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The
Parhelia 512's 3D Rendering Pipeline |
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Truly a
revolutionary core |
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This handy
little chart we created for you, should give you an idea
of what is under the hood for the Matrox Parhelia 512,
versus competitive technologies.
There are some
very significant advantages that the Parhelia 512 has,
over any of the above noted GPUs. First and
foremost, bandwidth. With its huge 256 bit memory
bus to DDR DRAM, the Parhelia 512 boasts up to 20GB per
second of memory bandwidth, utilizing current 650MHz DDR
DRAM technology. This is nearly 2X the memory
bandwidth of NVIDIA's flagship GeForce4 Ti 4600.
However, there are also a few questions that we have left
unanswered here.
Specifically,
the core clock speed of the Parhelia 512 has not been
disclosed as of yet, most likely since the product is
still in first or second rev. silicon and yields are still
being optimized. However, one could surmise that
this chip may in fact have one of the slowest core clock
speeds on this chart. The die size of the product is
easily the largest, with 80 million transistors in total,
yet still built on .15 micron manufacturing technology.
In addition, Matrox has made no mention of bandwidth
optimization techniques like Z-Occlusion Culling (Hidden
Surface Removal), compression techniques across the memory
bus or just how exactly the Parhelia 512's memory
controller is architected. All of these factors
could affect overall "available" bandwidth and fill rate
of the Parhelia 512 but are still unknown quantities to
us, at this time.
Getting back
to the architecture side of things, the Parhelia 512 also
has a total of 4 Texture Units per rendering pipe.
The only GPU to date, that has had more than even 2
texture units, is the Radeon 7500. Ever wonder why
the Radeon 7500 did so well with Serious Sam benchmarks,
even though it is an older generation chip? Croteam
was texture happy with that title and it really looks
great as a result. ATi actually incorporated 3
texturing units on the Radeon 7500 and then scaled back
down to two on the Radeon 8500. The Parhelia 512 has
4 texturing units, capable of delivering 4 Quad Textured
pixels per clock.
Vertex Shaders:
Vertex Shaders,
now here's an obvious advantage that NVIDIA capitalized on
with the GF4 Ti 4600. When it comes to DirectX 8
and next generation OpenGL gaming, Vertex and Pixel
Shaders are prerequisites. The more shaders you have
running in parallel, the more horsepower you have to run
today's amazing new game engines. The Parhelia 512
has 4 Vertex Shading engines, two more than the mighty
GeForce4 Ti. In addition, these Vertex Shaders
are DirectX 9 compliant and are "version 2.0" engines.
Here's an
example of what these Quad Vertex shaders can do to bring
special lighting and animation effects to an object to
give it more realism, in addition to Quad Texturing.
Quad
Vertex Shader Effect
Click viewing
So then, let's
animate things a bit. The following scene was
rendered on the Matrox Parhelia 512 GPU.
Under
water reef - Click to download or stream AVI
Pixel Shaders
and Texture Units:
In total, the
Parhelia 512 has a "36 stage" Shader Array, which includes
a 5 stage Pixel Shader, in each of the 4 rendering pipes
(20 total) and 4 Quad Texturing Units (16 total).
The Radeon 8500 and NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti have 2 stage Pixel
Shaders in each of their four rendering pipelines (8
total), and 2 Quad Texturing Units, for a total of a 16
stage Shader Array. The Pixel Shaders in the
Parhelia 512 are also version 1.3 and are DirectX 8
compliant, like the GeForce4 Ti and Radeon 8500.
Displacement Mapping, Fragmentation AA, Glyph AA and The
New Power Desk |