Parhelia!!!

[xortam]

I hear ya Chuck!

[dZeus]

impressive! lighting finally looks how it should, and the skeletal animaton/physicals look very cool as well!! now let's see wether it can compete with the dynamic lighting engine that Doom3 will sport

btw. why on earth didn't they properly deinterlace that movie?

[Topha]

http://www.chip.de/news_stories/news_stories_8710683.html

Resolution=3.840 x 2.400

its german, but what it says is, that this display needs a special video card. at the cebit they used matrox mms, each chip for a certain area of the screen.

maybe thats the 2D revolution the parhelia is said to have

i saw the display, and it looked cool, but the desktop icons were so small, that the matrox zoom feature (i never used it) would really come in handy

[Novdid]

Just have to say that the company delivering my connection doubled the speed 2 weeks ago, from the initial 512/128 kbit/s to 1Mbit/256kbit/s. Everything is flying a bit higher/faster now!!!

Extremely impressive physics in that engine. Fantastic the way that modell was bouncing all the way down from that tower, and not to mention the ones rolling down the stairs or the one being dragged by the truck!!!

[John Tdot]

parhelia and the next-next generation of cards

I previously posted this insanity on the a.c.p.v.matrox newsgroup but would like to further the discussion here:


Just read the latest rumors about Parhelia over on MURC. The forums there are ablaze with discussions of AGP 8x, DDR, clock speed, bandwidth, problems with existing cpus and busses feeding the video cards.

Imagine for a moment a 3-d video card that needs absolutely no support from the pc's cpu or busses except for catching keyboard or gameport inputs from the gamer. The pc would load the entire game code to the video card at game launch, then the card's gpu would execute the code itself (again, exept for getting user input). Absolutely no load on the pc at all, not on the cpu, not on the pci or agp bus, not on the disk drives. The pc could almost go into sleep mode, or be busy doing SETI calculations while the gpu/cpu on the card blisters along at ungodly speed.

Yes the video card would need mega-memory, and the gpu would have to include all functions now done by the pc's cpu, but this is just engineering, not psychic summoning. Imagine running Unreal 2 on a Pentium 133 with 200 fps frame rates. Intriguing.

Is this the next-next generation of video cards?

John T.

[xortam]

John ... basically what you're talking about there is a coprocessor card. The IPC (Inter-process communication) must be at a very high level and very efficient. The inherent problem with such cards is the host CPU soon becomes so much faster than the coprocessor that the video card will again become the bottleneck.

[John Tdot]

next-next generation follow-up

Xortam,

Rather than _coprocessor_ I think a better analogy would be _multiprocessor_, where the second cpu resides on the video card and executes all native game machine code there on the video card, away from all system (motherboard) resources as we now know them. Once transferred to the video card, the game code could then execute as quickly on an ISA bus computer (we're talking 486 class here!) as on the latest P4 or Athalon systems.

You would never again need to wonder whether the video card or the pc's cpu, memory or bus is the data bottleneck in the system. The video card itself would be the only bottleneck. Replace or upgrade it as you please to stay up with the latest and demanding games. You may never have to upgrade your system again to get improved gaming performance. Gee, I'm sure Intel and AMD would love that! (not!)

John Tdot

[Wombat]

Yeah, sure, it's possible. Useless, but possible. This video card of yours would probably cost $8000, and perform as well as a $1,000 PC with a $300 video card.

Yes the video card would need mega-memory, and the gpu would have to include all functions now done by the pc's cpu, but this is just engineering, not psychic summoning.

No, it's actually closer to psychic summoning. The components in your PC are pushing the price/performance limits of what early 21st century engineering has to offer. If we could build your uber-videocard, we'd have a much faster total system using the same tech. There's a reason it takes an entire computer to do the job.

[Stringy]

John,

Imagine for a moment a 3-d video card that needs absolutely no support from the pc's cpu or busses except for catching keyboard or gameport inputs from the gamer. The pc would load the entire game code to the video card at game launch, then the card's gpu would execute the code itself (again, exept for getting user input). Absolutely no load on the pc at all, not on the cpu, not on the pci or agp bus, not on the disk drives. The pc could almost go into sleep mode, or be busy doing SETI calculations while the gpu/cpu on the card blisters along at ungodly speed.

Sounds more like a Console... the way a current PC is designed you can't get this kind of thing...
Besides you still need to load the game up, which is dependant on the bus/cpu...
And would you want to wait 20minutes for the machine to load all that crap up??

is it still March?? damn at this rate may will never come


Craig

[John Tdot]

Wombat,

And that reason is.....?

I don't see any difference in the technology advance needed for this configuration than say the technology of today's video cards as seen say from five or six years ago. A Matrox g550 could have been built six years ago, but as you say it would have cost $8000 and may not have fit in a pci slot. Free your mind Wombat. Imagine what could be. Do not be stuck here in what is.

[xortam]

There's other problems besides the HW cost factor as Wombat pointed out. The board would have to support the Windows environment which means licensing the technology from M$FT (more $$$$$ even if it could be pulled off): Maybe they can start on this after M$FT is forced to cough up the source code. The board would have to have massive amounts of local storage to load the game and its resources or it will still be going to the system as Stringy pointed out. Look at the current storage requirements of games much less at what's coming down the pipeline. Is your board going to be able to dynamically access resources off of a CD/DVD or is it going to have to store everything locally? Don't forget you'll need to support on-line gaming and dynamic downloading of resources. This graphics card would be by far the most expensive component of the system and isn't going to be the thing people are going to readily upgrade. The card performance will still eventually become unsatisfactory in a multiprocessor design as the host CPUs continue to gain more power and game developers continue to exploit that power.

[VigilAnt]

Matrox To Sneak In A Glimpse Of Parhelia At GDC

As posted on www.murc.ws :

As was posted here before by Ant, Matrox is scheduled to have some presentations at GDC. The most interesting is one by <a href="http://cmp.bluedot.com/re/attendee/gdc_02/speakerPage.esp?speakerId=36748231" target="_blank" >Juan Guardado</a> . If you remember from last year, Juan showed a demo of displacement mapping running on unnamed hardware (now a G550). If you were at the event, you will remember the demo ran at a snail-paced 1-3 fps. Well, this year he is at it again, but this time I would bet we see some real hardware to push a demo of displacement mapping. Barring any unexpected problems, expect a preview of what Parhelia will be capable of.

VigilAnt

[xortam]

What I really would like to see is this Paraphernalia card supporting HDTV games.

[Helevitia]

Last edited by VigilAnt on 18th March 2002 at 18:34

Wow, I read the news page and it says one thing and read it again a minute later and it says another So I decided to check the wording here and it was changed as well. I really liked the previous wording. I'm guessig you changed it because it would probably create chaos amongst folks and there would be a debate that would never end...

Dave

[superfly]

Originally posted by xortam
There's other problems besides the HW cost factor as Wombat pointed out. The board would have to support the Windows environment which means licensing the technology from M$FT (more $$$$$ even if it could be pulled off): Maybe they can start on this after M$FT is forced to cough up the source code. The board would have to have massive amounts of local storage to load the game and its resources or it will still be going to the system as Stringy pointed out. Look at the current storage requirements of games much less at what's coming down the pipeline. Is your board going to be able to dynamically access resources off of a CD/DVD or is it going to have to store everything locally? This graphics card would be by far the most expensive component of the system and isn't going to be the thing people are going to readily upgrade. The card performance will still eventually become a bottleneck in a multiprocessor design as the host CPUs continue to gain more power.

I think it would be possible to engineer a video card with it's own cpu,and it wouldn't cost a fortune either,a 0.13 micron version of the p3 measures out to less that 80 sq mm,which makes it very cheap anyhow and integrate it into a shared memory architecture like the X-box uses...


The system's cpu would only be used for HDD,cdrom access as well as sound issues and perhaps still use it's memory for data that isn't bandwith intensive(if needed at all,of course)...