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State Of Matrox; A VigilAnt Perspective

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  • State Of Matrox; A VigilAnt Perspective

    As seen at www.murc.ws, discuss the article that follows in this thread.

    This is the first in a multi piece series of editorials that will be done by myself. The intent of these will be to follow the happenings of Matrox on the business health side and the technology side as it continues to progress so to speak.

    Many MURC loyalists are probably wondering right now what is going on at Matrox; what with all the hope and promise of the Parhelia arriving and falling back in the shadows of the other products on the market at the time, it's a given.

    To cut to the core of what is on my mind personally after visiting my ties with Matrox one on one, they are hurting. Let me clarify a bit, I have spoken with, in person, several individuals who have lost their jobs at Matrox, and others who have left recently to move on to greener pastures. Matrox is ill right now. I predicted it last year when in my article Haig For President. They needed to follow through with professional attention to the fine details on the Parhelia project, and it seems they have fumbled the ball for the most part. As a result, Matrox's video card division is ailing and rapidly dwindling in size. The cause of this seems to be the same cause that I described then. Mismanagement by people who need to step aside and allows those who know what the winds are in the industry (people like Haig and his staff). Matrox's owners need to step up those in charge of the development of the Parhelia and those who made the key decisions that crippled the project and fix them. Right now, ASAP, the sooner the better.

    Enough of the bad news, let's move on with some glimmers of hope and sparks within the company. It would seem they are readying not only revisions of the Parhelia which could be due out not too far from now, providing they have enough staff to pull it off, but they also have the next generation of the Parhelia core. Much like the G400 was to the G200, the next core will be to the Parhelia. A big refinement of current technology and advances in the core design, with updated and more powerful features. This promises to deliver over twice the power on paper, and full feature sets not seen on the current card. In addition, refinements to the Fragment Anti Aliasing is already near completion on this project alone. Things should get real interesting, and I will be diving into more on these two separate projects in the near future.

    Just like Parhelia's future depended on precise execution, these projects very much so depend on perfect execution. Again, I have an open plea to the powers that be at Matrox to reconsider their current decision on who is in charge, and go with someone who has polished a tougher portion of the company, Haig in tech support, or at least someone like him. He understands the market, the customers, and the business. None of which I think is ture of the current throne.

    VigilAnt
    VigilAnt

  • #2
    Hmm.... Seems more and more like Matrox is completely losing the ball.....
    -Slougi

    Comment


    • #3
      Yes indeed...hm...

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: State Of Matrox; A VigilAnt Perspective

        Originally posted by VigilAnt

        A big refinement of current technology and advances in the core design, with updated and more powerful features. This promises to deliver over twice the power on paper, and full feature sets not seen on the current card. In addition, refinements to the Fragment Anti Aliasing is already near completion on this project alone. Things should get real interesting, and I will be diving into more on these two separate projects in the near future.

        VigilAnt
        Current power of Parhelia is half of paper expectation. So we must hope, that real power of the new parhelia will be same as power of current parhelia on paper

        But all of us wont to know When????
        Kuba2k

        P4 1.6@2.1 512kB - i845E - 512MB DDR333@354 - 60 GB - G400 DH 32MB - EIZO 21" CRT & 29" flat TV - SB Audigy - Genius SW-5.1 Home Theater - Pioneer DVD 106s - TEAC WE540K - ELSA cable modem

        Comment


        • #5
          Re: Re: State Of Matrox; A VigilAnt Perspective

          Originally posted by Kuba2k


          Current power of Parhelia is half of paper expectation. So we must hope, that real power of the new parhelia will be same as power of current parhelia on paper

          But all of us wont to know When????
          I was going to write the same thing!
          Twice as fast as the current Parhelia OR twice as fast as what the Parhelia should be?
          Anyway i I guess the aswer is: soonâ„¢
          NocturnDragon

          Comment


          • #6
            And if the dreams come true, the new Parhelia will be 4 times faster then the current one
            Kuba2k

            P4 1.6@2.1 512kB - i845E - 512MB DDR333@354 - 60 GB - G400 DH 32MB - EIZO 21" CRT & 29" flat TV - SB Audigy - Genius SW-5.1 Home Theater - Pioneer DVD 106s - TEAC WE540K - ELSA cable modem

            Comment


            • #7
              And if they don't, Matrox will go byebye

              Comment


              • #8
                i get the impression that the parhelia is infact a bit broken (FAA borked in some games, the underclocked core/mem issue, the banding in d3d, ...) and was maybe rushed and that the new parhelia will become what the parhelia was actually supposed to be. and from vigilant's comment it seems that it's not the tech guys fault, but actually marketing/managment screwed up here. happens all the time in the computer business.
                but then i have really no clue what it is going on over there so it might also be the other way around.

                ps. where can i register to vote for Haig?
                no matrox, no matroxusers.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Re: State Of Matrox; A VigilAnt Perspective

                  Originally posted by VigilAnt

                  Just like Parhelia's future depended on precise execution, these projects very much so depend on perfect execution. Again, I have an open plea to the powers that be at Matrox to reconsider their current decision on who is in charge, and go with someone who has polished a tougher portion of the company, Haig in tech support, or at least someone like him. He understands the market, the customers, and the business. None of which I think is ture of the current throne.
                  I have to agree very much with this statement. I am really impressed with the Parhelia so far, but unfortunately it reaks of a rushed product launch. So far there has been at least one problem that could constitute a defect in the product line, plus at least one or two other problems that reak of sloppy manufacturing, someone rushing its release. One of which is the current clock speed issues, the other is a problem with the HSF on the P which one of the BBz was hinting about in another thread a while ago.

                  The PowerDesk app, while it has its benefits and while it has improved drastically since its initial release, reaks of something the driver team whipped together to adjust parameters of the card. And, to make it worse, the Sales staff seems to have taken over and made it, something which should never have seen the light of day, the app that everyone has to deal with.

                  Matrox still has not released documentation on their OpenGL fragment shader, nor have they released docs on PowerDesk so that people might try to make something useful out of it with plugins. We have been waiting on word about the above mentioned horizontal disturbances for about a month, as the 16th of Sept is the first date where a Matrox employee said they had reproduced it...

                  Personally the drivers on the Parhelia are still very rough... there are problems with overlays on them, even when not in Gigacolor, FAA causes artifacts in more than a couple games, and a ton of people are seeing all sorts of problems.


                  but, even through all my bitching i LOVE the Parhelia... the Parhelia has the *best* Multimonitor implementation on the face of the planet - i have yet to see another card that won't gib when you watch an SVCD on the second monitor and play 3d accelerated games on the first... and i still love Matrox... their tech support personnel kick ass... i really feel bad for Haig and the rest of them... since i know that they will be reading this, you guys do the best job on the face of the planet... and i really feel bad about the bullshit that you guys have to deal with in getting answers for us...

                  i think it might be about time that people start writing the other departments (customer service in particular) about any problems they might be having with the boards, as i know that its not tech supports fault if some of these serious problems are not solved... and evidentally the rest of Matrox doesn't take the TS staff seriously...

                  ps, i to wanna vote for Haig? where can i sign up?
                  "And yet, after spending 20+ years trying to evolve the user interface into something better, what's the most powerful improvement Apple was able to make? They finally put a god damned shell back in." -jwz

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Just curious
                    Parhelia runs at 220 mhz and has 4 pipelines, the ti4200 runs at 250 and also has 4 pipelines. Most of the extra texture units in the Parhelia are not being used by current games and when they do there will probably end up being a shortage of bandwidth.

                    So why would anyone expect it to run twice as fast as it does? Sure some benchmarks need improving but a lot has been done in the past few weeks. The real disapppointment for me was the card not reaching 300mhz, not the fact that for a given clockspeed the card would be faster than GF4's, which I believe was unreasonable considering nVidia's skill at optmizing their drivers and corse etc.

                    There is a lot of potential in this card. Matrox is just now learning to untap it


                    Regards Michael
                    Interests include:
                    Computing, Reading, Pubs, Restuarants, Pubs, Curries, More Pubs and more Curries

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by thop
                      where can i register to vote for Haig?
                      My vote for Haig!
                      Kuba2k

                      P4 1.6@2.1 512kB - i845E - 512MB DDR333@354 - 60 GB - G400 DH 32MB - EIZO 21" CRT & 29" flat TV - SB Audigy - Genius SW-5.1 Home Theater - Pioneer DVD 106s - TEAC WE540K - ELSA cable modem

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        number of pipelines * clock speed != GPU speed....

                        a lot of things can affect GPU speed... number of textures used, if a pixel or vertex shader is used the number of cycles it takes to execute it (which iirc, the Parhelia does pretty much everything in no more than 1 cycle), memory bandwidth, etc etc... maybe not twice as fast but enough to account for the difference...


                        the GPU speed and the CPU speed should have been higher, i agree....


                        Another fairly major show stopping bug that i believe Matrox is ignoring is the BIOS timing error.... even if it isn't Matrox's fault, its still an issue that did not exist on their older video cards or any of their competetors... some sort of option for working around this would be great for those affected (and i am not one of them, heh)...
                        "And yet, after spending 20+ years trying to evolve the user interface into something better, what's the most powerful improvement Apple was able to make? They finally put a god damned shell back in." -jwz

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Add to the fact that the Parhelia's Pixel Shaders as of now are far from the fastest (not sure if drivers or hardware.......

                          The Vertex Shaders, on the other hand, are very competitive.....and should be even more so with the launch of DX9....
                          Let us return to the moon, to stay!!!

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Given how long it took Matrox to go from the G4xx series to the Parhelia, shall we expect the Parhelia II in two or three years time?
                            Athlon XP-64/3200, 1gb PC3200, 512mb Radeon X1950Pro AGP, Dell 2005fwp, Logitech G5, IBM model M.

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by RichL
                              Given how long it took Matrox to go from the G4xx series to the Parhelia, shall we expect the Parhelia II in two or three years time?
                              Well if its based off the same techongy...a year

                              If its totally new...ummm
                              Why is it called tourist season, if we can't shoot at them?

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