Where does the G550 come from?

[Michel]

Ok, after being away for a day to clear my mind about the G550 i could only think of one thing:
Which card is it really? and why the name G550?

Remember last december: The following cards where found in the drivers:
G450 - F450 - G800 - F800
I conclude that the F stands for Fusion wich actually means the Headcasting thingy.

So Matrox had the following cards planned:
G450 - Normal G450 as in stores now
F450 - G450 with Headcasting
G800 - Normal G800
F800 - Normal G800 with Headcasting

There where also rumours about 2 chips being released, 'pin' compatible with eachother.

Now as i see it, the G550 chip itself IS the G800 chip!!. But somewhere along the line Matrox decided NOT to put the chip on an brand new board with fast memory, but to put it on the 'G450' board (they are pin-compatible). Further they 'crippled' the T&L unit so it could only be used for their own headcasting thingy.

I guess that's where the name G550 comes in. They just couldn't release this card with the G800 name, but they really needed an replacement for their 2 years old g400. So they stamped G550 on it and focused the entire marketing on Headcasting.

The reason why they decided to NOT bring bring it out as planned is very simple:
The card was delayed (due to many reasons) so much, that it's performance wasn't on par with the compitition and (more importantly) it's release would be TOO close to their nextgen chip!!.
If their nextgen is on schedule, the announcement should be somewhere in Q2 2002. Nobody will buy your 'only 6 months available card' if you've just announced an new superchip. (ok perhaps Nvidiots )

Well this are my 2 cents.

Michel

[SteveC]

I'd say forget about the 'f' & the 'fusion' thing - we've never heard about it since it was in those drivers that time. I'd say the G550 is so named because if it was called the G800, people would expect it to have come on leaps and bounds over the G400, and maybe even think that it would be twice the performance/memory/whatever.

G550 just means 'a bit better than the G4x0 series' to me. It's not even G600 which would mean to me as half as much better again or something.

It seems that Matrox have been trialling a few technologies at the moment and now they have got it all working, then maybe they can produce something amazing 'soon'.

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[mdhome]

Johan at Aces seems to think that the G800 was a gts2 comparable card but didnt want to release it as a high end solution because it would have to compete to the Geforce 3 (it may not have even been finished).

But i'm sure the G550 is much faster than any flavour of the G400. Internally it should be twice as fast and with the added potential to clock its core up to 200mhz we could have had a good solid 3d performer. Maybe not the fastest but still capable. However, Matrox decided to cripple it so it could be classed as a budget entry card. It seems that is where *most* of the money is.

regards MD

[Strade]

That's the most intelligent and possible thing a heard about 3 days on this forum!

But personally, I would like to belive that matrox will launch a KickAss card... but I don't dream to much...

Maybe Yes.... Maybe no...