What exactly is Matrox up to .... get the <facts>

[[GDI]Raptor]

Yes, but the most important thing is that he confirmes that a new card is on the way. G550 wasn't optimised for OpenGL, and since the "new card" will be, it's a sign that it will be a fast card.

[SteveC]

Originally posted by [GDI]Raptor
Yes, but the most important thing is that he confirmes that a new card is on the way. G550 wasn't optimised for OpenGL, and since the "new card" will be, it's a sign that it will be a fast card.

Was the G550 optimised for <I>anything</I>?

[Tempest]

Originally posted by KngtRider Also he is reading this thread

Okay, so things seem to be quite OK for now. A new card is apparently in the works, and if everything that has been said in this thread would be false and the new card would be a G650 with HandCasting&trade; (for deaf people) Haig wouldn't have posted a link to this thread... I think?

[KngtRider]

ahhh

i get you know tempest

now that i think of it your right, either he is keeping tabs on what rumours are going around(doesnt everyone) or posting the link was a subtle hint

EDIT: lol at logo, make one for carmack and billy g too

how did you do that anyway, manually in paint prog? want for another forum

[Haig]

A new card is apparently in the works, and if everything that has been said in this thread would be false.......Haig wouldn't have posted a link to this thread... I think?

There's also an interesting thread going on here:

http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/Forum8/HTML/000548-3.html

Haig

[Haig]

Seems valid to me

[Ali]

Ok, Haig says we can speculate about:memory type, amount of memory, price, amount of bandwidth, amount of outputs, name, extra goodies, etc

I would say DDR memory, because its cheap.

Probably 256bit, with slightly slower speed (200Mhz ish, rather that the fastest available).

Amount of Ram: 64, 128. Dont see the point of less than 64 in a new card, any more that 128 would be an extra cost for very little gain.

Amount of bandwidth: Lots and lots. Probably a bigish (8-16MB) of embeded memory to act as a cache for the external memory.

amount of outputs: 1VGA, 1DVI, 1 USB2 and 1 Firewire. with an adapter to convert the DVI to VGA of course. Possibility of a single connector on the card, then a great big breakout cable with all the connections you could think off.

Name: something to do with Fusion, or Piariah (sp?).

Extra goodies: well, DM is a given I would say. Probably a fast T&L engine (I heard 80million triangles/sec somewhere). Head casting will be there, since they spent all the money on it. There is sure to be something interesting, that nobody else has thought of. Matrox always does that.

Ali

[DukeP]

High quality ramdac still essential.

<Rant>
One guy posted in the matrox fora, that the high ramdac speed is about to become obsolte, with the DVI standard.
He might be right, in time. As of now, the DVI standard is not up to scratch. Far to limited in bandwith. I dont know what they have been thinking, when they designed those specs (for the DVI). Dell have just begone selling lovprice (ish) 20" TFT monitors. Not sure if they can run in highest rez via their DVI port. If it can, this must at least be very near the top of the specs.

</Rant>.

Plz keep 2D quality at the foremost!

~~DukeP~~

[Novdid]

256bit memory is not going to be cheap.

In the long run I think they rather go with 400MHz 128bit DDR(maybe not possible today, but maybe in a couple of months), than with 200MHz 256bit DDR.

[Tempest]

Originally posted by Ali
Name: something to do with Fusion, or Piariah (sp?).

Piariah=Parhelia? I don't think that Matrox Pariah would be a very selling name... (Just kidding )
I would like the final product to have something to do with the sun. If the technology is codenamed Parhelia (sundog), the final product might as well be named Ra (Egyptian god of the sun) as faked by me a while back...
The righteous name would of course be Matrox MGA Millennium G800 Parhelia Phoenix MAX
But I don't think the name will be G-anything because it would lead one to believe that the card is just another product based on the old core (which I hope it's not).

[Ali]

256bit memory has nothing to do with the actual chips, just the bus going to them (as far as I know).

The only thing that would cost more is the PCB itself.

Think of the nForce. It only uses normal DDR Ram, which is usually 64bit wide, but they have a 128bit bus if you use two or more sticks of RAM. Therefore your 'old' 64bit ram runs at 128 bits.

And yes, Piariah=Parhelia I was just too lazy to look back to see how to spell it

I also forgot about price. Realy, I dont care. The G400 lasted so long, that if the card is advanced enough to last 2 years, it could cost the same as 4 nVidia cards and come out even


Being serious, I would expect it to be expensive, probably around to US$400 upwards.

Ali

[superfly]

It's not just extra PCB space,it's mostly adding adding all those extra signal traces between chip and the memory itself and making sure that all those extra lines are properly routed to allow for the large clock speeds of todays DDR memory,currently at 332 mhz(3.2 ns) ...

Just on the graphics processor itself,it would add quite a large number of extra pins to the packaging itself...

let's take an example like the GF3,even though it still uses a 128 bit bus between the graphics chip and memory,it has about 150 extra pins over the gf2 that also uses a 128 bit bus itself and the same type of memory that's clocked at the same speed....

Those 150 pins(which total about 700 pins) are there because the GF3 splits that 128 bit bus into four seperate 32 bit buses,one for each pipeline(crossbar tech).


Making that bus into a full blown 256 bus would add even more pins that the above example and there would also add memory granularity issues as well since the memory module packaging would have to be larger to add the extra pins as well.

So there's alot of issues to consider when moving to a wider bus,otherwise we would have seen the transition happen by now.

[Novdid]

Right on!!!

[Lemmin]

I'm not sure about the embedded ram... you need a lot for it to be worthwhile, and even if you put enough in for todays games, if someone releases a game in the future that is texture heavy, you lose most of the benefit. Also, embedded ram makes the chip die much bigger, hence you get less per wafer and cost goes up. Better to concentrate on fast bandwidth to the main memory IMHO.

How about some different (non-bruce force) rendering techniques? Tile based and defered rendering like the powerVR chips? Or is that technology patented?

Also, just had a mad idea which is kind of off-topic, but would it be possible to have an asynchronous (non-clocked) graphics chip? Obviously it would have to interface to clocked memory... dunno if there would be any benefit to going asynch for a graphics solution.

LEM

[Novdid]

some embedded ram never hurts, even if it's a very small amount. It would work like the cache on a CPU, but in this case to store triangle data for example.