Matrox’ last gamer chip Parhelia 512 (PCGH retro special)

Matrox had somehow overslept the trend towards 3D graphics. While 3dfx, Nvidia and countless other manufacturers rolled out onto the market with 3D-capable graphics chips in the 1990s, Matrox clung (too) long to the superior image quality of the 2D cards Mystique and Millennium; the hastily launched m3d with Power VR chip was a flop. Only with the G200 and the following G400 Matrox can catch up again.

Allow: Matrox Parhelia
After further half-hearted attempts, on May 14, 2002, the company struck a last blow against the market leaders Nvidia and Ati: Matrox presented the Parhelia 512 and tried the 80 million transistor monster in both the professional and gaming markets alike to convince. Four texturing units are attached to each of the four rendering pipelines, and the concentrated calculation commands meet the then DirectX 8.1 Pixel Shader 1.3 standard. The programmable T&L unit (Vertex Shader), which Matrox impressively calls the “Vertex Shader Array”, was fit for the future. The hardware block is etched four times into the silicon and theoretically already meets the requirements for DirectX 9, which is not even in the beta test yet (however, Matrox has never released a corresponding driver).

The shader array would be able to calculate a gigantic 250 million vertices per second at an assumed 250 MHz, almost twice as much as Geforce4 Ti and five times more than Geforce3. In addition, there is an enormous theoretical memory bandwidth of up to 17.6 gigabytes per second, around twice as much as the current 3D accelerators of the time. For this purpose, Matrox has widened the memory bus from 128 to 256 bits – including the internal, matrox-specific “dual bus”, which also explains the name suffix 512. Other DirectX 9 functions such as the theoretically possible displacement mapping and higher color accuracy in the graphics card memory ( “GigaColor”) belong in the area of ​​nice but not very useful extras.

displacement mapping
The displacement mapping supplements the TruForm block (“N-Patches”) introduced by Ati. The Matrox chip is not only able to break down the incoming triangles into thousands more triangles, but can also vary their height position using texture values. In theory, this means that mountainous landscapes with winding gorges can be displayed and even animated very efficiently. All details are created “on the fly”

Source: Matrox





within the chip, without burdening the then current AGP bus with data and the main processor with calculations. At that time, the Westwood development team from Earth & Beyond was named as a supporter of displacement mapping, but the feature with DirectX 9 was not able to gain significant acceptance.

Fragment anti-aliasing
The tricky edge smoothing technology “FAA” (fragment anti-aliasing) at the launch of the Parhelia 512 was rated as exciting, which promises 16x anti-aliasing quality without a major drop in performance. To do this, Matrox reduces the smoothing effect on the contours of the objects. The Matrox technology does not handle disturbing aliasing effects of textures (texture flickering, edges of alpha textures) and edges along shadows. Instead, the manufacturer wants to bring the texture look into shape with an anisotropic filter. However, as with the trilinear blending filter, several texture units are used for this, which means that a loss of performance seems inevitable. With active anisotropic 2:1 filtering, the Matrox chip seizes all texture units per pipeline and can only stick one texture to a pixel per cycle. The color values ​​are finally stored in a slightly improved color format (40 bit). Matrox offers another technical gimmick with surround gaming, i.e. playing games on up to three monitors with a correspondingly wide field of view. This technology will later be available separately as a triple head to go, and in 2009 AMD’s Ati Radeon HD 5000 series will introduce a similar but more flexible and powerful technology for gamers.

Matrox Parhelia-512: Surround Gaming (16)

Source: Matrox

Matrox Parhelia 512: The Verdict
Overall, the appearance of the Parhelia 2002 turns out to be difficult. The GPU works inefficiently, because the clock frequency is too low, it cannot use its high memory bandwidth and proves to be not fully DirectX 9 compatible. In the test in PCGH 08/2002, Thilo Bayer said that the Parhelia “wouldn’t have it easy against Geforce4 Ti and Radeon 8500”. In retrospect, the price is too high for the performance offered (550 euros is no bargain in 2002), which is often below that of a Geforce 4 Ti-4600; Missing Windows 98 drivers are also detrimental to success. Finally, with the Radeon 9700, Ati brings a GPU that is superior in every respect, and the Parhelia 512 falls into oblivion. This finally ends Matrox’s involvement in the player market: the announced Parhelia 2 will never exist, the company is withdrawing to the market for special solutions. Nvidia and Ati are among themselves again.