Aaaarghhhhhhhhhhh

[knirfie]

wow, there life back in the crystal ball.
how about a few glances into the future crystal ball, please?

[GT98]

Originally posted by Requiem

I hope Matrox will do a better job with next rev of Parhelia, it looks incredible, it has a lot of potential in professional applications, but it's too slow for today gamers.

Interesting comment there...the Parhelia runs all my games quite nicely...if you dont look at the Frame counter. Only game that I could say that it seems to lag a bit on is Mafia and thats only when I'm driving a car..I get 15 FPS vs 60 in 3rd person mode. Plus my Surround Gaming FPS are great considering they are running at 2400x600.

[Nappe1]

I don't know much and nowadays I want talk about even less, but here's something...

there is actually New Product and New Revision on the works.

But before you start yelling "Soon(tm.)" I have to remind that they had Parhelia on the works over two years (and Parhelia is something I would call a NEW PRODUCT.)

So, I don't have any idea if this "New Product" is based on Parhelia or not, how long it has been on the works and how long it still will be...

Anyways, as this is speculation forum, next follows my pure speculation:
If that New Product truly is real follower for parhelia (as I assume.) and will be released on regular release place (on summer 2003) it leaves a bit bigger question mark to that new revision.

Of Course, as some of you have read from several sources, Matrox has (at least acording to Anandtech reviews) Roadmap and plans to stay on competition. Because of Parhelia's situation on the market, they definately need a new revision with higher clock rates and fixed FAA (maybe AGP 8x as marketing gimmick?) for the holiday season. Otherwise when the NV30 comes, they can kiss good buy to holiday sells. So what this basically mean?

well it could mean several things, but COMDEX is coming in mid-november... and suprisingly Matrox has stand there. (after a what?? two years break?)

but hold on your horses... is 6 months enough for Matrox sized company to pull another rabbit (this time on Stereoids) from the hat?? hard to say... But IMO they definately need it. Otherwise they are losing the game.

But then again.. I remember ppl waiting COMDEX here exactly two years ago and because what happened back then, I'll try to be careful. Once more: THERE ISN'T ANY PROOVEN FACTS THAT MATROX WOULD BE LAUNCHING ANYTHING AT COMDEX IN MID-NOVEMBER. EVERYTHING IS JUST PURE SPECULATION.

[Nappe1]

Originally posted by GT98


Interesting comment there...the Parhelia runs all my games quite nicely...if you dont look at the Frame counter. Only game that I could say that it seems to lag a bit on is Mafia and thats only when I'm driving a car..I get 15 FPS vs 60 in 3rd person mode. Plus my Surround Gaming FPS are great considering they are running at 2400x600.

yep, for you, and propably for me too, but general consumer checks only what's the fastest for the buck. Somehow, buying gfx cards are still not like buying a cars. Regular user always wants the fastest bang for the buck. And Matrox isn't anywhere near that.

That's why I said what I said on the post above.

[leech]

Depends if the buck has enough bang in it. No other card features some of the Parhelia stuff for the same price (or even higher) People who need a great card for doing their professional stuff as well as running their games with all settings on high, are going to buy the Parhelia. They are certified for some of the biggest 3D apps around.... Using 3 monitors for any kind of development is a dream come true. And in the time that developers aren't working, they like to play

Leech

[GT98]

Originally posted by Nappe1
Anyways, as this is speculation forum, next follows my pure speculation:
If that New Product truly is real follower for parhelia (as I assume.) and will be released on regular release place (on summer 2003) it leaves a bit bigger question mark to that new revision.

Of Course, as some of you have read from several sources, Matrox has (at least acording to Anandtech reviews) Roadmap and plans to stay on competition. Because of Parhelia's situation on the market, they definately need a new revision with higher clock rates and fixed FAA (maybe AGP 8x as marketing gimmick?) for the holiday season. Otherwise when the NV30 comes, they can kiss good buy to holiday sells. So what this basically mean?

well it could mean several things, but COMDEX is coming in mid-november... and suprisingly Matrox has stand there. (after a what?? two years break?)

but hold on your horses... is 6 months enough for Matrox sized company to pull another rabbit (this time on Stereoids) from the hat?? hard to say... But IMO they definately need it. Otherwise they are losing the game.

But then again.. I remember ppl waiting COMDEX here exactly two years ago and because what happened back then, I'll try to be careful. Once more: THERE ISN'T ANY PROOVEN FACTS THAT MATROX WOULD BE LAUNCHING ANYTHING AT COMDEX IN MID-NOVEMBER. EVERYTHING IS JUST PURE SPECULATION.

I'm going with this....A Higher clocked 256MB Parhelia with in the next 6 months and a Parhelia2 or what not paper launched late next spring with product by the Fall. Lets remind everyone that the Fab making the Parhelia core is skipping .13 and going to .09 which might delay things since Intel is so far the only one out there that might have that process nailed down to make CPUs on and still make a profit on.

Going on what I know from people dont expect anything earth shattering by the end of year. I think our best bet if you feel that the Parhelia isn't up to snuff is wait till next year and the driver base will be mature and what was wrong with the P will be fixed in the next refresh of the Parhelia core. Lets remember that the G4/5XX core was around for over 3 years and that new design GPU prob takes at least that long to devlop..just ask Nvidia and how long they where able to milk the Geforce 2 core all the way to a Geforce4 without a major revision to it.

[Captain Marvel]

"Lets remember that the G4/5XX core was around for over 3 years.."

yeah but was it supposed to be??? wasn't there something developed that never made it out of the gate??

[CaineTanathos]

Don't forget that Matrox also released the G200 before the g400.

the G200 was the first product and the g400 was the improved one.

So its possible they release a new card next year

[K6-III]

.09micron will give Matrox the ability to make the Parhelia full DX9 compliant...

[Axl]

Originally posted by Captain Marvel
"Lets remember that the G4/5XX core was around for over 3 years.."

yeah but was it supposed to be??? wasn't there something developed that never made it out of the gate??

Yes, and with same damn performance too.

[GT98]

Originally posted by Captain Marvel
"Lets remember that the G4/5XX core was around for over 3 years.."

yeah but was it supposed to be??? wasn't there something developed that never made it out of the gate??

Well the G550 points to what Matrox had been working on..it was supposed to be the G800 (its even reported in powerstrip as it ), but from what was said on here between the deveploment of the G5/8XX and the G450 Marvel, Matrox Graphics couldn't pull off doing both, so the Consumer level video editing card (ala Marvel Series) division got canned (also didnt do much in the way of sales from what I heard) and all the money went towards devloping GFX cards only and left the Video part to Matrox's Video Group which is a different division of Matrox all together....

[TdB]

I wonder if the non-programable vertex shader on the g550 would indicate dx7 T&L on the g800.
And since the g550 had ddr-memory, I bet the g800 would have that too, maybe even 128bit ddr.
My guess is that it would have been roughly equal to the radeon/geforce2 in terms of 3d.


A question for you hardware engineers out there: if you have a too expensive GPU, then what would you cut off, to make it cost effective?

replace 128bit ddr with 64bit ddr? nvidia did that with the GF2/GF2mx, which makes you believe that if you design with different ramtypes in mind, this would be easy to change late in development.

reduce the numper of pipelines or TMUS? is this difficult in late in the gpu development? what was the difference between g4xx and g550 in this regard?

remove specific 3d features? there was also talk about g800 being a multichip solution, could some features be on a different chip? FSAA-postfilter on a dedicated chip, or external T&L?

Reduce programability? dx8 vertex shader -> g550 vertex shader? how is the g550 vertex shader compared to dx8 vertex shaders(didn´t it have more registers than normal?) and dx7 T&l?

And that comment from john carmack, about matrox having solved the bandwith problem, was that aimed at the g800 or just the parhelia(obviously, parhelia has the bandwith solution, but would the g800 have had a different solution(256bit ddr, would have been a bit extreme back then), multichip or some kind of HSR)?

[thop]

well some people, or boys , know the secret behind the mysterious G800. but due to NDA or sth. of that sort they cant say anything. i wonder, do NDAs expire after while? and will matrox ever say sth. about it?

[TdB]

I don´t think they will tell us, ever.
but even those of us, who don´t know anything, can still speculate.

[Greebe]

We already said that the G550 is a stripped down version of the G800. It didn't work and thus...

What's the point of going ito details over what will never be seen and didn't work?