By Sam Parker Published: 5/14/2002 Five years ago, during the infancy of 3D game graphics, there were more than a half dozen companies making 3D graphics chips, but by last year fierce competition had pared the list down to two names: Nvidia and ATI. But as recent news is reminding us, such drastic consolidation isn't inevitable and doesn't have to be a linear march toward monopolistic dominance. Less than two weeks after 3Dlabs announced its P10 graphics technology and amid rumors of next-generation ATI and Nvidia products, Matrox has today revealed its own plans to reenter high-end game graphics with the Parhelia. While 3Dlabs has so far just talked of the P10 as a technology, rather than as a concrete hardware product, Matrox's Parhelia card is rather close to going into final production runs. While we're weeks away from getting cards to test ourselves, at least we can say we've seen all the features we'll talk about today running on prototype hardware. Having seen what this chip is capable of is important, because Matrox's goal for the Parhelia is to set a new standard for "high fidelity" visuals in 2D, 3D, and video. This sea bass has four separate pixel effects on it and is one example of the Parhelia's advanced effects. A parhelia is a halo effect seen in icy northern skies (like in Matrox's home town of Montreal) where ice crystals make it look like there are three suns just above the horizon--a name that, if nothing else, might remind you of its ability to project games across three monitors at once. "Surround gaming," as Matrox calls this new level of multimonitor support, is one of the card's more impressive features and will work with games right out of the box, but the Parhelia raises the bar in other ways as well. The card is capable of a new 10-bit color format, doubles some key specs of current-generation chips, introduces a new high-quality antialiasing method, and has a number of DirectX 9 features. If you need a crib sheet to follow how the Parhelia stacks up against the competition, the table on the next page lays out the specs in an easy-to-compare format. Company Nvidia Matrox 3Dlabs     CPTransistor count 63 million 80 73 Manufacturing process 0.15 micron 0.15 micron 0.15 micron Memory type 128-bit DDR 256-bit DDR 256-bit DDR Memory bandwitdh 10.4GB/sec ~20GB/sec ~20GB/sec Core clockspeed 300 ? ? Memory clockspeed 650 ? ? Virtual memory no no yes Max texture size 2Kx2K 2Kx2K 8Kx8K DX8 Vertex Shaders 2 4   DX9 Features none DX9 vertex, displacement maps DX9 vertex shaders Pipelines 4 4 4 Texture units 2 4 8 Max color depth 8 bits/channel 10 bits/channel 10 bits/channel Multidisplay dual triple dual Board producers various Matrox Creative Availability April summer late 2002 While the Parhelia is capable of nifty high-tech effects, illustrated by the movies of Matrox demos that we've included, first we'll look at what the Parhelia can do that won't depend on future support by game developers. First among these features is surround gaming. It isn't surprising that Matrox has moved to supporting for three monitors witha single Parhelia card, considering that the company pioneered dual-monitor support with the G400 back in 1999. The card has two 400MHz DACs so two monitors can be powered at up to 2048x1536, while a third monitor is limited to 1600x1200. If you do happen to have three monitors around, then Parhelia will give you full peripheral vision in games. The key component to surround gaming is triple display support, but there is a little more to it than that. The easiest way to get current games to take advantage of surround gaming is to make games think they're outputting to a single superwide display (three monitors set to 1024x768 would make the game think it's one 3072x768-resolution display), then use a game's field-of-view setting to scale the view. Without developer support, this works with Quake III-engine games like Soldier of Fortune II and Jedi Knight II and Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2002, and Matrox is hoping more developers will allow the small change to make it possible on a wider basis. While there's fish-eye distortion on the side displays, the center monitor looks as it would normally, so the added peripheral vision isn't hampered by trade-offs. The obvious requirement of such a configuration is to have three monitors and the space to set them side by side. While few people have three large monitors lying around, even older 15- and 17-inch monitors would probably be effective as peripheral displays, where absolute quality is less important.

If you've been wondering when games will come out that are more than today's fastest hardware can handle, rest assured that just over the horizon is a new generation of PC games, which will showcase much more complex visual effects. Unreal Tournament 2003 and Doom III aren't that far away, and, as the standard bearers for Epic's and id's widely licensed graphics engines, they should have a wider influence on PC graphics than any other individual games can. Matrox has spent two years building the Parhelia 3D engine from the ground up, and it has plenty of bells and whistles that will do more to make it competitive in tests based on these future games than in old standards like Quake III.

While the Parhelia isn't a full DX9 chip, it has features to make upcoming DX8 games run smoother.

The Parhelia is a big chip--there are some 80 million transistors carved into .15-micron silicon--and much of this goes toward the 3D engine. Many of the chip's specs take the current high end and double it. Like the P10, the Parhelia will use 256-bit memory for extreme memory bandwidth in the range of 20GB per second. It has a quad pipeline from front to back, starting with four DirectX 9 vertex shader pipes, four pixel pipelines, and four texture units per pipeline. Having the ability to apply four textures to every pixel per cycle points again to the fact that the Parhelia is designed for games with such advanced multilayering effects (like Doom III). And while the Parhelia doesn't have a full DirectX 9-compliant pixel shader pipeline, each pixel shader does have five stage to let it process more instructions per clock and enhance performance of DirectX 8-standard pixel shaders. Considering that pixel shaders effects have been slow to show up in games because they absolutely rely on graphics hardware to work (vertex shaders can fall back to run on the CPU), not pushing ahead to future DirectX 9 standards in this one area may not be such an issue.

Displacement mapping is the fully 3D cousin of height maps and acts as an efficient compression method for high detail models.

Every new generation of cards has to have a whiz-bang feature, and Matrox's own graphics innovation is to be seen in displacement maps, something Microsoft has incorporated into DirectX 9. Displacement maps are the fully 3D cousins of height maps, which are used to model outdoor terrain in a number of games, from Myth and Tribes 2 to Halo and Unreal II. But whereas a height map is simply a grayscale image that determines how high a point is from a flat surface, displacement maps work relative to more complex shapes. As the movies of Matrox's tech demos show, a low-polygon model can be turned into characters with vastly different looks by applying different displacement maps, which act on the surface relative to the normal line perpendicular to a given polygon.

Displacement Characters	Adaptive Tesselation	Displacement Terrain	Fish Effects	Underwater Reef
This demo how displacement mapping works to create multiple characters out of a single low-poly model.	This short clip shows how poly counts increase dramatically as the camera zooms close to a model.	Here's a demo of terrain created with displacement maps and how it can be modified on the fly.	This clip shows each of the fish in the underwater demo up close so you can see the individual pixel effects.	Here's a video of Matrox's real-time underwater reef scene, complete with impressive lighting effects.
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The resulting model actually looks very high detail because Matrox smooths the final mesh out by adding many polygons in an intelligent way. The tessellation process adding in polygonal detail can work relative to how far an object is from the 3D camera, so there isn't more detail than can actually be seen on the screen. In one terrain demo based on Westwood's Earth and Beyond Online, we saw how distant hills were modeled with relatively low polygon counts that gradually increased as the camera flew closer. A separate character demo shows just how dramatically the polygon count can increase, from just a hundred or so when the model is at a distance, to tens of thousands up close. All the tessellation is handled automatically by DirectX 9, but certainly the whole process depends on very specific support from developers.

Coming Soon

Despite all the rumors floating around that Matrox has a GeForce4-killer up its sleeve, Matrox wants to be clear that the card is tuned for visual quality and performance in the most demanding upcoming games and not to get higher frame rates than the competition in older games like Quake III. But by the time the Parhelia comes out this summer, there'll be even more reason to use something other than Quake III as a standard for performance.

The DX9 displacement map feature can adapt its tessellation of objects into high-polygon counts depending on camera distance.

Matrox hasn't traditionally released clock speed info on its products, but that's even less of a surprise here because big chips are difficult to produce at higher speeds. While the Parhelia has been through a number of preproduction cycles already, Matrox may not be absolutely sure of final speeds until the production run is in full gear. While the Parhelia's beefy design has its performance advantages in complex games, for current games, performance will likely come down to clock speeds and driver optimization.

While we won't try to elucidate why Matrox claims to have the best 2D image quality around, there are some general features that should significantly help 3D image quality. Matrox has developed a new kind of antialiasing technique that combines high-quality 16X sampling with an intelligent method of avoiding the performance hit you'd expect from such high-quality levels. The Parhelia's 16X antialiasing is a fragment antialiasing method that separates out the edges of objects, where aliasing or jaggies actually occur, so the process isn't applied indiscriminately to the whole frame. Since only 5 to 10 percent of pixels are on or near edges, only that portion of the frame has to be worked on. While the method isn't universally compatible, Matrox claims it works with quite a few games. The best thing about it is that it preserves texture quality by not antialiasing surfaces, so text and other textures aren't blurred needlessly.

This image taken from 3DMark 2001 shows just how small a percentage of a frame needs to by smoothed with the Parhelia's 16X fragment method.

A more forward-looking feature is 10-bit color. Many people, from digital photographers to game developers, have been asking hardware makers for higher-quality color standards, and the Parhelia should be the first shipping hardware to support 10-bit color, which is an intermediary step forward. While standard 32-bit color uses 8 bits for each red, green, and blue, then another 8 bits for the transparency (or alpha) channel, 10-bit color gives the primary colors more space and truncates the alpha channel to 2 bits. In games, this should make for smoother gradations in dark environments with high-contrast lighting. The Parhelia even has 10-bit DACs to ensure that quality isn't lost as the new color standard is sent out to displays. However, this standard will take some time to be supported in games and by Windows.

The Parhelia is on schedule to start production in June, so it should hit the market before any rumored products by Nvidia and ATI and be the first of a new generation of cards. However, it won't be cheap. Matrox has said it's a high-end "enthusiast" card, so that means it may be around the $400 price of the current high-end GeForce4 Ti cards.

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