Matrox Parhelia
After the G450, the G550 chip appeared, which also did not impress with its high performance, however, the Matrox Millennium G550 video cards provided good image output quality to the monitor, as well as support for digital monitors. As a development of the G450, the G550 again turned out to be more of a "working" chip than a "gaming" chip, and we again did not see any encroachment of the Matrox company on the leadership among gaming video cards.
This situation could lead to the complete loss of Matrox’s presence in the video card market, especially considering that even in the “high-impact” area of Matrox video cards - as image output to a monitor - the company has serious competitors.
However, fortunately, we will not be able to forget about Matrox - 11 months after the announcement of the G550, on May 14, 2002, the company announced a new chip - Matrox Parhelia-512.
Characteristics of Matrox Parhelia
Manufacturing technology - 0,15 microns;
80 million transistors;
Clock frequency - 200/220 MHz;
Memory controller - 256 bit DDR SDRAM;
Video memory frequency - 500 (250 DDR) MHz / 550 (275 DDR) MHz;
Video memory capacity - up to 256 MB;
Supports PCI 2.2, AGP 2.0 and AGP 3.0 interfaces, AGP 1x/2x/4x protocols;
Support ACPI, PCI Bus Power Management 1.1;
Gigacolor technology is one of the “impact” positions of Matrox Parhelia-512. The essence of this technology is to increase the accuracy of color reproduction. When using Gigacolor, 10 bits are allocated for each of the color components in the pixel color record, respectively, each of the color components (channels) can take a value from 0 to 1023 (2^10-1), and the total number of color shades displayed on the monitor , increases to 1073741824 - more than one billion.
Matrox Parhelia supports 10-bit color representation across the entire graphics pipeline, including support for 10-bit-per-channel (ARGB 2:10:10:10) textures, higher-precision internal calculations, and 10-precision framebuffer formats bits per channel (ARGB 2:10:10:10), as well as video and overlay processing. Image output is provided by the TV-Out block, RAMDAC and TMDS transceivers operating with the same color accuracy of 10 bits per color component.
Matrox Parhelia-512 supports all the multi-monitor capabilities of its predecessor, Matrox Millennium G550 - DualHead Clone, DualHead Zoom, DualHead Multi-Display and DualHead DVDMax:
Surround Gaming - support for a triple-width frame buffer and image output in games on three monitors at once. In this case, for example, in a 3D-Action or a car simulator, the player’s field of view significantly increases in width without changing in height.
The Matrox Parhelia's performance was much lower than one would expect from looking at the specifications. The developers' bet on a 256-bit memory controller did not pay off - Matrox Parhelia, not having any technologies designed to increase the efficiency of using the available memory bandwidth, was completely outperformed by the NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 and ATI RADEON 8500. With a narrower 128-bit memory bus, these graphics chips have technologies that increase the efficiency of its use - LMA II and HyperZ II.
