Preview - Matrox' new GPU Parhelia-512 (3/11)

By Lars Weinand - Editor In Chief RIVA Station / Editor Tomīs Hardware Guide

Overview

  Matrox
Parhelia-512		 NVIDIA
GF4 Ti 4600		 ATI
Radeon 8500
Chip Technology 512-bit 256-bit 256-bit
Manuf. Process 0.15 Micron 0.15 Micron 0.15 Micron
# of Transistors 80 Mio 63 Mio 60 Mio
Memory Bus 256-bit DDR 128-bit DDR 128-bit DDR
Memory Bandwith 20 GB/s 10,4 GB/s 8,8 GB/s
AGP Bus 1x/2x/4x/8x 1x/2x/4x 1x/2x/4x
Vertex Shader 4 2 1
Pixel Pipelines 4 4 4
Texture Stages/Pipe 4 2 2
PS Stages/Pipe 5 2 2
Texture Shader Stages 36 16 16
Vertex S. Version 2.0 1.1 1.1
Pixel S. Version 1.3 1.3 1.4
DirectX Generation 8.0 / 9.0 8.0 8.1
FSAA Modes Fragment /
SuperSampling		 MultiSampling SuperSampling
Z-Data Compression - Yes Yes
Max Displays 3 2 2
Internal Ramdacs 2 2 2
External Ramdacs 1 - -
Max Dual Resolution 2048x1536
@ 32bpp		 1600x1200
@ 32bpp		 1600x1200
@ 32bpp
Max Tripple
Resolution		 3840x1024
@ 32bpp		 - -
Bits per Color Channel 10 8 8

Quad Vertex Shader Array

Parhelia has a vertex shader unit whose T&L subsystem consists of four individual shaders. Combined with a 512-unit instruction cache, 256 constant registers and optimized control, the Parhelia-512 reaches a very high vertex throughput.

The vertex shaders correspond to Microsoft's DirectX 9 (v2.0). The hardware displacement mapping engine is connected directly to the vertex shader unit, via the vertex fetcher and cache. Refer to the diagram here.

Copyright: 14.05.2002 -   RIVA Station 2002 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

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