'Fusion' cards

[Storm]

LOL Well, there is definitely Nothing unsaid left inside the driver files.. so I'll continue guessing then.

1. Cold.. hmm.. maybe a smaller and/or somehow different manufacturing process allowing for the chip to run a lot cooler, therefore faster?
2. Maybe "Fusion" allows the boards to be connected together, giving QuadHead, HexaHead, QuadraHead etc, along with improved performance?
3. Integration of _something_ into the main chip, giving a speed advantage.
4. Fusing performance, quality and price into one board that blows away the competition?

OR

The fusion of monkeys, oranges, the F800, beer, sleep deprived matrox employees, cocaine, 512-bit GPU, a cat, a full OpenGL ICD, more beer, 0.01u manufacturing process and exotic dancers??

But seriously, does "fusion" interpret literally? As in fusing things/features together, or is it just a weird name for a feature that's conFusing this entire forum?

=Storm=

[skeoch]

Personally I like the idea that the G800 fusion could be T&L [or T&A ] with intergated memory there by running without bandwidth limitations.

Cant see matrox doing hardware fsaa, after all why would a company that prides itself on crystal clear vivid colours buy into a technology that basically (at present) just blurs what they work hard to create.

[Peter Aragon]

Could it be possible that the Fusion has a sound-chip onboard ?

Could be nice to have a true multimedia solution !

(Oh my god, it's freezing here )

------------------
Peter Aragon
Matrox G200, Iiyama VisionMaster Pro 400, Asus P2B 1013, Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 40GB, 128Mb, SBLive Full,
Hauppauge TV-card, HP8100i burner, Pioneer 10x DVD.

[dZeus]

hey, FSAA doesn't blur, it sharpens (the edges)

[skeoch]

how let down would you be if fusion was to come out a be a video/sound/capture card.



imagine the ad's

" the new g800 fusion why take two cards into the pc, when you can just plug and go!"



"wasting money on a sound card and video card, the new g800 you know it makes financial sense!"



" the new g800, its just neater!" - my favorite one



------------------
P3 700Mhz cB0 stepping, G400MAX,Abit BE6-2 RV Bios,Quantum KX 7200 13Gig,256Mb 100SDram,Asuscom ISDN,SCSI 100Mb zip int,SB Live Value,Tosh 6702, HP 9110i.

[skeoch]

dzeus I will give you that, it does look nicer but you do have to tweak the LOD to really apprieciate the finesse of FSAA. Personally I will sit this one out and wait for a better impementation.

but you are correct it does sharpen, edges I was refering to the applied textures, which have been known to get blurred

[Maggi]

LOL, Cloudy !!!

[skeoch]

maggi I appologise, you were right "T - buffer" is used as an umbrella term to cover

1.Depth of field
2.FSAA
3.Motion Blur

I was thinking of the acculmulation buffer, My bad

I stand corrected.

------------------
P3 700Mhz cB0 stepping, G400MAX,Abit BE6-2 RV Bios,Quantum KX 7200 13Gig,256Mb 100SDram,Asuscom ISDN,SCSI 100Mb zip int,SB Live Value,Tosh 6702, HP 9110i.

[Buuri]

FSAA is usually done like this:

Render the according picture in oversize, blur it, scale it down to actual screen resolution.

Maggi,

There's no explicit blurring. That is a side effect of the down-scaling.

:
B

[skeoch]

Anyway I think were getting side tracked here we were trying to eck out some extra info on the fusion cards.

Ideas so far:

1. TV/Video solution
2. T&L and clipping unit
3. Intergrated On board memory
4. Fcram
5. FSAA
6. Dual Processors, SLI support
7. Socketed Chips

So far we have been told "Tradition thinking will not get you close here." by Joel

And apparently Storm was close on one count with these ideas:
-Hooking up two boards together.. like the VooDoo2 SLI?
-Fusing Features together.. like an all-in-one type videocard with all Marvel's features, running on a single or maybe dual chip(s).
-Something along the lines of a totally integrated chip, where the video memory, the RAMDAC, the GPU w/T&L, and everything else inside one chip running at the same speed??
-Or we're on a totally different track, and Fusion is just an entirely different technology.. maybe a programmable GPU or something, which has a core that could be manipulated by software.

Anyone want to add any thing else?
My thinking is too "traditional"

[Dualbuzz]

Its all about Spec(ulation)s

[Maggi]

Hi Buuri,

afaik does that depend on the manufacturer ...

Karina (old timers might remember her) told me once that they (Matrox) did so back then on the G200.
(Btw, I still wonder why AA only worked in 16bpp on my G200 back then)

Dunno about the competition, but blurring it slightly at oversize and then reducing it looks way superior to the non blurred version. I admit though that this also depends on the algorhythm that is used for blurring and downscaling.

...

Thanx for feedback Skeoch !

I'm not really into 3dfx and thus I usually do not get too deep into their features ...

Cheers,
Maggi

[Cloudy]

I'd bet on the Elegant single chip solution.
1 chip a-la Bitboys with integrated ram and all the functionalities. I will propaply be a programmable chip with maybe something nicer/stronger than the warp I'v hear of in the G400. The more speculations arrise, the more I think matrox has licensed a few more patents from Bitboys oy. Maybe matrox has finally learned: innovate in the things you do best, and simply buy the rest

------------------
Cloudy
Asus P2B-DS, 2 x Celeron 400@75Mhz, 192Mb Ram, SB Live! Platinum,
2 x IBM 4.3Gb scsi,IBM 22GB IDE, Pioneer DVD ROM scsi, G400 32MB DH (Oc to 111.1%).

[skeoch]

i like the bitboys theory, after all they did get EMBM from them, and they do have some off the wall solutions to memory bandwidth issues.

I will have to wait and see the Matrox card before I buy anything else, I havent been impressed to Nvidia or 3DFX.

Besides if the Matrox card isnt great, there maybe decent drivers for the ATI Radeon by then, and NASA may have landed on Uranus.

[cjolley]

My vote goes for having the main, gpu, and mem clocks all at the same speed.
Does this imply that vid ram is on chip?
And does that mean vid ram becomes a large, super fast cache for agp transfers?
A vid card actualy using agp for something?, That would be new.
Think of the effect that turning cpu cache on or off has on system peformance. And imagine how much this could help with vid cards that are so memory-throughput limited now.
chuck