PHA8x128 arrived today!

[Wombat]

It will probably run faster, but I really doubt Doom3 has a chance in hell. Carmack didn't really like the Parhelia performance, I don't think even if you tripled it it would be any good.

[DGhost]

AGP 8x won't do anything.

as far as the higher clock speed, yes, it should improve a little. the difference between maybe 12 and 17fps at 640x480.

unless their drivers magically got better or they fixed quite a number of bugs in the pixel shading pipeline on the parhelia, it will still perform sub par.

[bsdgeek]

I emailed him (John Carmack) about Parhelia a while ago and showed this to everybody in #murc at the time.

"It should in theory be able to run on the ARB ( not ARB2 ) path, but performance was really bad last time I checked, and they had some invariance problems with shadows that were apparently due to a hardware bug. "

"I haven't heard from them in two years or so, and I really wouldn't be able to budget the time to deal with them if they did contact me. "

(emphasis mine)

[DGhost]

Originally posted by bsdgeek
"It should in theory be able to run on the ARB ( not ARB2 ) path, but performance was really bad last time I checked, and they had some invariance problems with shadows that were apparently due to a hardware bug. "

that, my friend, is about the understatement of the century.

of course, I was always told they were driver bugs, and due to be fixed in the next release or two of the drivers...

as far as the not getting back... games have not been their priority for a long time...

[Wombat]

Originally posted by bsdgeek

"I haven't heard from them in two years or so, and I really wouldn't be able to budget the time to deal with them if they did contact me. "

(emphasis mine)

Man, and Carmack fixed a big bug in the G400 Linux ICD, for free, just because he felt like it. They owe him for that one, you think they'd at least talk to him.

[Ribbit]

He did more than that - he basically had a big part in the development of the original Linux G200 OpenGL drivers (Utah-GLX, as we know it now), getting them to the point where they were able to run Quake3 decently. I'm not even sure if Q3 had been released at that time.

[SaTaN^666]

well I am still not giving up on matrox. maybe I will just have this video card for tripple head gaming"old games" and then buy a gaming video card for another computer for present and future games

[G400SG16mb]

Originally posted by Chrono_Wanderer
But then, who uses Matrox for gaming? So I guess that doesn't matter.

The problem is much of Matrox's market throughout the 90s dependended on their cards being able to do games. They weren't the best, but they could do it. We bought them because their 2D was the best, but most of us still wanted an all round card.

Now Matrox seems to have pulled out of this, it means their cards are quickly forgotten by many technical people. A computer shop 5 years ago would have their vid card section's top shelf including Matrox boxes. Now the same shop probably never sold anything beyond a G550 a couple of years ago.
Gaming kudos earns mindshare.

They should price this cheaper to compete with GeForce NVS line... [/B]

They probably should cut their prices. Parhelia costs like a Radeon 9800Pro still? Matrox is probably constrained by high fabrication cost and the terror of a price-cut not increasing sales but sending them further into the red.

I don't think Matrox will survive if they try to make their cards purely for the professional 2D niche. They won't keep up by economics of scale.

Hmm I wonder how a Gxxx in a laptop would've done.

[DGhost]

a G400 series core in a laptop might have done very, very well for the high end/business market. the dual display capabilities, as well as the image output quality, would have made it ideal for a number of things.

however, it would have been expensive. and last I checked, the Mobile FireGL and Quadro markets are pretty tiny.

[G400SG16mb]

any decent laptop graphics chipset seems to cost an arm and a leg though. People don't notice the cost of individual components when buying a several thousand dollar laptop ; )

The G450/550 chipset would've been well suited for laptops.

I wonder if Matrox could've branched out into motherboard chipsets with integrated video.... maybe impossible. But Matrox should've done something to stay in the game.

I think they sold a couple of network card models once?

[Kruzin]

Originally posted by G400SG16mb
I wonder if Matrox could've branched out into motherboard chipsets with integrated video.... maybe impossible. But Matrox should've done something to stay in the game.

Who says they didn't try (and give up before full production)? (coughfusioncough)

I think they sold a couple of network card models once?

They sold a whole line of networking equipment. NICs, hubs, switches. Nice stuff too, but they didn't make it themselves.

[Nappe1]

about integrated graphics...
My room mate got a Hewlett Packard Mini-Tower Celeron333A based computer for free. To my suprise, I spotted 2 Meg edition of Matrox G100 on board. Though it wasn't integrated inside the chipset, it didn't took much space from µ-ATX Slot 1 motherboard.
(if I remember right, the driver installation recognizes it as Matrox Millenium G100 AGP. I didn't even knew that G100 was sold as gfx chipset to Intel for integration. I did knew that lot's of Matrox cards have been pre-installed to various systems, but as directly soldered on board? that was a news for me.)

and oh yes... G100 still is unbeatable in signal clarity. There's no way my Radeon 9700 beating it nor my room mate's PNY GF4 TI4200.

[DGhost]

HP has been a long time integrator of Matrox graphics solutions.

I remember working with some old P166/200 HP workstations that had integrated Millennium II's on board.

[chhfchhf]

Horrorable fill rate!

[DGhost]

it has fillrate?