The Parhelia-512

The following is a list of the many features of the Parhelia-512. Again, we strongly urge you to read the Parhelia-512 Preview before continuing so that you can fully understand the scope of all the technologies that the Parhelia contain. It also helps in understanding benchmark scores when the architecture in the tests is fully understood.

Specifications

Parhelia-512

• True 512-bit GPU
  
• 80 million transistors in a 0.15u fabrication process
  
• 220MHz Core speed
  
• 325MHz memory speed (650MHz DDR)
  
• True 256-bit DDR memory interface
  
• Up to 20GB/sec. memory bandwidth
  
• Up to 256MB DDR unified frame buffer
  
• 10-bit Gigacolor Technology
  
  
  • 10-bit per channel RGB rendering and output
    
  • Over one billion simultaneously displayed colors
    
  • 10-bit precision for 2D, 3D, DVD and video
    
  • 10-bit frame buffer mode for ARGB (2:10:10:10)
    
  • 10-bit RAMDACs with full gamma correction
  
  
• AGP host interface designed up to AGP8X
  
  
  • Fast Writes supported
  
  
• 8-way parallel DMA streaming engine
  
• OpenGL1.3 and DX8.1 compliant

DualHead-HF Display Technology

• Fourth-generation DualHead
  
• 400MHz 10-bit RAMDAC
  
• Support for two digital TMDS transmitters
  
• Integrated 10-bit high fidelity TV/Video encoder
  
• TripleHead desktop
  
• 10-bit gamma correction
  
• Dual independent, gamma correctable hardware overlays
  
• Support for true multi-display under Windows 2000 and XP
  
• Hardware accelerated multi-screen OpenGL support

Quad Vertex Shader Array

• Four vertex shader units (DX8 and higher)
  
• Parallel processing of up to 16 vertices
  
• 512 instruction on-chip cache
  
• 256 constant registers
  
• Quad texturing per pixel, per clock cycle
  
• 64 super sample texture filtering
  
  
  • Dynamic allocation of texture units
    
  • 8-sample anisotropic and trilinear filtering on 4 dual-textured pixels/clock
    
  • 16-sample anisotropic filtering on a 4 single-textured pixels/clock

36-stage shader array

• 4 pixel pipes
  
• 4 texturing units per pipe
  
• 5 pixel shader stages per pixel pipe
  
• Support for up to 10 pixel stages per pass
  
• 4 pixels/clock throughput with quad texturing and 5 pixel shader operations

Hardware displacement Mapping

• Patent-pending depth-adaptive tessellation for continuous level of detail geometry
  
• Vertex texturing for dynamic generation of geometry using texture maps
  
• Support for Bezier curves and N-patch (PN-triangle) evaluation

16x Fragment Antialiasing (FAA-16x)

• 16x super sampling quality on edge pixels only
  
• Avoids blurring of internal pixels
  
• Low performance overhead
  
• Supports for Full Scene Antialiasing (FSAA)