John Carmack about Parhelia

[Ali]

It wasnt Carmack that sold his Ferrari, it was that Diakatana guy with the long hair.

Isnt PowerVR designed around multi-chip? Their arcade systems had several chips from memory, could JC be talking about that?

Ali

[MK]

You mean John Romero ...

MK

[bsdgeek]

It was one sweet car too!

[Jammrock]

Thresh (his real name eludes my mind right now) won Carmack's original Ferrari at the first world Quake tourney. He had to sell it because he didn't have a license at the time and couldn't afford the taxes...or something silly like that. Carmack has owned and owns several Ferrari's.

As the story goes, his mom used to bug him to quite making games and get a "real job." After he bought his second Ferrari, his Mom stopped pestering him

Jammrock

[jwb]

Originally posted by Nappe1


well, why not these patents haven't made any problems to SiS, Matrox or PowerVR?

and besides, 3DLabs was bought by Creative, so they must have something that is worth of getting nVidia's angry on them.

NV30 could be multi chip, if it is coming from the guys of old gigapixel. But only time shows that.

Because Matrox has experience from the start of 3D. They don't have to copy from any other. Because PoverVR uses an entirely different architecture and they were first kid on the block here. And lastly because SiS is no contender.

Of course 3Dlabs has very strong cards for CAD users and the like. Wildcats come to mind... But if they start implementing multitexture, some sort of AA, they will getting very close watches from the others. And bet on it, if they want something to find, they will find something for the laywers.

I remember btw that nVidia stated once that they will NOT introduce a multichip solution. Point they made was that single chip is always cheaper and faster because of trace length, multiple dies, complicated PCB layout etc... This was way back when 3dfx was still using Voodoo2 SLI. Why the would change their mind..? They do what they are good at.

PoverVR will enhance TBR at all cost or they will simply go out of business. nVidia will brute force at all cost (speed demon). ATI will try to brute force against nVidia. 3dfx tried multi-chip solutions at all cost. They dropped their balls already on that one. Matrox was lucky enough to have a backup plan.

Plan A: Develope high end (g800)
get decent money, PR, name brand from it.
If this fail then:

Plan B: sell it to business at g550
as a very good 2D multi-monitor solution
and for cheap

All the others cannot do that.
Would you by a Geforce2MX if a GeForce4 Ti 4600 never existed and you only wanted a good 2D card. No way in my case.
Would you want to buy a ATI Radeon SDR if no 8500 exist even it you only wanted a low end office card. No way.

But I would still shell out some money for a original Millennium PCI 2MB with 6MB expansion WRAM daughterboard with a sharp 220Mhz RAMDAC and the proven MGA 2064W. Even if the AGP slot will be left empty! (if it has one) If anything will fail on the server is's not the Matrox.


Anyway my crystalball is always clouded and foggy.

[Nappe1]

Originally posted by jwb


Of course 3Dlabs has very strong cards for CAD users and the like. Wildcats come to mind... But if they start implementing multitexture, some sort of AA, they will getting very close watches from the others. And bet on it, if they want something to find, they will find something for the laywers.
...
I remember btw that nVidia stated once that they will NOT introduce a multichip solution. Point they made was that single chip is always cheaper and faster because of trace length, multiple dies, complicated PCB layout etc... This was way back when 3dfx was still using Voodoo2 SLI. Why the would change their mind..? They do what they are good at.

in the first one, Let me guess that you really haven't followed actively 3DCards many years?

does Permedia 2 say anything to you?

and besides, 3DLabs has already Multitexturing and best FSAA on the market. So Pro/CAD/3D modeling cards are no exceptions, what comes to feature set (plus 3DLabs had Hardware Transform without Lightning in their chips when nVidia was making Riva128.) Only thing what 3DLabs needs more is memory bandwidth with reasonable price. Their cards generally outperform gaming cards even today at least in professional aplications, but they are just too pricy.

and the 2nd one, you've got a point there, but lot has changed since then and if they want get some use of their investment (3dfx and mostly gigapixel.) they might need to make turn around here. 3dfx/Gigapixel idea was all about the multichip and I think that in case of nVidia, Geometry processor and rendering pipeline in different chips could be possible. (in general form, that's not a multi-chip, but more like divided rendering pipeline, which as you earlier in your post said, would solve some bandwidth problems.)

[jwb]

Originally posted by Nappe1


in the first one, Let me guess that you really haven't followed actively 3DCards many years?

does Permedia 2 say anything to you?

Was not a good educated guess

I was once nearly convinced to buy a Diamond FireGL 1000 the other's were Diamond Monster 3DII and Diamond Viper 550
I choose the Monster 3DII... later added a second one. Kept the Matrox inside...

[frankymail]

BTW guys (maybe my post is a little late ), a parhelia is the singular form of the word and isn't the same thing as a parhelion and a parenthelia. All three and mock-suns (halos of the sun) but they are not the same thing. So don'T go thinking the Parhelia will be a multi-chip solution just because of that.

C Ya

[DuRaNgO]

I remember btw that nVidia stated once that they will NOT introduce a multichip solution

They also stated that they wouldn't do EMBM, and after almost three years they finally figured it out

[Marshmallowman]

its parhelia because it has 2 displays...

[Wombat]

Both Webster's and American Heritage disagree with you franky.

[Dr Mordrid]

3D Labs do indeed make nice professional cards. I have one of their Oxygen GVX1 Pro displays in the 3D workstation and it's very nice. They also nave an excellent OpenGL.

Of course something faster will be nice

Dr. Mordrid

[frankymail]

You're right, all of them are mock-suns (halos of the sun, often placed in a triangular arrangement, caused by the refraction of the of the middle section of the visible light sepctrum by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere and blahblahblah...) but that is the same as saying that a Pentium 3 and an Athlon are both the same thing because they are both CPU, or that a prostitute and a whore are the same…I'm pretty sure it ain't written Parhelion (plur. Parhelia or Parenthelia) in the dictionnary, because all three of them have distinctive characteristics... They might be similar natural phenomenae, but they are not the same. If you don't believe me, pay a visit to you local library and borrow a few books on meteorology; you can learn a lot of interesting things in those heavy mofos... Btw, if Parhelia was a plural noun, the singular form would be Parhelium, not Parhelion.

C Ya

[Michel]

What stroke my mind was the clear statement that we will see THIS YEAR a MULTICHIP solution.

Hmmz.. according to the latest NV30 rumors it WILL be an multichip:

AGP 4x and 8x
Copper Core GPU Processor 0.13 m default clock 450 MHz
73 million transistors
8 pipes
128 MB DDR-SDRAM @ 375 MHz x2 = 750Mhz and 256 bit yes 256 bit
370Mhz RAMDAC
DirectX 9.x compatible
Quad Vertex Shaders
Dual Pixel Shaders
85 bone capable
Lightspeed Memory Architecture III
Quad Cache memory caching subsystem
Dual Z-buffers for greater compression without losses
visibility subsystem
NvAuto advanced pre-charge
Advanced Hardware Anisotropic Filtering - A new 12nvx mode that delivers improved subpixel coverage, texture placement and quality. 12nvx mode should deliver 80% better subpixel coverage and placement than previous modes
Hardware bumpmapping
4 Textures/Pixel in a single clock cycle "loop back" can also apply an additional 4 textures per rendering pass
A separate second copper processor running at 450Mhz an 0.13m as well - handle all T&L now called TT&L (True Time and lighting) and NVAutoShaper a new prechached and precacheable system
Programmers can also add shapes to be temporarily stored in precache to speed things up
Latest OpenGL
Backward glide game capable thanks to NvBlur (Yes a new version of Glide!)
NView Multi-display Technology
Built in re-programmable DVD and TV decoder chip

(link: http://www.vr-zone.com/#2259 )

i've heard rumors that it will have 22,3 GB bandwith (the dualchip version).
Rumors for Parhelia go upto 19,2 GB..

Will the same thing happen to Matrox as with the G400MAX??
At time of introduction the fastest card on earth, but few months later surpassed by an nextgen Nvidia? (i find the nv30 nextgen, because it is a new design an rumors are it won't be called GeForce)

[DukeP]

Latin.
Parhelia, plural.
Parhelium, singular.

Like Vira, vs. Virus.

~~DukeP~~