The G550 is here !!!

[The_King]

Yes. Why would they release a gaming card next if they didn't release one after the G450? So IMO, a gaming card aint comin'.

[Rags]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Electric Amish:
From what I've read on-line, specifically the quote from a Matrox rep in which he spouted something along the lines of:

I believe there WILL BE a high end, nVidiot kicking card coming up. I has just got to be a new chip! No way they could get that performance from the G450/550 line.

amish

<a href=http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/2329 TARGET=_blank>Link to article</a>

[This message has been edited by Electric Amish (edited 22 June 2001).]</font>

I believe them

Rags

[mdhome]

Q2 2002.
Matrox will need to have some serious piece of kit if they think they are going to be anywhere near kings of 3d. By then they will have to have contend with the Geforce 4, Kyro III, Radeon 2 plus their successors. Unfortunately the G550 doesnt even begin to give us a sniff of what is required and personally I think it may be too big a jump. Also bear in mind that their new card will need a lot of functionality that hasnt even been seen in any core from Matrox.
The real crunch of course of whether it will run the nextgen of games such as Doom 3 and Unreal 2, both of which will apparently tax even a geforce 3.

MD

[Greebe]

LOL No problem!

[az]

Kyro III will have vertex and pixel shaders.

Due out in november!

AZ

[DuRaNgO]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">with the targeted core clock of 250mhz(http://www.extremetech.com/article/0,2299,s%253D201%2526a%253D2529,00.asp) and 4 pipes the kyro will have 20% more real fillrate (1gigapixel) than the geforce 3, with no overdraw included in the calculation..

</font>

[Indiana]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by DuRaNgO:
[B] with the targeted core clock of 250mhz(http://www.extremetech.com/article/0,2299,s%253D201%2526a%253D2529,00.asp) and 4 pipes the kyro will have 20% more real fillrate (1gigapixel) than the geforce 3, with no overdraw included in the calculation..
</font>

If that was true and the KyroIII really has DX8 vertex/pixel-shaders this would be one hell of a gfx-card, esp. regarding the major overdraw most new game-titles will have. Reminds me a bit of the days when 3DFx owned the 3D-market and only slightly improved it's technology while NVidia kept developing more competitive products - just that NVidia now is 3DFx and ImgTech seems to be in the position NVidia was at that time...

[Novdid]

It is not really the same situation here. Nvidia is progressing faster than the competitors for the moment, and I bet the fall refresh of the GF3 will be just as fast as the Kyro3 (well...maybe three times more expensive to, with lousy image quality).

It will be hard to push away Nvidia from the top.

[Rags]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Novdid:
It is not really the same situation here. Nvidia is progressing faster than the competitors for the moment, and I bet the fall refresh of the GF3 will be just as fast as the Kyro3 (well...maybe three times more expensive to, with lousy image quality).

It will be hard to push away Nvidia from the top. </font>

The same was said of 3dfx just a short time ago...how soon we forget. nVidia will go down, their days are numbered

Rags

[Ali]

Nvidia wont stay on top for ever, but they have pushed the envelope for a while now.

Remember the Geforce3 has enough extra pins on the chip to implement a 256bit memory datapath. That should give them almost double the speed as long as they can clock the GPU faster.

I think the next 1 or 2 years will be very exciting, with huge sped increases, and features added left right and center. Then we can start worring about cost, and quality.

Matrox might have made a good decision to wait until the market slows down a bit before releasing a gaming card. Imagine how hard it is to guess what speed you will need 2 years from now, then design the chip.

Matroxs next chip is probably going to be based aroung DX9. By the time they get a DX8 one out, it will be old hat (if Q2 2002 is true).

Ali

[Rags]

Ali,

It's not about physical pins on the chip, it's about the design of the car from the ground up, and the PCB to support it.

Rags

[Marshmallowman]

G550 is an interesting card. It is very close to the g450 design, so fabing and pcb manufacturing costs must be getting quite low ,this cad will probably make matrox a fair chunk of money. It provides a nice incremental increase in features for their OEM customers, and had a very low development cost(guessing?). The interesting part is the bolted on T&L unit, it is of limited in use in most situation's as the g550 can't push that many polygons to really stress a dedicated T&L unit, BUT it does have a bit of perfomance to spare... like it was designed for a much faster card!, perhaps a bit of G800 tech has been bolted on for purposes of getting a bit of low key testing done. I think the headcasting T&L is a development exercise for an important bit of core logic which probably be in the next gen card.
Why would the disable it?, they are going to be dropping in subtle "features" in each new driver releses, testing the waters/possiblities of a big new feature without the cost of a whole new tech roleout like the GF3. Then when it is sorted the will just add some raw bandwidth and gpu power to their new baby, 256bit ddr memory?

Well thats what I saw in the goose'S entrails!

[mdhome]

Well thats what I saw in the goose'S entrails!!!

Marshmallowman, you are not Aboriginal are you?

[Greebe]

I think what you get is what you get. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Illusion[Spirit]]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Marshmallowman:
like it was designed for a much faster card!, perhaps a bit of G800 tech has been bolted on for purposes of getting a bit of low key testing done. </font>

Maybe the G550 was the G800? But watered down when it was late and couldnt hope to compete with the GF3?