Matrox Parhelia
Encyclopedia
DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...
8.1 and incorporating several DirectX 9.0 features. It was best known for its ability to drive three monitors ("Surround Gaming") and its Coral Reef tech demo.
Background
The Parhelia series was MatroxMatrox
Matrox is a producer of video card components and equipment for personal computers. Based in Dorval, Quebec, Canada it was founded by Lorne Trottier and Branko Matić....
's attempt to return to the market after a long hiatus, their first significant effort since the G200
Matrox G200
The G200 is a 2D, 3D, and video accelerator chip for personal computers designed by Matrox. It was released in 1998.-History:Matrox had been known for years as a significant player in the high-end 2D graphics accelerator market. Cards they produced were excellent Windows accelerators, and some of...
and G400
Matrox G400
The G400 is a video card made by Matrox, released in September 1999. The graphics processor contains a 2D GUI, video, and Direct3D 6.0 3D accelerator...
lines had become uncompetitive. Their other post-G400 products, G450 and G550, were cost-reduced revisions of "G400" technology and were not competitive with ATI's Radeon
Radeon
Radeon is a brand of graphics processing units and random access memory produced by Advanced Micro Devices , first launched in 2000 by ATI Technologies, which was acquired by AMD in 2006. Radeon is the successor to the Rage line. There are four different groups, which can be differentiated by...
or NVIDIA's GeForce
GeForce
GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units designed by Nvidia. , there have been eleven iterations of the design. The first GeForce products were discrete GPUs designed for use on add-on graphics boards, intended for the high-margin PC gaming market...
lines with regards to 3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
.
Features
The Parhelia-512 was the first GPU by Matrox to be equipped with a 256-bit memory bus, giving it an advantage over other cards of the time in the area of memory bandwidth. The '-512' suffix refers to the 512-bit ring bus. The Parhelia processor featured Glyph acceleration, where anti-aliasing of text was accelerated by the hardware.Parhelia-512 includes 4 32x4 vertex shaders with dedicated displacement mapping
Displacement mapping
Displacement mapping is an alternative computer graphics technique in contrast to bump mapping, normal mapping, and parallax mapping, using a texture- or height map to cause an effect where the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface are displaced, often along the local...
engine, pixel shader array with 4 texturing unit and 5-stage pixel shader per pixel pipeline. It supports 16x fragment anti-aliasing
Anti-aliasing
In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution...
, all of which were featured prominently in Matrox's Coral Reef technical demo.
Display controller component supports 10-bit color frame buffer (called "Gigacolor") with 10-bit 400MHz RAMDACs on 2 RGB ports and 230MHz RAMDAC on TV encoder port, which was an improvement over its competitors. The frame buffer is in RGBA (10:10:10:2) format, and supports full gamma correction. Dual link TMDS is supported via external controller connected to the digital interface.
Memory controller supports 256-bit DDR SDRAM.
The "Surround Gaming" support allowed the card to drive three monitors creating a unique level gaming immersion. For example, in a flight simulator or sim racing
Sim racing
Sim racing is the collective term for computer software that attempts to simulate accurately auto racing , complete with real-world variables such as fuel usage, damage, tire wear and grip, and suspension settings...
, the middle monitor could show the windshield while the left and right monitors could display the side views (offering peripheral vision
Peripheral vision
Peripheral vision is a part of vision that occurs outside the very center of gaze. There is a broad set of non-central points in the field of view that is included in the notion of peripheral vision...
). However, only 2 displays can be controlled independently.
Video cards
The cards were released in 2002, simply called Matrox Parhelia, initially came with 128 or 256 MiB memory. Retail cards are clocked 220MHz core, 275MHz memory; OEM cards are clocked 200MHz core, 250MHz memory.To further improve analog image quality, 5th order low-pass filters are used.
Performance
For a top-of-the-line, and rather expensive card ($399 USD), the Matrox Parhelia's 3D gaming performance was well behind NVIDIANVIDIA
Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...
's older and similarly priced GeForce 4 Ti 4600. The Parhelia was only competitive with the older Radeon 8500 and GeForce 3, which typically cost half as much. The Parhelia's potent performance was held back by its comparatively low GPU clock speed (250MHz), initially believed by many commentators to be due to the large (for that time-frame) transistor total. However, ATI's Radeon 9700 was released later that year, with a considerably larger transistor count (108 million vs. 80 million), on the same 150 nm chip fabrication process, yet managed a substantially higher clock (325MHz vs. 250MHz).
The card's fillrate
Fillrate
The term fillrate usually refers to the number of pixels a video card can render and write to video memory in a second. In this case, fillrates are given in megapixels per second or in gigapixels per second , and they are obtained by multiplying the number of raster operations by the clock...
performance was formidable in games that used many texture layers; though equipped with just 4 pixel pipelines, each had 4 texture units. This, unfortunately, proved not to be an efficient arrangement in most situations. Parhelia was also hampered by poor bandwidth conserving technologies/techniques; ATI introduced their 3rd gen HyperZ
HyperZ
HyperZ is the name of a set of computer graphics processing techniques used by ATI Technologies in their Radeon video cards.On the Radeon R100-based cores, Radeon DDR through 7500, where HyperZ debuted, ATI claimed a 20% improvement in overall rendering efficiency...
in Radeon 9700, NVIDIA touted Lightning Memory Architecture 2 for the GeForce 4 series, Matrox had no similarly comprehensive optimization approach. While the Parhelia possessed an impressive raw memory bandwidth much of it was wasted on 'invisible' house-keeping tasks because the card lacked the ability predict overdraw or compress z-buffer data, among other inefficiencies. Some writers believed Parhelia to have a 'crippled' triangle-setup engine that starved the rest of the chip in typical 3D rendering tasks http://web.archive.org/web/20030904210006/www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1656&p=6.
Later in Parhelia's life, when DirectX 9 applications were becoming quite prevalent, Matrox acknowledged that the vertex shaders were not Shader Model 2.0 capable, and as such not DirectX 9-compliant, as was initially advertised. Presumably there were several bugs within the Parhelia core that could not be worked around in the drivers. However, it was all a bit of a moot point because Parhelia's performance was not adequate to drive most DirectX 9-supporting titles well even without more complex shader code weighing the card down.
Sales
Despite the lackluster performance for its price, Matrox hoped to win over enthusiasts with the Parhelia's unique and high quality features, such as "Surround Gaming", glyph acceleration, high resolutions, and 16x fragment anti-aliasing. In these aspects, some reviewers suggested that Parhelia could have been a compelling alternative to the comparably priced GeForce 4 Ti 4600 ($399 USD), which was the performance leader but only DirectX 8.1 compliant.However, within a few months after release, the Parhelia was completely overshadowed by ATI
Ati
As a word, Ati may refer to:* Ati, a town in Chad* Ati, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines* Ati-Atihan Festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines* Ati, a queen of the fabled Land of Punt in Africa...
's far faster and fully DirectX 9.0 compliant Radeon 9700
Radeon R300
The Radeon R300 is the third generation of Radeon graphics chips from ATI Technologies. The line features 3D acceleration based upon Direct3D 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0, a major improvement in features and performance compared to the preceding Radeon R200 design. R300 was the first fully Direct3D...
. The Radeon 9700 was faster and produced higher quality 3D images, while debuting at the same price point as the Parhelia ($399 USD). Due to their equivalent pricing against faster cards, the Parhelia never got a significant hold in the market. It remains a niche product today while nVidia and ATI control the majority of the discrete graphics chip market.
Parhelia-LX
After the launch of Parhelia-512, Matrox released Parhelia-LX, which supports only 128-bit memory and has only 2 pixel pipelines. The first video cards using it included Matrox Millennium P650 and Millennium P750.Future products
Originally, Matrox planned to produce the 'Parhelia 2' successor, codenamed 'Pitou'. However, when Parhelia-512 failed to compete in the gaming market, the project was never again mentioned.Parhelia processors were later upgraded to support AGP 8x, and PCI Express.
In 2006, Matrox re-introduced Surround Gaming with their TripleHead2Go, which utilizing the existing GPU to render 3D graphics, splitting the resulting image over three screens. Certified products include ATI
Ati
As a word, Ati may refer to:* Ati, a town in Chad* Ati, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines* Ati-Atihan Festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines* Ati, a queen of the fabled Land of Punt in Africa...
and NVIDIA
NVIDIA
Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...
(and later Intel) processors.
With the introduction of Millennium P690 in 2007, it was die-shrunk to 90 nm, and supports DDR2 memory. Windows Vista is supported under XP Driver Model.
In June 2008, Matrox announced the release of M-Series video cards. It has the advertised single-chip quad head support. Unlike previous products, it supports Windows Vista Aero acceleration.