The russians cant listen to NDAs either.

[pahelianism]

Originally posted by Jazzz
I would of liked the card to be fully DirectX 9 card like the R1000 and nv30 are. Seeing that Nvidia release a card every 6 months and ATI 9 months they can afford to leave DirectX 9 features out until their next release, Im not sure after how long Matrox will release their next card though.

next year the first update, in two years the second update and in 3 to 4 years a new chip

[Dr Mordrid]

Looks like it was done in the prototyping stage to me. That means the design was running on a programmable chip and not in final silicon.

Dr. Mordrid

[otlg22]

Jazzz:

Well if you look at the block diagram, the only thing that isn't DX9 compatible is the pixel shader setup, and that would be very easy to change on a quick 6 month cycle for matrox, the way they have it set up they can just add 4 more shaders, and set them up like the other 4 and boom fully dx 9 compliant.

Smart move on their part.. Keep the silicon costs down, but allow it to be easily upgraded in the future.

TDB:

I think that's talking of the Z-buffer compression that ATI and NVidia use.. it doesn't mean they don't do some form of advanced culling to save the bandwidth in another area so they didn't have to worry with zbuffer compression, which has mixed results at best.

Also yeah if it's 4/4 it would be very similiar to 4x old style DIB.

Steve

[mute]

Originally posted by TDB

i read this as: "we are not focusing on speed and wanted the card out ASAP, and wanted to reduce develoment-cost, so we didn´t bother to develop any bandwith-saving tech, we just want to show the high-end market that we are still alive".

The card ASAP ? .. right ..

you know how long they've been working on this ?

[hominid skull]

Could anybody care to explain what an "8 Way Parallel DMA Engine" means? Could this mean that the Parhelia memory controller can fetch 8 64bit chunks of memory (ie. 8-way memory controller)?

If you look at the diagram, the 8 way Parallel DMA Engine has 8 ports through which the data can be transmitted, 4 to the Vertex shaders - 1 to the vertex cache - 1 to the Depth adaptive tessalation unit and 2 to the memory controller array. I presume that all of the 8 data pathways can transmit data at the same time and independently of each other. Just my guess.

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by pahelianism


next year the first update, in two years the second update and in 3 to 4 years a new chip

Exactly.

Anyone care to imagine what the Parhelia II MAX will be like?

Dr. Mordrid

[pahelianism]

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid


Exactly.

Anyone care to imagine what the Parhelia II MAX will be like?

Dr. Mordrid

hmmm i wont think about *g*. the pII max will be a monster of a card, maybe the doom3 developers will think of declaring the PII max as the endboss in the game.

[otlg22]

Hominid:

Well seeing as it's called '8 way parallel' I would tend to agree they can all fire at once.. the only question is the direction.. Some of the connections seem to be dual ported, others single..

Would need more detail to dig any deeper really.. There are probably some restrictions on the combinations that can be used, and there are probably instances that leave units starved..

That's normal for all CPU/GPUs..

[Ali]

They will have to jump on .13 technology once they can get their hands on it. Not only will it get the chip costs down, but you should be able to stick on full DX9 shaders at the same time.

Ali

[Jazzz]

otlg22, i don't know much about graphics cards and I haven't had a chance to read through the article yet so I wasn't aware what parts of the chip weren't DirectX 9 thanks for clearing that up for me.

As tempted as I am to get this when it is released im gonna wait until the AMD Clawhammers are out before I upgrade, my PII 450MHz and G400 max are really being strained with newer games (lol my usual fps in Jedi knight 2 is 10-20 in multiplayer and that is with the settings on low as well )

[Ali]

Whats a VIP 2.0 video interface? the thing in the upper right corner, with a two ended arrow to the video camera?

Some sort of video in/video out? I thought Matrox wasnt going to do that?

Ali

[otlg22]

Well I'm using an athlon 1800+ with a first gen radeon.. I have a first gen geforce in my daughters machine, and a g400 in my sons.. Been waiting for someone like this from Matrox for a long time..

Steve

PS The Radeon and GeForce were free demos, so I didn't buy em

[TdB]

well, bandwidth-savings tech can probably be added to the core later, thats what nvidia an ati did.

btw isn´t that "64 super texture filtering" just ordinary anisotropic filtering?

that faa-16x looks pomising though, appearently some sort of edge-only aa, with minimal performance hit.

i didn´t quite understand the pixelshader part, is ps1.3 but with additional flexibility??

[otlg22]

I think VIP 2.0 is digital video of somekind.. probably ieee 1394 interface would be my guess (although I could be wrong).

[otlg22]

TDB:

The pixel shaders are only 'techincally' not dx9 compliant. They _can_ do dx9 level work, but the DX spec calls for 4 shaders capable of doing a certain level of work, and the Matrox shaders appear to chained together so you only have 2 of them for more complex shading operations. (i.e. 4 simple shaders or 2 complex shaders, kind of like the decoder on the Athlon, it can issue a certain number of 'simple' ops a clock, or a smaller number of complex ops a clock)