The Parhelia-512

Specifications

Before reading and comparing the specifications like a laundry list, take a minute to digest some of the features – you’ll be glad you did, as the Parhelia-512 is by no means a conventional piece of hardware.

Parhelia-512

• True 512-bit GPU
  
• 80 million transistors in a 0.15u fabrication process
  
• 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
  
• Dual integrated 400MHz 10-bit RAMDACs
  
• 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)