New card models in 2000 drivers!!

[villerk]

Recently a (highly) respectable finnish newspaper Aamulehti informed that Matrox is going to announce G550 in a couple of weeks... and this piece of news wasn't in the 'rumors'-section!!

[atko]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by [GDI]Raptor:
I think that Matrox were working on the G800, and they got big problems with the chip, the problems were so big that they had to delay it, and now the performance of the chip isn't so sperior over nVida's chips, that they chose the name G550, and saves the name G800 for the next chip! Matrox is still one of the bigest graphics vendors on the market! And I think they still want to be one of the bigest vendors!</font>

I don't think so. My opinion is that they didn't want to come out with a half-solution. I mean, that the cards (GeForce series and Radeon) which supports TnL are not programmable and they won't be supported at all in the future, after the appear of the first DX8 titles.

Of course you can program theirs TnL engines, but they are far away from the programmable vertex shaders which are supported by DX8. So if you want to run a DX8 title on your radeon or geforce you have to disable a lot of visual setting, or you have to buy a GF3 or another DX8 compliant card. Their is a third possibility: the developers have to write their software for DX8 compliant cards and they have to write it for not DX8 compliant cards. Of course it is the right way, but to optimize a software for three different generation (without TnL like Kyro, with TnL like GF/Rad, and cards with VS/PS) of cards is a hard work.

I think that the TnL wasn't so 'must to have' feature in the past one and half a year. TnL is getting more and more needful in the present days. If we look at the latest games we can recognize they are fill-rate limited, and if you have a card without TnL (like Kyros) it can perform like a card with TnL. Of course you need a faster CPU. But I think it is much more worth the money to buy a faster CPU, because it is a multifunction device.

So I really think that Matrox will announce a card which fulfill our needs. It would be DX8 compliant, it would have state of the art fetures and it wouldn't be so expensive as a GF3 but of course it wouldn't be so fast. I think it will have the speed of a GF2. But it is enough.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">One question: Isn't Matrix Skinning a part of the T&L system (If it is Matrix Skinning, and NOT Matrox Skinning)
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No. You can perform matrix skinning with your Vertex Shader (it can be done by a hardware accelerator (GF3) or by software with your CPU) OR you have to have a specialized hardware (like Radeon). But hardwired matrix skinning engine is not the future. The future is the Vertex Shaders.