no response to the GeForce doesn't appear to have hurt them like it did 3dfx.

In fact, it doesn't appear to have hurt them at all, although we'll never know.

Any time I see "they better" in a sentence about Matrox's competitive relationship with nVidia and 3dfx, I get the feeling you could replace the phrase with "they've never" and be more accurate.

Just to provide some perspective, the Voodoo3 shipped in March of last year, with the TNT2 shipping shortly after. Matrox didn't release the G400 until July, it wasn't readily available for a while afterwards, and then they didn't even bother to ship the Max to retailers for a *very* long time. Then they released absolutely nothing in response to the GeForce, and, somehow, the sky did not fall as it did for 3dfx.

I think both Matrox and to an even greater extent, ATI, have somewhat different markets than 3dfx and nVidia. They compete to some extent with them, but at the end of the day, gamers aren't as important to them as you would think. I won't make any predictions about Matrox, as they are very unpredictable, but I'd like to about ATI's next effort:

It will ship late.

It will be slower than nVidia's and 3dfx's boards.

The drivers will be awful. They will ignore complaints and continue to release unstable drivers for months.

The DVD support will be great, but the new player promised with the card will ship a year late.

They will make more money than nVidia and 3dfx combined.

And that's because we are a small and unstable market, and there are far larger and more predictable markets out there. It's funny. I never hear anyone saying anything like, "Matrox better sell more boards to Dell and Compaq or they are really screwed." And yet I hear that Matrox's next board "better have this feature" or "must be as fast as so and so" all the time. I suspect the former is considerably more true than the latter.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[paulcs]

By the way, only the first two paragraphs were a response to AJ. The remainder of my last post was just a long-winded, meandering rant.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[isochar]

Posted above:

"The G800 will almost certainly have to have hardware T&L to omit this future would probably be sucicide for Matrox - especially with announcements from software houses suggesting that future games will make heavy use of this feature in the latter part of this year."

Matrox definately will have T&L... all the rumors keep repeating that the G800 is being released in conjuction with DX 8. (which has full T&L support)

On a side note, 3dfx is on a suicide run by pushing the FSAA on their Voodoo 4/5 instead of working to put T&L into them. Maybe they should put all that marketing money into research and figure out how to put T&L into those chipsets so late?