Parhelia's triangle setup engine

[dneal]

Anand's explanation of Parhelia's problem from his Radeon 9700 preview---

The R300 features four programmable vertex shader pipelines, much like the Matrox Parhelia. The difference between the R300 and the Parhelia is that the R300 has a much improved triangle setup engine, so while the Parhelia can boast incredible vertex throughput rates, the GPU is still limited by its triangle set-up engine. This reason is why, in games with very low triangle counts, that the Parhelia was not able to outperform even the GeForce4 with fewer vertex shader pipelines; with a triangle set-up engine no more powerful than the GeForce4’s, and running at a lower clock speed, the Parhelia did not have the triangle throughput power to backup its vertex shader pipelines.

Any comments on this? Is this true? (Sure fits some of the benchmarks i suppose)

[cjolley]

I think triangle set-up has always been the Achilles heel of Matrox 3D cards as far as gaming goes.
They are not exactly shy about mentioning that gaming isn't their top priority.

chuck

[Ribbit]

And yet they keep details about it very secret - it's one of the big things missing from the low-lever register specs on the G[24]00. Strange....

Anyway, given the balancing and care that was taken with the rest of the design, I'd have thought mismatching the triangle-setup and shader pipelines would have been a major blunder.

Disclaimer: I'm not a driver writer or chip designer, so I don't really know what I'm talking about.

[moreau]

I don't really know what I'm talking about

most of us don't, but that isn't stopping us...