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Today in DCC Workstation
3D
Graphics Cards for DCC
Intro,
Why Accelerate?, What
to Look For, PCI vs. AGP
Entry-Level,
Low-Cost, High-Speed 3D Acceleration: Sub $300 Cards
nVidia
RIVA TNT2 Ultra, Matrox Millenium
G200 and G400, 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1,
3Dlabs Permedia3 Create!
Mid-Range,
High-Speed 3D Acceleration: Sub $1000 Cards
High-End,
Maximum 3D Acceleration: Cards Over $1,000
Matrox
Millenium G200 and G400
 Many
DCC workstation vendors (HP, Intergraph, Compaq, Siemens, IBM, MaxVision,
Tri-Star) offer the Matrox Millenium
G200 as their entry level accelerator. It is a good all-around 2D/3D card
but with the introduction of the Matrox G400 chip series, many of these
vendors are likely to follow XI Computers and HP, by offering the G400
series chip based cards instead. The Matrox G400 achieves up to three
times the 3D rendering performance of the MGA-G200 in real applications
at high resolution, using its new 3D Rendering Array Processor.
The Matrox Millennium G200 AGP 2X graphics subsystem is based on Matrox's
MGA-G200 chip technology. It has a 128-bit dual bus architecture with
integrated 250MHz RAMDAC, DDC2B support for plug-&-play detection of monitor,
dual command pipelining for simultaneous read and write operations, true
32-bit ARGB, Direct3D acceleration, 32-bit Z buffering, multi-monitor
support with multiple cards, 16/10 monitor support, available MPEG-2 decompression
upgrade, and 8MB SGRAM video memory (upgradable to 16MB). The card offers
non-interlaced resolutions of up to 1800x1440 in 24-bit and up to 1600x1200
in 32-bit.
The Matrox G400 graphics subsystem consists of a single .25 micron chip
with a unique 256-bit DualBus architecture and 32MB of high-bandwidth
synchronous memory. The new 256-bit DualBus design uses two independent
128-bit buses operating in parallel inside the Matrox G400 chip. The chip
uses a full 128-bit interface to memory as a complement to the dual bus.
The chip also has a DualHead display feature which allows simultaneous
output to two physically different displays, and has a 3D rendering engine
with fast single pass multi-texturing, 32-bit rendering, 32-bit textures,
32-bit Z-buffer with 8-bit stencil, and full AGP texturing.
With 32MB of fixed, high-bandwidth SGRAM, and a 360MHz RAMDAC, the card
is capable of driving high-end monitors at resolutions up to 2048 x 1536,
32-bpp at 85Hz. Fully OpenGL and DirectX 6 compliant, the G400 chip also
supports hardware environment-mapped bump mapping for real-time special
effects and high levels of detail. The 3D rendering processor and setup
engine maximize parallelism during 3D setup and rendering, allowing the
single cycle multi-texturing as well as set up of multiple triangles in
parallel. The setup engines in the Matrox G400 are capable of drawing
over 5 million triangles/second and natively support DirectX 6 Flexible
Vertex Format, Vertex Buffers, triangle strips and OpenGL anti-aliased
vectors. The chip also supports 8-bit stencil buffering, anisotropic filtering
(a requirement for 3D on the web), source textures up to 2048 x 2048,
32-bit Z-buffering, guard band clipping and support of 3D resolutions
up to 2048 x 1536. The Matrox rendering architecture, called Vibrant Color
Quality2 (VCQ2), preserves color quality for 32-bpp color in multi-textured
software applications.
Conceived as an AGP 4X device from the ground up, the G400 chip employs
technical innovations enabling it to sustain optimal performance over
the AGP 4X bus. The Matrox G400 is a unique Multi-Threaded Bus Master
device capable of using Direct Memory Access (DMA) to fetch commands and
data from multiple locations in system memory. Matrox combines this new
bus mastering technique with Extended Burst Transactions on the AGP 4X
bus to achieve and sustain maximum bandwidth in real world applications
and deliver measurable performance benefits to end users. The Matrox G400
also supports AGP pipelining, side band signaling and AGP read and write
operations with Matrox's Symmetric Rendering Architecture (SRA), introduced
with the MGA-G200.
Video Support
The Matrox G400 chip series accelerates video effects in video editing
solutions using Matrox's new Motion Video Rendering (MVR) architecture.
Using the MVR, the Matrox G400 is capable of texturing from mip-mapped,
non-power of two, non-square YUV textures such as a native DVD video stream
in 16:9 format, and of providing television-quality video as textures
in a 3D environment - opening the potential for real-time video in 3D
games, professional modeling and design.
The Matrox G400 provides digital video acceleration at full resolution
and frame rate as well as DVD decoding with hardware sub-picture support.
The powerful digital video accelerator is capable of full resolution,
full frame rate DVD decoding, full-screen output to TV, supports hardware
alpha-blended sub-picture and can take a 16:9 DVD stream and display it
full-screen at a 4:3 aspect ratio on a standard television set. The Matrox
G400 has high-bandwidth video input and output ports which will support
a range of video add-on products.
The chip series is compliant and optimized for key industry products and
standards, including Microsoft Windows 2000, the AMD-K7 processor, Intel
Pentium III, AGP 4X and the PC 99 specification. Of the two chips in the
series, the Matrox G400 features a 300MHz RAMDAC as opposed to the Matrox
G400 MAX, which is 30 per cent faster and features a 360MHz RAMDAC. The
Matrox Millennium G400 MAX sells for $249 ESP.
Lead
on to the 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1
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