Comparative image quality

[Ryu Connor]

Even if matrox has successfully corrected the anisotropic filter for the P drivers, R9700 can still filter than P right? According to the P whitepapers, P can do "8 sample anisotropic and trilinear filtering on 4 dual-textured pixels/clock" or "16 sample anisotropic filtering on 4 SINGLE-TEXTURED pixel/clock" soooo does it mean P can do both:

Bilinear + 16-tap aniso = 64 samples.
AND
Trilinear + 8-Tap aniso = 64 samples.

Just wondering

The 9700 with it's 128 samples (trilinear + 16-Tap) does still filter more than the Parhelia.

As for the Parhelia's specs, I went to Matrox site and looked at the AF feature link here:

http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/parhelia512/technology/supersample.cfm

It didn't provide much help and after delving through a few reviews I can't find anything that details something contrary to the information proceeding this.

When the future drivers arrive that unlock 8x and I assume 4x the break down of samples would be like so.

Bilinear + 2-Tap = 8 Samples
Bilinear + 4-Tap = 16 Samples
Bilinear + 8-Tap = 32 Samples

Trilinear + 2-Tap = 16 Samples
Trilinear + 4-Tap = 32 Samples
Trilinear + 8-Tap = 64 Samples

So long as the performance claim of being able to lay down all 64 samples in a clock remains true, it should make for a performance competitive option compared to the GF3/4.

If you have a link to a white paper that details the Parhelia being able to do something different than the above I would be most interested in reading it.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Speaking of the professional market niche, IMO semi-pro ppl are starting to use gaming cards for their works because today's gaming gfx cards are much more programmable than before. If we look at the R9700, i think they are attempting to go into semi-pro 3d rendering niche with their rendermonkey thingy. Also, it's a shame that P does not have openGL 2.0/full DX 9 support. i think R9700 is a nice all-round card and has stolen lots of P sales: it has alomost all the P sweetness, such as 10-bit gigacolour and displacement mapping. Also, it seems like R9700 is also very smart with it's 128-bit floating point colour precision. That's 32-bit colour/channel comparing to P's 10-bit colour/channel. Although R9700 does not have a DAC that can output all that colour, i think this 128 colour thing is a great technological achievement for ATI. This function will get a lot of graphic artist sales.

Actually IMO P is an innovative GPU, but i think Matrox engineers gotta pull themselves together... i mean their quad texturing and FAA is great, but they should have added agp 8x, 4 more pipes, pixel shader 2.0, full dx9 and GL2 support, more programmable, 128-bit etc. also, i think many ppl were hoping that P could do 3 dvi... i think Matorx is really close to getting lots of sales, but they gotta reveise their gpu a bit to dump in all the functions into the chip. Also, it would be nice if they can add quad monitor support too. If they can do all these in the 256mb P version, they will be able to get lots of sales, trash the quadro line, price it at around 600 CDN bucks and dun really need to rise their clock speed or get into 130nm fab (since it looks like a pro card). It will truly be an ideal semi-pro card for game development that can play future games well (with it's 8 pipes). Let's hope that they can do this in Parhelia II or the 256mb version ( how long must we wait??)
If R9700 can do all the stuff that was said on the whitepapers, IMO it can kill P sales

BTW i really agree with u JaG about the DAC's sharpness. Matrox should be better than ATi at analog output quality. But i do have a feeling that ati is really close with matrox . Besides, 2d quality made by these two companies are so good that it is become more unnoticable, even at high resolution. (i think R9700's dac can do 1600x1200@200Hz!)

***sigh*** the r9700 imo is a surprise for Matrox's P....

[Chrono_Wanderer]

i think u got it right ryu... too bad R9700 can filter better than Parhelia... matorx marketed P as a card that has the best all-round quality, but guess it doesn't in terms of texture

sigh.. life sucks when there is not enough colour (wait... 16.7 m colour is not enough! )