Some More G450 Rumors

[paulcs]

I got this from Anandtech's news section.

"The rumours of Matrox's upcoming G450 continue to fly across the net. Peanut of 3DChipset sent us this latest bit of info:

Another interesting rumor is that Matrox is currently working on a standalone hardware T&L engine so that they can create a board with up to two G400 (texture units like 3dfx) chips and use up to 8 (yes, 8 for the high-end) T&L engines on one card..."

This is getting more entertaining all the time. And if any of this is true, you know Kruzin, Joel, Rags, et al, will get one long before the rest of us. And, because of the blood oath they signed, they won't tell us. And they'll kick our butts on-line, and we'll think they're just better than we are.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Kruzin]

IF any of these rumors pan out on this, or any other cards in the future...and IF Matrox elects to continue with the beta program (and/or the current testers), I would imagine it would work the same way as it did with our G400s.

We did not get our cards until well after they where announced, and in actual production. Ours where from the first batch of final retail cards, in full packaging. While we did get them a little before they where widely available, we did not get any alpha or beta boards. And when we did get the cards, we where allowed to talk about them a little bit...

So (fingers crossed) IF we get any future products, you guys would be the first to know

I do gotta say though, that some of these rumors sound a bit far fetched to me...guess we'll find out when Matrox decides to clue us all in...

[Brian R.]

It's not the video card that counts, its the digger behind the trigger.

[Ant]

Gee I wonder where those rumours originated

[paulcs]

They do seem to have legs.

(Sorry Kruzin. I was just pulling yer chain.)

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[DuRaNgO]

since there not nVidea rumors, most of them may actually be true
jim

[Cloudy]

Hi,

After seeing ATi and 3Dfx going for the multiple chips on board option and hearing about the Glaze it seems a very reasonable path to go for. For example, if you put aside sse/3Dnow! for a second, it's much more cost effective buying two Celerons and a dual mobo than one PIII.
Spec wise, especially after all the debate about the warp code, the G400 seems like an excellent candidate for multiprocessing.
It might not be as fast as the VSA100 in lo-res but it'll keep having the best picture quality around. It can be like the Sparc of the graphic chips - not the fastest around, but still one of the best, not to mention unbeatable in scalability and in multiproc performance.
If , and only if all those roumors are true, we're entereing a new age of computer graphics.

First thing I want is a dynamic desktop backround (not a slide show), like having an OpenGL screen saver running under your windows and Icons, or a nice water effect.
Yeah, that would be cool !

Have fun all of you and happy new year.


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Cloudy
Asus P2B-DS, 2 x Celeron 400@75Mhz, 128Mb Ram, Xitel Storm Platinum,
2 x IBM 4.3Gb scsi,IBM 22GB IDE, Pioneer DVD ROM scsi, G400 32MB DH (Oc to 150/200).

[franksch3]

Wheter your dual celeron solution would be effective depends on two things:

- Does the OS support more than one processor. Windows 98 only uses one processor, and since it is in my opinion much better to play games than Windows NT, I'd rather go for a PIII. (Win2000 isn't yet really released ;-)

- Does the game support using threads for rendering. If it only uses one thread, that rendering code will only run at one processor, so again no speed gains.

The only game currently supporting multiprocessing for rendering is Quake 3 if I'm correct.

[skeoch]

Forgive me if I am being stupid, but do I have this right?, the rumour is:

That there maybe an add on card available for the G400(most likely dual head) card to add a powerful T&L engine, using multiple g400 chips reprogramed to have a bias towards T&L rather than fill rate?

Thank you for your comments and flames ahead of time.

[Fireangel]

uh-oh !
From what i understand :
- The G400 is programmable through the Warp Engine. It 'may' be programmed to do TL (but would that be interesting considering it would lower the fill rate ?).
- The G450 will have a T&L chip included on the PCB.

I haven't heard about any upgrade for the existing G400s that would add T&L... even though i wouldn't mind Matrox developping one...

Did i get this right ? :-p

[gbm]

Highly unrealistic... You can't connect more than one chip on one card to AGP or PCI bus. And with current semiconductor technology you can put as much as you want on single piece of silicon without getting into troubles with onboard interchip communication. So I don't think we will see any SLI-like solution soon, and I don't think that any company other that 3DFx will use multichip solution in a mainstream graphics card. We may, however, see new graphics chips with many geometry/triangle setup/lighting processors and many rasterizers on-chip soon.

[Ron]

GBM
It's time to review some of your assumptions or have you forgotten about the ATI MAAX card? They are not using SLI but frame interleaving with 2 Rage chips on one AGP graphics card. This is simply a variation on parallel processing whose time has come. 2 or more G400 chips in combo with a dedicated T&L engine/s would provide some interesting speculation at least, if not for the gaming market then for the graphics professional.

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BX6r2, 128MB PC100, C366A@567, Pan DVDwHollywood+,Pan 4X SCSI II CDR, WangDAT, Quantam UDMA HDs, Fireport 40 UW, SBLive!Value (attached to bi-amped TEAC/Hitachi multimedia system), SMC Intel 21041 NIC, etc. G200 Mystique as well.



[This message has been edited by Ron (edited 30 December 1999).]

[Ant]

Hmm well what about the Productiva G100 MMS with dual and quad chips on board, and what about the dual G200 boards?

[Wombat]

It's important to clarify, the MAXX doesn't use SLI. The chips alternate frames. It could be that there is effectively one graphics chip in control at a time. I don't know whether or not they share the on-board RAM, but I think they might still be keeping their own memory space (32MB each, that's why the MAXX is 64MB, or so I've heard).

[paulcs]

Most of the major video chip producers have multiple chip solutions of one kind or another. As Ant pointed out, there is already precedent at Matrox. Ron pointed out that the new ATI gaming board has two chips. I think 3DLabs might have an extremely expensive multiple Glint chip board or two.

This looks to me like a viable solution and maybe a good way to keep up with the Jones (3dfx and nVidia).

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net