'Fusion' cards

[Randy Simons]

Framebuffer on chip? Na, one only write into the framebuffer (normally). The texture-buffer is only read (during the real use) but the Z-buffer.. that part is heavily used, THAT would be the one you want to have on-die

The other 2 are handled well by Matrox's DualBus.

But making 8MB or so on-die.. pfoe.. The yields will be rather low, and thus, the price rather high.

About voxels: really, I wonder why everybody thinks it has low visual quality.. remember, with texture-mapping you always have been fooled with bi- and tri-linear, bump-mapping etc to make it prettier. Landscapes usually do suck: rocks, fields, sand.. when you look at them under your feet it looks like shit. Voxels can give you REAL grass, REAL sand etc.

I haven't seen a game yet with a landscape so nice rendered as in Delta Force2...

[drzaius]

oh man..
i've been away for a week and was hoping someone had found out what the "Fusion" was

woohoo number 215!!

[Rob M.]

Originally posted by SaltedPeanut:
Just wait until September 11th. You will find out all the information from Matrox then...

I have always wondered about this comment, it came out of the blue like someone who knew something accidentally let a little slip..

C'mon, a month is too long to wait..

[This message has been edited by Rob M. (edited 14 August 2000).]

[Fat Tone]

Fusion: How about mounting a G800, 64Mb FCRAM and a VGA connector on the reverse side of a slota/1 processor?

Just wanted to join the party!

Tony.

[Storm]

Sure.. but that's in relation to polygons. I meant that you need an SGI Onyx2 we have at work to play it at something above 1280x1024.
Besides, if you want 'realistic', polygon-based grass usually looks much better and actual holes in buildings can be achieved if you make an engine that subdivides a polygon upon being hit or triggered. Say.. 2 generations of videocard away, we'll have that. Perhaps on the Matrox G1600/F3200Plus. I'm sure if Voxels were as good as everyone claims, they would already Have full hardware support from all the major manufacturers. It's a nice concept though.. just needs some adjustments. I'll take back my statements the day you can see voxel landscapes at 1600x1200 with trilinear filtering in Hardware.

=Storm=
The die hard polygon® guy™.

[Raptor^]

Your Onyx2 would probably suck for voxel rendering.. its processors arent that fast and it can't accelerate voxels in its rendering pipeline at all

Not sure how voxel acceleration would work anyway... surely just having a Z-buffer equivalent is the best you can do, simply because everything consists soley of individual 'pixels'.

Oh yeah, I already have a gfx engine capable of sub-dividing polygons on collisions. It is mighty slow if you sub-divide too much tho!!! Not sure how you could hardware accelerate that either, except with higher fill rates (and the accompanying memory bandwidth of course).


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P3-700E, Abit BF6, G400 MAX, 8.6 gig Seagate, 8.6 gig WD, SBLive 1024, 256Mb PC100... Mouse, Keyb, Stuff

[Heiney]

Remember guys, embedded DRAM was BitBoy's idea

And it's sure working out for them! hehehehhe


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ABIT BF6, Pentium III Katmai 450->663MHz, GW VOS32 Cooler, 128MB SDRAM, Toshiba 6X DVD, Quantum Fireball Plus LM, Matrox Millenium G400 DH @ 160/200, Creative SBLive, Enlight 7237 Case, 300watt PCPC TurboCool PS, and some fun with a Dremel!

[Storm]

[Raptor^] You're right about that.. anything that doesn't go through its rendering pipeline isn't particularly fast.. which is why there is support for a huge amount of CPU's. R10k cpu's are only good for certain tasks. The MIPS structure puts a lot of limits on them. SGI's are often used as reference to ungodly fast systems.
As for voxel acceleration -- hey I don't make engines, I _use_ engines.
It figures that subdivision would be slow, since the cpu has to process a large chunk of data instantly. This kind of method is also really prone to clipping bugs and subdivision errors. You Can't hardware accelerate it either.. we need faster cpu's for that. Of course the videocard has to keep up with it as well. The G800/F800 better be good.. Matrox can't afford to lose this battle.

=Storm=
BitBoys -- What BitBoys? :P

[Buuri]

There are too many downsides to voxel rendering (apart from the low image quality, and slow speed).

LOL
Speed is the best thing about voxels!

:
B

[drzaius]

just read the RT2000 review here and was thinking that the fusion could be a fusion of the G450/G800 and a video capture card.?!

kinda what 3DFX has done with the V3 3500.

or is this idea the reason why the Marvel was made? (although there isn't any mention of a Marvel G450 or G800 as said before)

[Riddek]

Straight from the tree of knowledge:
G800 AGP (G400 SD)
G800 Fusion AGP (G400 DH)
G800 Fusion Plus AGP (G400 DH MAX)

It's a marketing thing. "Dual Head" sounds so "evil geneticist". "Fusion" sounds "sleek & sexy". What's in a name, anyway?

[Dyre]

Someone said this is the biggest post in Matrox Hardware.... i think not. Check out the McRhea thread! And that was a REAL topic. :P
Uh yeah, i think the G800 willl have a built in wet-bar...

[Pace]

Are you referring to the IRQ thread, Dyre?

Paul.

[Jorden]

Don't remind us of the original McRhea thread, please Although the topic was a real one

But next someone gives a link to the mega-thread in TSB (22 pages), full of nothing

Jord.

[Peter Aragon]

Or a reference to Tylau