Matrox Parhelia

Written by - on 07 November 2009. Posted in Matrox Parhelia

After the release of Matrox Millennium G400, a motherboard remarkable in all respects, both in terms of speed and quality, Matrox was expected to gradually increase the speeds in future chips - G600, G800, etc. However, after the G400, the company released only a modified G400 version - G450 chip. Video cards based on the G450 proved to be excellent workhorses for people who are demanding on the quality of the image on the screen, but against the background of new products from competitors, they looked very faded in games.

After the G450, the G550 chip appeared, which also did not impress with high performance, however, the Matrox Millennium G550 video cards provided good image output quality on 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" than a "gaming" chip, and again we did not see any encroachment by Matrox on the leadership among gaming video cards.
Such a situation could lead to a complete loss of Matrox's presence in the video card market, especially considering that even in the "shock" area of Matrox video cards - as an image output to a monitor - the company has serious competitors.
However, we, fortunately, 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.

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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;
The amount of video memory - up to 256 MB;
Support for 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 "shock" positions of Matrox Parhelia-512. The essence of this technology is to increase the accuracy of color reproduction. When using Gigacolor, 10 bits are assigned to 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 throughout the graphics pipeline, including support for textures with 10 bits per channel color accuracy (ARGB 2:10:10:10), higher precision internal calculations, framebuffer formats with 10 precision bits per channel (ARGB 2:10:10:10), as well as video processing and overlays. 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.

The Matrox Parhelia-512 supports all the multi-monitor features of its predecessor, the Matrox Millennium G550 - DualHead Clone, DualHead Zoom, DualHead Multi-Display and DualHead DVDMax:

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Surround Gaming - support for a triple-width frame buffer and displaying images 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 is significantly increased in width without changing in height.

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The performance of the Matrox Parhelia was far below what one would expect from the specs. The developers' bet on a 256-bit memory controller was not justified - Matrox Parhelia, having no technologies designed to increase the efficiency of using the available memory bandwidth, outperformed 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.