“OpenGL 2.0 timing: Worth fighting over? 3DLabs thinks so. And is Nvidia’s Cg an open standard or a proprietary grab for control of graphics development?” Read the story at ExtremeTech. “Justified pride or proud parent syndrome? Marketing VP Dan Wood tells Dave Salvator how and why Parhelia will move 3D gaming to a whole new level.” Read the story at ExtremeTech.
3Dlabs Counters Nvidia & Matrox Reveals More Parhelia
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Gosh, I have been posting a lot here today. Anyway, does anyone know if the Parphelia is going to be sold directly by Matrox, or if it is going to be licensed out to manufacturers like Nvidia’s and ATI’s cards are?
Skipp
that’s been their way forever and i don’t think they’ll change now..
parhelia changing the way people thinks about graphics.. i don’t think so.. they are gonna have their 15 minute of fame till Ati’s R300 run them over..
Judging from the specs, it looks like they have already been eclipsed by the geforce 4. Performance wise, it is clocked lower than the Geforce4, Matrox is hoping that there superior image quality is going to be the selling point for this card (again). If you read the interview, the Matrox guy basically avoided all the questions regarding the speed of the card, and tried to focus more on the features (tri-head gaming, image landscaping, etc) and less on the framerates and the such. Altogether it looks like a nice card unless you are a hardcore gamer, in which it falls short of the Geforce 4. I guess the market will decide how well this card is going to be accepted. I sure hope they do succeed, more competition in the graphics field the better, considering nVidia seems to be dominating with every new revision, and ATI is not a great alternative; perhaps we lowly consumers will be able to get a decent graphics card below $200 if this pace keeps up.
Skipp
Judging from the specs, it looks like they have already been eclipsed by the geforce 4.
I haven’t seen any benchmarks yet. But just like in CPUs; clock speed != total performance; Athlons for a long time (post-P4) have proved that.
ATI is not a great alternative; perhaps we lowly consumers will be able to get a decent graphics card below $200 if this pace keeps up.
They have the best value for money out there; for Windows and Mac users. Because they lack proper Linux drivers like Nvidia’s, I would be for a long time using Nvidia. Sure ATI have documentation; but I haven’t seen drivers out yet…
If there is anything that is happning right now, is that the graphics card industry is turning into something like the CPU market. Hopefully one day price cuts would happen faster :-p
I don’t understand how Cg got to do with anything of OpenGL. Cg isn’t a direct competitor to OpenGL.
They have the best value for money out there; for Windows and Mac users. Because they lack proper Linux drivers like Nvidia’s, I would be for a long time using Nvidia. Sure ATI have documentation; but I haven’t seen drivers out yet…
If there is anything that is happning right now, is that the graphics card industry is turning into something like the CPU market. Hopefully one day price cuts would happen faster :-p
—
Nvidia drivers are absolutely terrible, buggy, bloated, closed source and all around crappy performance.
Unlike Nvidia, Matrox creates QUALITY DRIVERS, yes, having run a Matrox G550 w/ Windows and Linux, the drivers provided by Matrox have always been good quality, on both platforms, not just Windows.
As for the GeForce, the only thing it has going for it is the high FPS, but when it comes to quality of graphics, driver stability and colour accurancy, it is terrible. Again, I’ll take a Matrox card over any FP’s hype product any day of the week.
Btw Matrox don’t gear their hardware to the lowest of the lowest of the lowest common denominator, known as “gamers”, you know the one’s, they over clock their CPU and Graphics card to get an extra 0.0000000000000000001 fps, and have their computer hooked up to an endothermic reactor to keep the heat to the minimum.
As soon as the Matrox is out with their new card – my $500 is going towards Matrox, the quality company that it is. Any time I see “…with assistance from Microsoft…” (hint: M$) I automaticaly shift funds to (any other company in the market without any M$ involvment). Call me a penis head, but quite frankly I’m not going to give any more of my money to the ass-wipes on wall street (any publicaly traded company (excluding Sun, ofcourse)) or M$. May that cock holster Bill gates die of athletes foot spreading into his brain.
Gosh, I have been posting a lot here today. Me too. Anyway, does anyone know if the Parphelia is going to be sold directly by Matrox, or if it is going to be licensed out to manufacturers like Nvidia’s and ATI’s are.
I read they would but you can’t never know for sure. Also that they had a problem about on die speeds (AnandTech or was it Tom’s hardware ?) maybe Apple turn to Parhelia (they bought GPU/VPU manufacturers recently so they will not …).
My interest is in price/performance.
Matrox could provide a good card to compete on low end with NVidia Quadro and ATI FireGL ?
Not probably, but it (the parhelia) would be good for runing Maya and 3DStudio Max on an acceptable basis with low budgets (Open GL).
The Cg OpenSource langauge is bullsheet(shit ?
!
They just want to do the same Sun did with StarOffice.
Better to buy an ATI 8500 since it’s compatible with Linux/BSD/XFree, Windows and QNX.
Nvidia drivers are absolutely terrible, buggy, bloated, closed source and all around crappy performance.
Never could afford Matrox cards; and I’m talking value foe money. The only two GPU guys that seems to have chipsets built for this group are Nvidia and ATi.
As a Linux user; ATi driver support is terrible (I had a Radeon 7000VE; I had auction it off). I don’t really care whether Nvidia’s drivers are open or close source because frankly their drivers are good and with every revision, I see, even 2D apps, performance increase.
You are obviously the high end gamer or 3D designer or something. I hardly play games in the first place.
The Cg OpenSource langauge is bullsheet(shit ?
!
They just want to do the same Sun did with StarOffice.
Better to buy an ATI 8500 since it’s compatible with Linux/BSD/XFree, Windows and QNX.
StarOffice had never been open source; but its sister project, OpenOffice.org, is the biggest open source project around.
As for a language being open source – never seen one (except Python..). You probbaly mean tools related to it. Cg is a specification, laced with Nvidia patents.
And as for Radeon 8500; it isn’t exactly priced for normal consumers who only play games once in awhile. So, for me, unless they have a Linux driver team like Nvidia’s; I don’t care whether or not it is open source; as long they have *proper* drivers for their low end stuff. They do for Mac OS and Windows…
So, for me, unless they have a Linux driver team like Nvidia’s
It is rumoured that the ATI FirGL driver works with 8500’s. This driver should give excellent performance on the Radeon (but only the 8500). This driver is closed source, however Tungstengraphics is working on a full open source driver (with TCL support).
I’m still sticking with NVidia for now, since their Linux support is close to perfect (at least on my hardware 🙂
fooks
Matrox could provide a good card to compete on low end with NVidia Quadro and ATI FireGL ?
Not probably, but it (the parhelia) would be good for runing Maya and 3DStudio Max on an acceptable basis with low budgets (Open GL)
No way. Their OpenGL drivers are a joke. The G200 used a D3D wrapper. They STIL don’t support EMBM (Environment Mapped Bump Mapping) in their OpenGL implementation, and this was their flagship feature. The list of OpenGL extentions for Parhelia does not have any extention for Displacement mapping, and don’t expect to see it there anytime soon – the history repeats itself. Their developer relations site is a joke too – it contains just a few PR docs, compare this to the NVidia devrel site with tons of docs, tools, and code. Their hardware may be good, but it’s the software that counts in the end – most of NVidia engineers do software, not hardware.
So:
How long will it be until someone writes an OS kernel that can use spare processor cycles from a systems Gfx card to augment the processing power of the main CPU…
At this rate we’re ging to have Gfx cards that have an entire OS running on them just to render the video stream from the host OS…
… rethink the shit of a bull you are talking. Is your world so narrow minded? Although I don’t know you, I can name 5600 things you currently posses by stock listed companies. Do you own a car? Do you own a TV set? do you own a fridge? Bla, bla, bla… Call in here again, when you figured out a product in your posession that is not related to some sort of stock listed company and then tell me, why it is valid posessing them, holding the view you try to promote here. Actually, I cannot think of any CPU + mobo combo, etc.. you could have that is not stock listed – so stop the BS, please… unless you put that Matrox up on the shelf on it’s own for fetish reasons.
Again, every and all stuff in your damn flat can be associated to a stock company, including (and especially)all your PC-components…
Yo.
I think maybe you need to consider a term called “quality gaming”. Better graphics = better immersion. I’ve used both Matrox and Nvidia graphicscards, and I clearly see a difference in quality in Matrox favour. Maybe the next ATI/Nvidia card will be faster, but I’d still prefer a quality card. Why buy a new expensive graphics card, if the quality is LOWER? Even if the framerates are faster, even humpty-five-hundred frames, what use it ?
Thumbs up to Matrox
i write for a living. blurry text results in a signficant producivity loss. i am willig to pay for matrox superior image quality even if ati and nvidia offer higher performing parts. for the home pc, games are not my central concern, but to know i can enjoy matrox legendary image and text quality while having 3d performance competitive with geforce or radeon makes for a very compeling product
i am willig to pay for matrox superior image quality even if ati and nvidia offer higher performing parts. for the home pc, games are not my central concern, but to know i can enjoy matrox legendary image and text quality while having 3d performance competitive with geforce or radeon makes for a very compeling product
Could this be true ?
That’s my interest also, but I have deep doubts about it.
Spending money to change my NVidia GForce MX 2, wich does 50 % of my tasks on rendering 3D, must be a sustained decision for me.