Displacement mapping absolutely rocks. Adding arbitrary geometry to figures or in outdoor terrain is a step in the right direction.
FAA absolutely rocks. Swimming textures in buildings in FS 2002? GONE.
10-bit color was a bit of a disappointment. Because LCD monitors were used in the demo, it downsampled to 8-bit color. While there is a difference in banding, it was less apparent than I expected. When I test the card with 3 CRTs, I'll take a deeper look into it.
It will not be a Quake3 GeForce4 Ti killer with the way most reviewers run the benchmarks. With 80 million transistors on a .15um process there's likely to be a lot of heat and it's unlikely that the Parhelia 512 will have more than a 300MHz gclock.
Having said that, Matrox suggests, and I agree with them, that performance in Quake3 is fast enough today. Turn on FSAA (games with stencil buffers have issues with FAA), anisotropic filtering, and Surround Gaming, and it should be playable.
Surround gaming absolutely rocks. I got to play Quake3 and on three monitors and it was smooth. One little note - while playing, I didn't consciously look to my right or left, but in my peripheral vision caught movement on the extra monitors.
Matrox suggests, and after walking around the show floor, I agree, that DirectX 8 games will be more prevalent this Christmas. The number of DirectX 9 games will be very limited if any at all. Thus their decision to go with DirectX 8.1.
If you have a chance and are at E3 go to the AMD/Matrox/Alienware lot (last year's G.O.D). Soldier Of Fortune II and F1 2002 make use of Surround Gaming. The HUGE monitors for the racing game are the way to play a racing game.
Parhelia 512 can multipass render. Eight textures per pixel is possible on a Parhelia.
Review cards are likely to be sent out in early June. Retail boards will likely be out in late June/early July.
Did I mention Displacement Mapping totally rocks??? Watching a character be N-Patched, then displacement mapped, gives a totally different look.
To give you a sense of how powerful the pixel shaders are capable of their ocean demo renders a shark, a bass, and a school of fish. Everything is bumpmapped and using 4 textures per pixel. The bass consists of 8 pixel shaders with 100 pixel shader instructions.
The anisotropic filtering did sharpen Quake3. The Parhelia is capable of dynamically allocating 64 texture samples in a pass. In other words, one pixel with 64 sample anisotropic filtering, or alternatively 4 pixels with 16 sample aniso in a single clock.
Performance hit with 16x FAA in one application (no numbers, sorry) was about 20% and with their 4x FSAA around 50%.
Only one mode of FAA - 16x at the moment..
