Real Matrox Parhelia Details leaked

[GadgetMaster]

Once its out its out!
The wonders of the web eh! :-D  :-D

[JetFireDX]

I had heard that Microsoft dropped Nvidia for the next XBox's GPU....wonder if Matrox's (or a version there of) is the choice? Sounds like a beast of a chip, but lets see programmers put all that hardware to use.

[System]

According to one site, which showed the chip  and display ad of 3 monitors side by side with one desktop spread across all of them...

* Up to 350 Mhz clock
* 0.15  micron process
* 80 Million Transistors
* Up to 20 GB/sec memory bandwidth
* 256-bit memory interface
* Up to 1.4 GB/s Fillrate and
* AGP2x/4x/8x with SBA and Fastwrites
* 4 Pipelines
* 4 Texture blocks per pipeline
* Triple Ultra Sharp-II 400 Mhz  RAMDAC
* Resolution up to 2048x1536x32bpp at 85Mhz
* Vertex 2.0 Spec
* EMBM & DOT3
* DX9 N-Patches
* Highend card will cost ~ $500
* Released end Summer

[Skyraker]

This all sounds well and good, and I would crawl on my belly naked over broken glass to have one of these inside an Amione... however...

With the current amione using a G3 it seems pointless to have so much graphics power as it simply won't be used...

Also can someone explain to me what 3d drivers does the Amiga currently use (we obviously can't have directx, what about opengl?) and will they take full advantage of these new cards?

I know some people are using voodoo chipsets so I guess thats under opengl and not glide.

Regards

Skyraker.

[Herewegoagain]

This all sounds well and good, and I would crawl on my belly naked over broken glass to have one of these inside an Amione... however...

Well, a 600MHz cpu is what Haig at Matrox Tech Support have said will likely be the requirements for the card, so yes the G3 @ 600 should do just fine.  But you are correct that it will not use it to it's fullest potential, because A1 currently only supports AGP2X.  That's not to say it would be a total slow dog either.  Just that it would not be able to reach it's maximum.

The Amiga uses Warp3D for 3D stuff, along with Mesa (OpenGL compatable).  So it has a good foundation, and will be getting a few other things like input devices, and sound (?) etc in the upcoming versions.  Someone else may know more than me about this, so feel free to jump in and correct me if I'm wrong.

[Skyraker]

AGP 2x deliveres a bandwidth of 528mb/sec, My point wasn't to do with the AGP but with the processor, is 600mhz going to be fast enough to keep up with this monster (and before someone tells me off for quoting clock speeds... I know, I just think they should have started off at 1ghz)

Regards

Skyraker.

[Blackbeard]

Just when we thought that things were looking good, all of a sudden that look even better! This is great news for the future of Amiga and it appears that they have made the right choices. With the newer PPC chips not far off and this totally SMOKIN' graphics card, Amiga will RULE the universe!

[System]

Better Amiga rule than Apple or Sony. Amigans have suffered enough.

[ksk]

Parhelia-512 (G1000)
80-90 million transistors
4 rendering pipelines with 4 TMUs each
512bit internal  structure
256bit memory access
TripleHead
SurroundGaming (3D image similar to the one used in IMAX theaters)
350MHz GPU
256MB DDR SDRAM working at 700MHz.

Matrox Parhelia-512 Launched in Japan
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/story.html?id=1021332234

[redrumloa]

That's a bit misleading and an oversimplification. The simplest way to explain what is wrong with that statement is encapsulated in one word: Amithlon.

That's probably not true.

Remember the old Geforce-II Ultra benckmarks? A 700Mhz P3 gave nearly identical FPS in all test against a 1.6Ghz P4.

And *YES* I would rather have a faster CPU than 600Mhz. 1Ghz would have been a better starting point, bit I can live with 600Mhz as a start!