G800

[Jon P. Inghram]

Originally posted by Wombat
Dude, since when were we allowed to say that?

OMG, this an accidental leak of the G800 secret? G400 SLI or something?

[bsdgeek]

Originally posted by borat
the MAXX is not really a huge surprise given that the G450 drivers had something about a dual cpu graphics card written in them somewhere if i remember correctly. wonder why G800 was scraped?Does the G550 give 11/8 the performance of the G400?

Why was it scrapped? And supposedly there are a bunch of features, that if a revision had been done, would have made G550 a higher class card.

[Kruzin]

G800 was not scrapped, it was renamed G550.

[K6-III]

Matrox wouldn't start the development of a new card and take 2 years just to add Headcasting....

[Wombat]

Agreed.

[Kruzin]

Well, as we know, headcasting uses T&L. But Matrox decided to limit the G550s T&L to only their headcasting apps, making it unavailable to any other T&L app. Why they limited it is still unclear...bugs, poor performance, whatever...it's crippled.
So if G550 had an un-castorated T&L, and came out with higher clock speeds, it would have been G800...

The logical conclusion is that M decided it was better to concetrate on Parhelia R&D, rather than put those resources to bettering G550(800).

[[GDI]Raptor]

It looks to me both on the G550 and Parhelia that Matrox has big problems with clocking their chips high......

To "few" recources in R&D perhaps? Or not good enough equipment?

[chhfchhf]

who can provide some pictures of G800?

[borat]

doubt you'll ever see them unless matrox HQ burns down and leaves bits of silicon everywhere.

[K6-III]

Maybe someday, as with bitboys, all the info will be made available...

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Agree. There are quite a bit of hidden things on the G550. (Vertex Shaders and T&L). Maybe Matrox also planned to implant Pixel Shaders on G800, but they dropped it probably because they do not have the right equiptment to clock it as a gaming card, so they rearranged the silicon, and eventually bcame the G550 with fewer 3D features. I'd say the programmers hide the T&L pretty well too. (And they didn't use the original G800 silicon for the G550 PCB, and hide the features through drivers, is probably because G800 should be a bigger chip than G550 (considering the amount of features it was supposed to have) so by cutting down the transistors on the IC production cost should be reduced.

And about the G800 as a Dual G400... I think Matrox couldn't handle the cost of producing a dual chip solution. And I don't think the Rage Fury MAXX and the Voodoo 5 5500/6000 weren very successful... so seeinig that, Matrox probably diecided to drop the Dual G400 idea. (i.e. in here who actually has a dual GPU card anyways?)

If there was actually a Dual G400 idea, I have the impression that the G450 MMS has so kind of technology/idea the the G800 was supposed to have. Maybe 4-head surround gaming. (3 screens are used and one screen for manu and stuff) For video it would be great. 3 screens for app and 4th screen as a TV for video playback...

[Kurt]

it'd be good if they gave us the choice between buying a 1 or 2 GPU card. The voodoo 5500 and 6000 weren't selling a lot, but the GF4 Ti4600 or radeon 9700 pro aren't either...

they don't give the users much choice on what to buy...

[Greebe]

And about the G800 as a Dual G400...

Left field flyball, where in the world did you get that idea?!?!?!?!?!

I said double the G400's speed only.

[Jon P. Inghram]

You said

2xG400 (basically)

That can be interpreted several ways. And when Wombat says

Dude, since when were we allowed to say that?

it sounded suspicious.

[thop]

I bet we will see a G800 prototype on ebay one day.