Efficiency

Design and research go a long way

What may surprise many is the fact that the Parhelia currently runs at a much slower clock speed than its competition and this is due to the fact that it is the largest consumer graphics processor currently available. Containing roughly 80 million transistors, the Parhelia is one complex chip. There are basically two ways that Matrox can increase the speed on the Parhelia. The first method is to decrease the manufacturing process and optimize internal interconnects. This method is basically the “dirty” method of increasing clock speed. The other more elegant method is to design more pipelines – like Intel does in its Pentium 4 processors, although some may argue otherwise – so that increasing speed wouldn’t require retooling the manufacturing line.

We also want to touch base on the MHz-myth. There are times when raw MHz matters and then there are times when other things are more paramount in determining performance. Just recently in the CPU world, the DEC Alpha processor finally reached 1GHz but it is one of the most powerful processors available. While MHz plays a role in performance, there are many other things that contribute to performance such as cache, pipelines, memory management, I/O performance, op-code efficiency and many more.

Clearly the Parhelia doesn’t quite have the filtrate as the high-end GeForce4 Ti4600, but at the end of the day, it may not need the extra clock speed to compete.

Memoirs of 3dfx

Back in the day when 3dfx was still around and boasting that speed was king, NVIDIA and ATI determined to show the speed is not king, and that features and quality are the biggest factors in the overall “performance” of a graphics card. However, as NVIDIA and ATI added more and more features that developers were not using, it became apparent that speed was the major competing factor.

Since all the special features that were being added to graphics cards were too far ahead of their time, developers sometimes seemed unsupportive simply because they wanted to be sure that their application would run on the widest array of configurations available. Supporting the greatest and latest often times means that a developer has to sacrifice support for older technology, leaving users with outdated equipment without hope. Often times, people would complain at companies like ATI and NVIDIA for releasing one product after another. People were simply upset that as soon as they opened the shrink wrap on their new video card that another new chip had been announced. Suffice to say that the culprit was really not having features that could be used out of the box.

This brings us to the Parhelia and the technology it contains, most of which can be used out of the box! From the advanced 16X Fragment Anti-aliasing to TripleHead to Surround Gaming to 10-bit GigaColor, all can be used today and with today’s software and games. The Parhelia also contains DirectX 9 features, and although it isn’t a complete DX9 solution, it does contain many of the of significant DX9 features. Matrox has told us that there are parts of the Parhelia that aren’t even enabled today because of the lack of software and the Parhelia will be ready for tomorrow’s software and games as well. Whether Matrox’s claim will hold true or not remains to be seen, but at least on some counts, we’re not stuck with “T&L” hype that no one can yet use.