Matrox Parhelia-512 Preview May 14, 2002 Tuan Nguyen

Introduction

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Hit and run?

Just when you thought things were getting furious between NVIDIA and ATI, 3DLabs busts back into the scene with its “Visual” processing unit. We knew that 3DLabs had been acquired by Creative Labs, so being suspicious about a new product in the works from them was natural. Meanwhile, NVIDIA and ATI continue to produce more video cards to up the ante.

But honestly, did you expect this? Quieter than a pin drop, the people that brew technology inside the graphics division at Matrox headquarters have been at work. Given that Matrox is all the way in eastern Canada and we can’t get to visit them as often as we’d like, we still tried to keep tabs on the quiet company.

Over the past few months, we’ve been randomly calling up our favorite PR reps simply to pose random questions of curiosity. Unfortunately, most of our interrogation attempts left us without answers. This is the way it’s been for much of the past 2 years. If you can remember back that far, you’ll recall that Matrox was a dominant player in the mainstream graphics market with its G400 series. When introduced, the series took the gaming industry by storm with never before seen features such as EMBM (environment mapped bump mapping) and a 360MHz “UltraSharp” RAMDAC.

After the successful lifespan of the G400, Matrox sharply announced that it would be stepping back from the gaming market to concentrate its resources on business oriented products. This announcement came as a severe shock to many Matrox loyalists and challengers alike. Indeed its announcement came true, and the world’s oldest graphics company was swift to exit the gaming scene. Rampant rumors of its G800 chip quickly diminished to quiet whispers as gamers everywhere turned to GeForces and Radeons.

Two years in the making

Probably just as significant as reaching its 25-year milestone in business is the launch of Parhelia – Matrox’s cutting edge brainchild and secret weapon designed with the latest arsenal of technology available today (and then some). All this time when Matrox was telling everyone that it would concentrate all its resources on developing business solutions was somewhat misleading. We’ve seen a few products emerge from Matrox within the past 2 years that haven’t really pushed the gaming envelop in any groundbreaking direction. Matrox instead, had been constantly improving the products that it already had, using a minimal amount of force, while concentrating all brainpower in a “come-back” chip.

Are we about to witness another G400 MAX surprise attack or is Parhelia simply another multi-function business solution? Read on.


SIDEBAR: Strangely, while I’m the one who wrote the Parhelia-512 article, I was the last to know about it in all the FiringSquad staff.

Competition

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R&D and the competition

By now everyone knows the release schedule that NVIDIA has enforced upon themselves. Releasing a new product every six months is pattern that NVIDIA has been keeping up with very well but unfortunately, most consumers can’t say the same for themselves. It’s definitely exciting to see new things come frequently, but many people are also becoming increasingly frustrated because their investment becomes outdated in a matter of weeks.

A good reason why the graphics industry should slow down is to allow games to catch up and fully utilize the graphics processor. Now, you may think that if this happens, games will become too complex and the cards won’t be able to handle them. But on the contrary, the exact opposite may happen.

Take for example the PlayStation2. It’s a closed architecture system, meaning you can’t upgrade its critical parts like you do with a computer. Yet, seemingly the games just keep getting better year after year and the PS2 will remain a viable console for at least two more years. This happens because developers are forced to design their games within boundaries set by hardware. They must conform and flex their skills harder when developing for a console than for an open platform like the PC, and over time they learn more and more about how to best utilize the hardware.

A year, or more

With Parhelia, Matrox has told us that it plans to have it be a successful product for at least a year. This probably means that Matrox plans to have a design and produce period of at least a year for new products. As long as each offering is powerful enough to last the entire cycle, it shouldn’t be a problem for Matrox.

Matrox’s strategy actually isn’t too far off from NVIDIA’s and ATI’s. What NVIDIA and ATI do is produce a new architecture every year, with refreshes half way. Typically we will see a new product every spring season and product refreshes in the fall. This is when a product will be updated with, say, faster memory or a faster core clock frequency. The internal architecture itself though, will remain largely the same, if not exactly.

Going this way, there won’t be a need for mid-year refreshes and customers can hold on to their investment longer and won’t feel like they’re being ripped from their money. However, the only way to get the true value of a graphics card is to pair it up with applications that utilize it. With at least a one-year life cycle, the Parhelia will see its feature set being increasingly exposed to applications and games, which means the end user will be continually rewarded. Before T&L was even being considered for support in games, NVIDIA’s GeForce256 was already out the door.



SIDEBAR: It’s funny that many considered NVIDIA and ATI to be the only major players in the graphics arena in the past 2 years even when 3dfx was still around (barely).

The Parhelia-512

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Specifications

Before reading and comparing the specifications like a laundry list, take a minute to digest some of the features – you’ll be glad you did, as the Parhelia-512 is by no means a conventional piece of hardware.

Parhelia-512

• True 512-bit GPU
  
• 80 million transistors in a 0.15u fabrication process
  
• True 256-bit DDR memory interface
  
• Up to 20GB/sec. memory bandwidth
  
• Up to 256MB DDR unified frame buffer
  
• 10-bit Gigacolor Technology
  
  
  • 10-bit per channel RGB rendering and output
    
  • Over one billion simultaneously displayed colors
    
  • 10-bit precision for 2D, 3D, DVD and video
    
  • 10-bit frame buffer mode for ARGB (2:10:10:10)
    
  • 10-bit RAMDACs with full gamma correction
  
  
• AGP host interface designed up to AGP8X
  
  
  • Fast Writes supported
  
  
• 8-way parallel DMA streaming engine
  
• OpenGL1.3 and DX8.1 compliant

DualHead-HF Display Technology

• Fourth-generation DualHead
  
• Dual integrated 400MHz 10-bit RAMDACs
  
• Support for two digital TMDS transmitters
  
• Integrated 10-bit high fidelity TV/Video encoder
  
• TripleHead desktop
  
• 10-bit gamma correction
  
• Dual independent, gamma correctable hardware overlays
  
• Support for true multi-display under Windows 2000 and XP
  
• Hardware accelerated multi-screen OpenGL support

Quad Vertex Shader Array

• Four vertex shader units (DX8 and higher)
  
• Parallel processing of up to 16 vertices
  
• 512 instruction on-chip cache
  
• 256 constant registers
  
• Quad texturing per pixel, per clock cycle
  
• 64 super sample texture filtering
  
  
  • Dynamic allocation of texture units
    
  • 8-sample anisotropic and trilinear filtering on 4 dual-textured pixels/clock
    
  • 16-sample anisotropic filtering on a 4 single-textured pixels/clock

36-stage shader array

• 4 pixel pipes
  
• 4 texturing units per pipe
  
• 5 pixel shader stages per pixel pipe
  
• Support for up to 10 pixel stages per pass
  
• 4 pixels/clock throughput with quad texturing and 5 pixel shader operations

Hardware Displacement Mapping

• Patent-pending depth-adaptive tessellation for continuous level of detail geometry
  
• Vertex texturing for dynamic generation of geometry using texture maps
  
• Support for Bezier curves and N-patch (PN-triangle) evaluation

16x Fragment Antialiasing (FAA-16x)

• 16x super sampling quality on edge pixels only
  
• Avoids blurring of internal pixels
  
• Low performance overhead
  
• Supports for Full Scene Antialiasing (FSAA)

GPU Features

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The first 512-bit GPU

We’re now entering a new era where graphics processors are approaching and exceeding the silicon count of high-end processors. Weighing in at a monstrous 80 million transistors, the Parhelia is the most complex GPU to date and is manufactured using a 0.15 micron process.

Some of the impressive features surrounding the GPU include its support for a true 256-bit DDR memory interface. Returning to its roots, Matrox also uses a dual-bus design that it introduced with its G400 processor two years ago. With dual-bus, the Parhelia is able to send and receive information on independent busses, never clogging up the pipeline for either sending or receiving. A significant part of its performance comes from using 512-bit registers and being able to process 512-bit chunks of information.

[image]

Bandwidth

Matrox has always been secretive about its clock speeds in both memory and core but it was simple to figure out what the clock for its memory was running at. Using a few simple calculations, we were able to deduce the memory to be running at 625MHz/2 since it’s DDR. This is currently comparable to what NVIDIA is clocking its memory on the GeForce4 Ti 4600. Although Matrox hasn’t confirmed the memory architecture being used in Parhelia, we’re assuming it’s a type of cross-bar architecture.

The cross-bar memory strategy is becoming ever more popular and we’ll be seeing it featured in AMD’s Hammer processor. It’s only appropriate that Parhelia comes with so much bandwidth both internally and externally because pleasing a 36-stage shader array isn’t an easy task. With four programmable texture and five programmable pixel shader stages on each of its four pixel pipelines, Parhelia’s shader array is the most sophisticated array to date.



SIDEBAR: Spiderman’s spider sense alerts him to danger before it happens

Advanced 3D

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Depth-Adaptive Tessellation

One of the features we’ll be seeing in action immediately is DAT, which is a method of increasing the level of detail of objects as you approach them. The method Matrox uses increases the number or vertices, and consequently the number of triangles in objects the closer you come by using a tessellation method. You can think of this method similar to the pattern of fractals. So while you won’t get extra geometric features in the object, you will get a more refined and smooth looking one.

Today, when you walk closer to say a Quake 3 model, it becomes more apparent that the object is made up of blocky polygons. DAT will increase the number of polygons significantly as you draw nearer to the object without a performance hit. It achieves this because it now no longer has to spend polygons rendering a wide environment view and simply needs to focus more polygons on specific objects that have obscured surrounding objects because you have moved closed.

The process works by supporting a feature called Bezier evaluation, which takes data that describes trends in the shape of the polygon mesh. The evaluators then can dynamically create vertices on the mesh based on that data. Think of it as a type of key-frame animation but for a polygon mesh. The evaluators control data that defines the trends (or direction in the case of a key-frame animation) within the mesh and then creates intermediate vertices based on this information that fill in the flat space of the larger polygon.

Parhelia is the first consumer graphics card able to do tessellation in real time. We’re beginning to see more features that will require little work on the software development side but offer a monumental difference in object detail. Before, when 3D processors weren’t so strong, a lot of emphasis was put on the quality of textures. But we’re now beginning to see a lot more work go into making the actual object more detailed using increasingly clever ways.

10-bit Gigacolor

The current standard for color representation on the desktop is 24-bit color - 8 bits for each color component. With 8 bits you can represent 256 distinct values of green—with 0 being black and 255 the full intensity of green. Although 24-bit color is an improvement over the previous 16-bit color quality, 256 values per component are not enough to precisely represent all the visible color values within the RGB color space. Even John Carmack has stated that the ideal conditions that he would like to be working in are something higher than 24-bit color.

Matrox demonstrates Gigacolor using the following still image gradient demo:

[image]

Displacement Mapping

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Doing things the hard way

One of the most difficult things to do in 3D is making models with complex geometry that render in real time at a satisfying speed. A lot of the high geometry models you see in 3D movies are painstakingly modeled by hand most of the time, and in the game development world, there is almost no such free time. Matrox is now presenting an much easier method of achieving the same results with minimal efforts and existing tools.

New to our list of 3D terminology is displacement mapping and this is done on the Parhelia hardware. What DM does is take a displacement map (think of it as a bump map) and use the different darkness and brightness data on the map to form a complex mesh out of a flat mesh. Using this method, the Parhelia is able to render complex models and objects on the screen and on the fly simply by using textures, which developers have been “painting” for years now. Making a displacement map takes very little effort compared to modeling a complex object in 3D space.

[image]

FAA-16 Anti-aliasing

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Anti-aliasing with 16x anisotropic filtering

Aliasing - often referred to as "stair casing" or "jaggies" - is the jagged-edge effect that occurs along the edges of lines and polygons. This undesirable effect happens because there are not enough pixels available on a typical monitor to properly display mathematically smooth lines and polygon edges. When a 3D scene is transposed onto a monitor's pixel grid, or raster, each pixel is colored according to whether or not it is covered by an object in the scene. Aliasing occurs because the raster system does not properly handle the case in which a pixel is only partially covered. Partially covered pixels occur along the edges of objects and are referred to as edge pixels or fragment pixels. The mishandling of fragment pixels results in harsh, jagged color transitions between an object’s edge and the background. Antialiasing techniques attempt to smooth jagged edges by properly handling fragment pixels (i.e. adjusting the pixel color according to the amount of pixel coverage).

The problem with current methods of anti-aliasing is that the filters do not just filter the jagged edges, but also filter out everything in-between them. Textures that weren’t meant to be anti-aliased end up going through the same filter processes as edges, and consequently end up looking blurred and discolored. Matrox eliminates this problem by employing a fragment detection system. This system only detects areas with fragment pixels and applies only those pixels through the AA system.

[image]

TripleHead

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Much more than DualHead

Matrox originally broke the door down on mainstream multi-monitor graphics with its G400 line of graphics products and ever since then, everyone else has followed suit. Interestingly enough, neither ATI nor NVIDIA have been able to develop a multi-monitor solution that fully stands up to Matrox’s DualHead.

Now in its fourth generation, Matrox’s mutli-monitor solution is more than just a two-display implementation, it’s a full feature set in itself. The following are the list of features standard in Parhelia’s plethora array of features:

DualHead-HF is an extension of DualHead's highly acclaimed, productivity-enhancing
feature set.

DH Multi-Display extends your desktop across two monitors. The extra desktop real estate creates a more productive and efficient setup, allowing you to simultaneously view and access multiple application windows. Browse the web on one screen and work on a spreadsheet on the other screen at the same time. Your second display can be configured with independent resolution, refresh, and color depth, thereby allowing you to reuse an older monitor in a different configuration.

DH Zoom allows you to view zoomed selections full-screen on your second display. This is particularly useful for examining or retouching a section of a photo or CAD project in extreme detail.

DH Clone outputs a mirror image of your desktop to the second display. Clone can be used to output a presentation or game to a TV or second monitor, for example.

DH DVDMax plays your MPEG-2 and other video clips full-screen out to a second display (TV, monitor, or flat panel). DVDMax provides the equivalent quality of a high-end set-top DVD player.

New to the table are two modes that allow you to use not two, but three displays with one Parhelia!

TripleHead Desktop

Parhelia's DualHead-HF is completely unique in that it enables the use of a third CRT or flat panel display for those that desire maximum desktop real estate. Parhelia uses a third RAMDAC to support a stretched Windows desktop up to a maximum resolution of 3840 x 1024 @ 32bpp. This ultra wide desktop is the ultimate productivity solution for both professionals and enthusiasts. We’ve used dual displays before and you can take our word for it when we say going back to a single display is a pain in the bunghole.

[image]

Surround Gaming

Parhelia delivers the “IMAX” experience of 3D gaming by stretching supported 3D games across three displays, and providing up to three times the regular field of view (FOV). This isn’t simply a horizontal skew of the game image though and really does display three fully discrete images on three discrete displays. A lot of games that are on store shelves (some have been out for a long time already) currently do support more than one display. Even the venerable Quake 3 supports up to 3 displays.

While attending a private demonstration with Matrox, Jedi Knight 2 was shown on three displays, all running at 1280x1024 and all in 10-bit Gigacolor glory and amazingly none of them ever dropped a noticeable frame. Gaming was smooth on all accounts and when playing a game like a FPS, it really does help to see on your sides – you never know when a bullet might blow your brains out from the side.

Bob’s (CalBear’s) take on triple monitor gaming: I had a chance to play Quake 3 and Jedi Knight II on the triple monitor display at the presentation as well. There was a caveat - In order for the display to look entirely correct on the primary monitor, the Field Of View needed to be changed to about 110 or 120 (normal FOV is 90). Any first person game that you play on such a set up would require the ability for the player to change the FOV variable.

I played around with some bots in DM7, and was impressed by how much more of the map I could see and sense. In Counter-Strike, I have a tendency to sway my mouse back and forth a bit as I enter a new area, to make sure no one is hiding off to the side. With three monitors, I obviously wouldn’t have to do that as much. Surround Gaming is the closest thing I’ve felt to having true peripheral vision in a game situation. Now if someone will buy me three monitors of approximately the same size, I’d be happy to use it all the time!

I also got to toy around with Flight Simulator a bit, and it was interesting to be able to see what’s going on in the side windows without hitting the padlock view. For ultra hardcore flight sim fans, surround gaming might be a nifty feature.


SIDEBAR: I lived in Ontario (the better province) for most of my life and just recently (in the past year and a half) relocated to northern California. I like it in Toronto.

More Features

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More things than you can shake a stick at

Matrox is known for implementing never-before-seen features but it’s also well known for bringing those features through an evolution process that constantly improves and adds new options. The Parhelia is a testimony to Matrox’s dedication and the rest of its features show it. Here are some of the other significant features:

Video quality

Made for DVD and HDTV, the Parhelia is designed to fully stretch these standards to their limits. A common problem with displays these days is what’s known as blanking. Blanking refers to the amount of time for the electron beam to return from right to left, and from top to bottom in a CRT monitor. Reduced blanking enables higher resolution DVI outputs by increasing the efficiency of the timing signals sent to the panels. The typical loss due to blanking is in the order of 30 percent. Parhelia supports a horizontal blanking size of ten pixels and a vertical blanking of one line. At 1920 x 1200 the loss is lower than one percent. Next generation panels supporting reduced blanking will benefit from higher resolutions and refresh rates.

Piping your Parhelia out to an external large screen display? 10-bit Gigacolor has you covered. Movie buffs will get improved image quality thanks in part to better and faster RAMDACs as well as video encoders. The Parhelia is also fully ready for both HDTV decoding and encoding. Don’t think you’ll be ready for heavy HDTV copying however as the Parhelia integrates some tough encryption and HDTV material protection schemes. Creating your own HDTV material is perfectly fine though.

[image]

Dual independent video overlay controllers

DualHead-HF's symmetric architecture includes dual independent overlay controllers and programmable mixing engines. Each overlay controller is equipped with a scaler unit and a look-up table (LUT) for gamma corrected overlays. Video has a different gamma curve than RGB data found on the desktop. It therefore needs to be corrected independently of the primary display to produce an accurate color and rich color output. Conventional color correction schemes have been based on the RGB desktop values – this is typical of video cards on the market today. Think your GeForce’s video overlay zoom is nifty? Think again.

The mixing engines enable various blending options of the primary surface with the overlay surface. The most notable features of the DualHead-HF programmable mixing engines are that they support 256 levels of alpha keying with per-pixel independent alpha support, as well as chroma and color keying on a per-component range. This allows a wide range of possible features such as advanced OnScreenDisplays, DVD Subpicture blending, video effects and full-screen or windowed overlays for CAD applications.


SIDEBAR: Interestingly enough, Canopus, a long time, bold name in the graphics arena is stepping back up to the plate as well with a GeForce4 based graphics card.

More Specs

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And the list goes on

The mammoth list of features that the Parhelia contains is simply overwhelming. While we’ve covered all the major features of the card, the more subtle specs can have a great impact on your graphics experience as well. Here are the rest of the features for Parhelia-512:

Texturing Support

Support for all texture formats including:
32-bit source textures
10-bit per channel texture support
All DXTC formats
2D, 3D (volume) and cubic textures
Non-square and non-power-of-2 textures
Planar and packed YUV textures
Up to 2K by 2K source textures
Support for projected textures
Support for texture swizzling
Render-to-texture support
Other 3D features include:
Depth acceleration unit for advanced Z processing
32-matrix Matrix Palette Skinning (MPS)
Particle acceleration
Full sub-pixel and sub-texel precision
Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM) and DOTProduct-3
Planar, cubic and spherical environment mapping
Fogging, alpha blending and specular highlighting
Flat and gouraud shading
Independent intensity, Z and texture depths
Anti-aliased 3D vector support

High fidelity 2D engine

Fastest and highest quality 2D display engine ever built

Gigacolor Desktop

All drawing operations at extended 30-bit color (10:10:10)
10-bit per channel frame buffer
High-quality dithering for lower bit depth output

Glyph Antialiasing

Hardware accelerated text anti-aliasing
Programmable gamma correction
Full acceleration of Windows XP GDI and DirectDraw functions
GDI+ v2.0 ready
Programmable, ultra-fast bliter at up to 16 pixels/clock
Alpha cursor support
32-bit ultra-fast VGA core

High fidelity video engine

PC Theater DVD Playback
10-bit DVD playback
10-bit advanced filtering and scaling
10-bit DVD output via TV encoder
Independent gamma and proc-amp controls
Full quality output using DVDMax

Programmable overlay processor

Video overlay with programmable proc-amp and independent gamma correction
Video mixing engine in overlay processor
High-quality horizontal and vertical scaling
Up to 4x4 filter kernel with programmable filtering coefficients
Full-speed bi-cubic filter
Fully VMR-compliant front-end scaling
Advanced de-interlacing with sub-pixel positioning
VIP2.0 compliant video input port

Industry compliance

Microsoft Windows
Linux

Platforms

X86, X86-64 and IA-64 compatible
AMD 3Dnow!, MMX, Intel SSE & SSE2 optimized
AGP 8X, 4X, 2X and 1X

Compliance

PCI 2.2, AGP 2.0 and AGP 3.0
PCI Bus Power Management 1.1, ACPI
DirectX 8.1, PS1.3, VS1.1, VS2.0
OpenGL 1.3
DirectX VA, VMR, WDM

Notes

All the standard features and then some, have been designed into the Parhelia. Matrox’s goal with Parhelia was to design something that would surprise even the most hardware graphics enthusiast and gamer. An impressive card with an impressive list of features – this isn’t your daddy’s VGA card.


SIDEBAR: It’s now 4:12AM in the morning.

Conclusion

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Did you expect Matrox to produce such an absurdly high-end graphics processor? Truthfully, we don’t think anyone expected this much. But if this is the sign of things to come from Matrox, this year will truly be a hallmark year for everyone. Matrox themselves have been very quiet about high-end graphics for two years but have ferociously been developing and engineering behind closed doors for this milestone that we expect no less.

The name Parhelia comes from a natural phenomenon in the sky, an astonishing sight to witness. Likewise, the announcement of Parhelia-512, is an astonishing feat in itself from Matrox. The GPU boasts some of today’s standard and high-end 3D features and then leapfrogs ahead of what the competition has to offer with an extensive array of advanced features previously only available to high-end 3D modelers in the movie industry.

With revolutionary features such as Adaptive Tessellation and Displacement Mapping, one can only begin to imagine what sort of games are coming out the door. We briefly talked to John Carmack and while he can’t comment on his thoughts about the Parhelia just yet, he did say that Doom was already running on it. This can only mean that there are games and applications already in the works that support the lavish features of the Parhelia-512 GPU.

There are many firsts with Parhelia. The first 512-bit GPU, the first to use AT and DM features. The first consumer level graphics device to support more than two displays on the same board. The first to integrate a 650MHz UltraSharp RAMDAC – a record previously held by Matrox’s own G400 MAX with a 360MHz UltraSharp RAMDAC. The list goes on and Parhelia-512 is the first of many.

Will you be more productive and will you be able to frag faster when the time comes? This all depends on developer support for Parhelia. Fortunately, Matrox has made sure that many of its advanced features are supported out of the box and that developers are working closely with it to produce more titles that utilize the features of the Parhelia.

Many have complained that NVIDIA and ATI have been at the evolutionary game more than they’ve been at producing revolutionary products but now they have a reason to stop and gaze. It was only a few short months ago that we previewed the first GeForce4 Titanium GPU and even then we were impressed. With Parhelia-512, we truly think we’re dealing with something “over the top”. Is Parhelia-512 a “GeForce5” killer? Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO has stated that NV30 will be as significant as NVIDIA entering the graphics market. That’s a mouthful to swallow, and something that people will measure NVIDIA up against when the time comes.

At the time of this writing, Parhelia-512 boards aren’t yet on store shelves and won’t be for a few more weeks. From what we’ve heard, there will be two initial board skus using the Parhelia-512 GPU. One will be aimed at the gamer and the other will be aimed at the professional level. We’re not quite sure if both will have 256MB of memory but we do know that the starting price will be steep (around the $500 mark).

The Parhelia is one insane product, and it is priced as such. This is not a product that Matrox is necessarily marketing to the mainstream gamer. The Parhelia, with its feature set and price point, is aimed more squarely at the high end gaming enthusiast, and the graphics professionals. It remains to be seen whether new skus at a lower pricepoint will be released. No doubt there will probably be a “Marvel” version out with TV and video in support but with the current price points, but we can only imagine how the prices on such a sku will be.

Are you just deciding whether or not to plunk down the money for a GeForce4 or Radeon 8500? Were you eagerly waiting NV30 and R300? For the past two years, there were only two real choices. But now, the grand-daddy of graphics is back in the ring, and it’s going to be a no-holds barred, steel-cage, no mercy match until the bitter end.


SIDEBAR: Comment about Parhelia-512 in our comment section