Was the G550 rushed out the door?

[xortam]

I know many of you may find it funny to hear somebody say, that after all this time, Matrox was in a rush to release a graphics card. But maybe Matrox really did get hurt by the reported engineering exodus. Maybe the remaining driver developers are really struggling to implement the functionality for their next-gen cards, G550 included. The G550 has a mess of registers that apparently are geared simply to provide palette skinning in the form of the HeadCasting engine. No other T&L functionality has been announced. Maybe the card is more capable than what was released and its only a matter of time for the developers to exploit the new HW. Maybe Matrox just felt that they had to get something to market because their aging product line was starting to deteriorate their sales. Perhaps Marketing came up with HeadCasting as the one niche they should exploit and concentrate the developers efforts towards supporting that application. I'm hoping there's more to the G550 than what has been announced so far (Max version, dual-chip version, more complete T&L, improved memory support, new efficiencies brought forth via the pipeline and filter enhancements, etc.) Is it possible there's a lot more we can see from this new card?

[rubank]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Sebastian Macdougall, Matrox' spokesman, reiterated the company's positioning of this feature as exclusive to its bundled applications, "The T&L unit is not used for gaming because games and benchmarks do not make heavy use of Matrix Palette Skinning, a feature that our hardware is specifically designed for and very efficient at. Our T&L unit is not optimized for T&L with regular gaming use. Therefore, Matrox will not be dedicating any resources in driver development, optimization, testing and support for hardware T&L as it does not benefit the end user. The focus of this card is to introduce never-before-seen application areas in 3D, at a low price-point such that many people can benefit from this application area and adapt to it." </font>

Maybe this answers your question?

I think it´s in line with what Matrox rep´s have said before: "we can do better but we won´t", with regard to driver development

rubank

[SteveC]

T&L was brought into existence to alleviate the slowdowns caused by the CPU doing a lot of the 3d processing work. Now, get a good T&L and run it on a PII-450 with T&L and then run it on a PIII-1Gig with T&L. The PII-450 will do surprisingly well.

Now, run the same test with the T&L off in both tests and the PIII-1Gig will probably be even faster.

T&L was a good idea 2 years ago when CPUs weren't up to what they are now. Now that CPU processing power is so great, T&L is not required anymore.

That's my view anyhow.

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[drzaius]

TnL (before the Geforce3) yes can be done better by a CPU, but can't do what the new TnL stuff are doing.
also TnL hasn't properly been put into games yet. the only thing it can do is setup the triangles, and do a couple of lightings. but the newer TnL engines have 8 or more lights to deal with and will have to push more poly's (once games use them) that a CPU can't handle as well, maybe if that's all the CPU had to do but new games are going to change that by having more complex physics and AI.

------------------
Slow people are easy to pass, it's people who drive fast that are hard.

[xortam]

Thanks rubank ... I hadn't seen that quote. I'll have to look it up and see what else was said (if anything).

drzaius ... regarding your new thread on expanded use of the new register set on the G550 ... that's what I'm driving at with these questions. It seems that their's some flexibility in this new card that maybe just hasn't been announced yet. Perhaps its just a matter of time and resources before the driver team can exploit this new functionality. Now Mr. Macdougall stated that Matrox won't be working on HW TnL (at lease as it applies to the G550) but perhaps there's some other goodness that's yet to be revealed with this card.

[rylan]

Do you seriously think the Matrox driver team is going to use their time to try to come up with ways to use the crippled semi-T&L engine on the G550? Its quite obvious this is not a gaming card in any way, so why would they allocate resources to try to force it to do something?
I'm sure they'll have enough problems just getting a half-decent OpenGL driver released.

[xortam]

Say whiner ... did I say anything about gaming? For one, gaming is not my chief interest, and secondly, TnL is not a feature exclusive to gaming. I also mentioned other areas besides TnL. I'm asking if anybody thinks they'll exploit the new HW features of the G550 beyond what's been stated in their literature.

[bacon]

From what i can gather the Vertex and Matrix pallete engines have constant registers so that doesnt suggest any kind of programmable TnL. I'm sure if they find more application which will have support for these features added, although I would have to have a look at there OpenGL extensions. Maybe features will be incorporapted into Flash animations and the new Shockwave 3D .