Thread: Matrox last gamer chip Parhelia 512 portable torrent

Matrox Parhelia-512 announced by a graphics chip, which should mean a return to the 3D gaming business PC Games Hardware reminiscent of today's anniversary of the last great video card from Matrox for players.

The trend towards 3D graphics, Matrox had somehow overslept while 3dfx, Nvidia, and countless other manufacturers in the nineties with 3D-capable graphics chip market aufrollten, clung Matrox (too) long to the superior picture quality of the 2D maps Mystique and Millennium, the thrown hastily on the market m3d with Power VR Chip was a flop only with the G200 and G400 of the following Matrox can find connection.

After another half-hearted attempts, the company obtained on 14 May 2002 for a final blow to the market leaders Nvidia and ATI from: Matrox Parhelia 512 and presents the attempt with the 80-million-transistor monster, how to convince the professional players in the market equally. At the four rendering pipelines, each hang four Texturierungseinheiten that evaporated arithmetic instructions the then-standard DirectX 8.1 pixel shaders to meet 1.3 fit for the future was the programmable T & L unit vertex shaders, which is titled as impressive Matrox Vertex Shader Array.



The hardware block is equal to four times rammed into the silicon and fulfilled theoretically already meet the requirements for not even in beta-experimental DirectX 9 an appropriate driver, Matrox has never published. Gigantic 250 million vertices per second would be the shader array at presented at 250 MHz can calculate almost twice as much as GeForce4 Ti and five times more than GeForce3 this enormous theoretical memory bandwidth comes with up to 17.6 gigabytes per second, about twice as much as then current 3D accelerators.

Matrox has widened to the memory bus from 128 to 256 bits - including the internal, Matrox's proprietary "dual-bus," explained as well as the 512th name suffix More DirectX 9 functions as the theoretically possible displacement mapping and greater color accuracy in video memory GigaColor belong to the realm of cute, but not very useful additions.

Adds the displacement mapping, introduced by Ati TruForm block N-Patches the Matrix chip is not only capable of arriving triangles to divide into thousands more triangles, but can also vary the height position of texture values. This theory can be very efficient with mountainous landscapes and winding canyons represent even animate full details emerge on the fly.