Newsgroup: it.comp.hardware.video-3d
Titolo: Press release della Matrox G-400 (senza commenti)

Matrox G400 Press Preview
I was fortunate enough to be invited to Matrox UK one Sunday afternoon
at the end of February to meet with Dan Wood Matrox Product Manager
literally the moment he stepped of the plane from Canada. Dan was
embarking on his European tour of press previews of the new Matrox
G400 chip, this was mainly to magazines with one or two online editors
thrown in, I was lucky enough to get the very first European showing
all to myself.
First things first, the G400 on show was a beta version of the
hardware although it was feature complete and will be almost identical
to the production version with the main difference that it was not yet
running at the full speed at which it will ship. The drivers were very
early drivers and must be considered alphas, again they were not
functioning at the speed  expected of the release drivers. The G400
had 32MB of SGRAM on board, a 300MHz RAMDAC, was a 0.25 micron design
but as for clock speeds Matrox were not prepared to talk. While the
G400 board on show had a 300MHz RAMDAC and all of the information
released so far states that the G400 will support a 300MHz RAMDAC it
seems pretty certain that G400 based products will appear with higher
speed RAMDACs, remember the Millennium G200 SE currently ships with a
320MHz RAMDAC. The G400 board had two RGB monitor connectors (yes two)
and a TV out connector. The system used for the preview was a Pentium
II 400 with 128MB SDRAM, and displayed on a magnificent ViewSonic P817
21" monitor (maximum resolution 2056 x 1536). It was repeatedly
stressed that any benchmarks shown should be considered very
conservative.
The G400 is AGP 4X built from the ground up rather than being an AGP
2X device patched up to be AGP 4X compatible. The G400 will also
support AGP 2X fully so there is no need to worry about not having an
AGP 4X system but obviously maximum performance of the G400 is going
to be at 4X. Unfortunately for the G400, and any other AGP 4X device,
Intel have slipped in the delivery of their new Camino chipset that is
needed for AGP 4X, this is something causing a small headache for all
manufacturers in the development of AGP 4X cards but the G400 is ready
and waiting for it when the Camino arrives hopefully in the summer and
in the meantime we will be able to make the most of the G400 on our
AGP 2X motherboards. The G400 will be able to make full use of the AGP
4X's 1GB/sec bandwidth, and acts as a multi-threaded AGP 4X bus master
device that is capable of using Direct Memory Access (DMA) to fetch
commands and data from multiple locations in memory. The G400 also
supports AGP texturing, pipelining, side band signalling, and AGP 4X
reads/writes. 
 
2D Quality And Performance
As with the MGA-G200 the G400 is based upon a DualBus architecture but
Matrox have not stood still in this area as the G400 is 256-bit
DualBus device employing dual 128-bit buses. The use of the DualBus
has the potential of providing a much more powerful graphics core than
a normal single bus solution due to it's ability to provide parallel
processing. Whilst the external video memory bus is limited to 128-bit
the parallel processing and Data In/Out buffers of the DualBus allow
the G400 to make maximum use of the external 128-bit by being able to
constantly "burst" information through it. The G400 employs
acceleration for all GDI and DirectDraw functions.
The 2D image quality is typically Matrox, top notch, easily on a par
with the MGA-G200 with an extremely sharp image and excellent colour
saturation. Speedwise it's not possible to really comment to any great
degree from such a preview but Windows dragging was smooth without
tearing and redraws were instantaneous as we've become used to with
Matrox 2D.
It's a bit of a niggle with me that a lot of reviews I see totally
neglect 2D performance, simply writing it of as not important or
making the totally wrong assumption that all 2D chips are now at a
level were performance is equal and it doesn't really matter. Also
many reviews still class 1024 x 768 as high resolution whereas I would
class this as the lowest 2D resolution realistically useable today
with GUI's. The lowering of monitor prices is pushing the mainstream
resolutions in use higher and higher, a 17" monitor is quickly
becoming the norm. I personally consider that 1280 x 1024 is currently
the start of "high resolutions" and from tests I have conducted in the
past it's clear that whilst many cards exhibit similar 2D performance
at 1024 x 768 once you move above that resolution the performance of
many 2D chips falls dramatically both in speed and image quality.
Matrox have always excelled in 2D and it's good to see that the
constant 3D frenzy we cannot escape at the moment has not sidetracked
them from continuing to push forward in the 2D performance stakes. It
may be a surprise to some but the graphics card world does not revolve
around 3D gaming for everybody, for many high resolution 2D
performance is of far more value. Winbench 99 benchmarks showed that
the G400 is extremely scaleable at high resolutions, at 1600 x 1200 @
24-bit the benchmark only dropped 2 points below that obtained at 1024
x 768
 was pretty much certain there would be no great surprises in the
feature set of the G400 but the unveiling of DualHead was a complete
surprise. Multi-monitor setups are rapidly becoming the in thing and
the G400 will support multiple monitors as standard. This is not by
including multiple G400 chips on a single board, the G400 has the
ability to support dual outputs (RGB, Flat Panel or TV-Out) via a
single chip. The G400 will support either dual RGB monitors, RGB
monitor and a Flat Panel monitor or a RGB monitor and a TV output.
Actually it can support 3 outputs, dual RGB monitors and TVO although
the secondary RGB monitor and the TVO will have share an output.
DualHead is made possible on the G400 by two things. First the
introduction of a second cathode ray tube controller (CRTC) which can
fetch data independently from the primary CRTC. The two CRTC's also
have the ability to read the same image at different refresh rates,
this allows output of the same image to both RGB monitor and TV out
but without the constraint of having to have the two running at the
same refresh rate, i.e. the 50 or 60Hz needed for the TV output. The
second feature is that the Matrox TVO has it's own independent RAMDAC
which allows it to drive a RGB stream up to a maximum of 1280 x 1024
at 60Hz.
But it's not just a case of having a second monitor to spread your
desktop over or having your desktop cloned via the TVO to your TV.
Matrox are supplementing DualHead by providing a set of tools known as
MonitorMorph, these tools give you an expanded set of functions. With
dual RGB monitors you can have a classic multi-monitor setup where
your desktop is stretched across the two monitors. Alternatively your
primary display could have your normal desktop on it and then the
second monitor could provide you with a zoomed view, for example of a
specific application window or indeed a zoomed view of any area of
your desktop such a single image from a webpage. The zoom function
could allow those using Adobe Photoshop for example to be working on
an image and have a zoomed version on a second monitor to easily allow
image manipulation on a per pixel basis rather than having to
repeatedly zoom in and out. You could also be running a game on the
secondary RGB monitor or indeed your TV via TVO but retain your
desktop on the primary monitor to allow you to monitor Internet
activities, or indeed allow one person to continue working while a
second  plays the game on the secondary monitor. DualHead also has a
bypass feature that allows video input to be passed through to TV and
be displayed fullscreen while retaining the full Windows desktop on
the primary monitor.
 
DVD
DualHead is also of benefit for DVD users. DVD can obviously be output
to a TV via TVO but it can again be done so independently of the
primary desktop. A DVD player can be started up but the output will go
fullscreen to the TV or the secondary RGB monitor. This worked very
well in practice, an MPEG2 file was started and the output
automatically appeared on an attached TV fullscreen, the player
remained on the desktop with it's own view on the file being played
but this can be minimised without affecting the TV output and the
Windows desktop can continue to be used.
The G400 provides hardware assisted DVD playback with a low CPU
overhead which is obviously needed if you do wish to run DVD via
DualHead and have a useable desktop at the same time. The hardware DVD
support allows it to do real time aspect ratio conversion that allows
a 16:9 letterbox display to be viewed on a TV as a standard 4:3 image
giving a full screen image on a non widescreen TV thus eliminating the
top and bottom borders.
The quality of the DVD output was excellent with very good colour and
detail depths, performance was faultless and appeared full speed with
no obviously dropped frames even whilst the desktop was being used on
the primary monitor.
Of things 3D
I'm sure that even though the G400 is a very well rounded card the
main focus of attention is going to be on it's 3D gaming capabilities.
The good thing though is that the G400 looks like it is going to be a
real contender in the next generation 3D graphics stakes along with
the TNT2 and Voodoo 3. Speed, that I'm sure is what the masses are
going to be screaming for. Matrox are saying that the G400 has around
3X the 3D performance of the MGA-G200 a conservative benchmark with
3DMark Max was given of 6000+ on a Pentium II 500.
The G400 is certainly feature packed on the 3D side:
• Floating Point 3D Setup Engine with
  dynamically re-allocatable resources:
    • Ultra-pipelined floating point and culling
      engines
    • Optimised support for Direct3D and
      OpenGL triangles, strips, fans and vectors
    • Flexible Vertex Format natively
      supported
    • Vertex Buffers natively supported
• Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
• Single cycle multi-texturing
• Vertex and table fog
• Specular highlighting (any colour)
• True colour ARGB Flat and Gouraud
   shading
• Vibrant Colour Quality2(VCQ2) Rendering:
    • 32-bit precision internal pipelines
    • up to 32-bit source textures
    • 32-bit output
    • 16bpp dithering down from 32bpp
      palette for 16bpp output
    • Full subpixel and subtexel correction
    • 8-bit precision for filter coefficients
    • Highly saturated & separated analogue
      colour output (UltraSharp DAC)
• Texturing support:
    • Texture sizes up to 2048 x 2048
    • All texture formats are supported
    • non-square texture support
    • non-power of 2 texture support
    • Perspective Correct Texture Mapping
    • Texturing from local and AGP memory
    • Opaque Texture Surfaces
    • Alpha in Texture Palettes
    • Texture transparency
    • Mip-map non-power of 2 textures
    • Multiple YUV source texture formats for
      Video Stream Texture Mapping
    • Full subpicture blended DVD as texture
      source •  Filtering support:
    • 11 level mip-mapping support
    • Bilinear Filtering
    • True eight-sample per pixel trilinear
      filtering
    • Anisotropic filtering
• Alpha blending:
    • All blend modes under DirectX 6 and
      OpenGL
    • Supports all permutations of passes
      including light maps, environment maps,
      reflection
      maps, etc.
• Z-buffer support:
    • 16-bit
    • 32-bit
    • 24-bit plus 8-bit stencil buffer used for 
      shadows, overlays, etc...
• Guard Band Clipping
• Single, Double or Triple buffering
• 3D-image effects combined with no
  exclusion conditions
• Sort independent (full scene) anti-aliasing
• Vector/edge anti-aliasing
• Hardware dithering including dithering of LUT
   textures 
The G400 is clearly up there amongst the leaders at least in the terms
of features with support for the likes of environment mapped bump
mapping, single pass multi-texturing, stencil buffer, up to 2048 x
2048 textures etc. All the features that will be demanded by the next
generation of 3D games.
3D Image Quality
The G400 builds upon the excellent 3D image quality of the MGA-G200
with Vibrant Colour Quality2 (VCQ2), images have exceptional clarity
and colour depth. The screenshot on the right is from the game Black &
White running with full 32-bit colour rendering. Again as with the
MGA-G200 the G400 uses 32-bit precision all the way through it's
rendering pipeline, even if the final image is to be rendered in
16-bit. This gives a greater richness of colour   to all rendered
images by eliminating unnecessary dithering steps. The UltraSharp DAC
technology used is responsible for generating and maintaining the
colour saturation.
 
Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
Despite the excellent feature set of the G400 I really think
environment mapped bump mapping is going to be the real jaw dropper
with the G400 at least for the gamer. There are cards currently
available that supposedly support bump mapping and others that claim
to support it in software but these cards actually only support
something called embossed bump mapping. At the time of this preview
the were no other cards that had or were scheduled to have environment
mapped bump mapping but I believe now it is known that the TNT2 will
support it. 
Environment mapped bump mapping is one of the new features of
DirectX6, but what does it do? Well to put it simply it allows a
texture to give the appearance of height and depth, or bumps. Doesn't
so that impressive? Well it has to be seen to be appreciated, this is
something that has the potential to to raise 3D visuals to new heights
if used correctly. To illustrate the type of effect that can be
achieved below are two screenshots, on the left using a normal flat
texture map, and on the right with bump mapping.
As you can see the bump mapping can give the appearance of the object
having a much greater complexity but without the need for the 3D
object to have an increased polygon count. The effect is limited in
that the object will still appear flat in profile, for example the
edge of the Earth will still appear just as round with or without bump
mapping so it is something that needs to be used wisely.
One use of environment mapped bump mapping was shown in a small demo
from the game Slave Zero where a large robot was shown with and
without bump mapping. Without the robot was nicely textured showing
battle damage, when bump mapping was switched on the effect was quite
stunning. The damage now looked like real hits and dints and the metal
of the robot very realistically reflected light as it moved around, it
could quite easily have been mistaken for a pre rendered sequence
except that jumping onto the keyboard gave full control over it to run
around and fire off it's weapons.
Environment mapped bump mapping is not just a simple case of giving
the illusion of relief to a texture it can also be used to reflect
light and it's surroundings. The demo on the left was shown in which
the waves on the water were generated by bump mapping. It can be seen
that the bitmap of the background is reflected in the waves. This
looks great as a static image but this runs in real time with waves
rolling along reflecting the background, oh and the water with the
wave effect is composed of just two triangles.
 
In another demo, from the game SpeedBusters, environment mapped bump
mapping was used firstly to generate the effect of collision damage on
the car and secondly to produce a heat haze effect being generated by
the cars exhaust. Due to the way the bump maps are generated there is
not a huge processing overhead, certainly nowhere near that which
would be needed to produce similar effects by increasing the polygon
complexity of the 3D models. Bump mapping looks set to be widely used
in upcoming games, as I said before it is now a feature of DirectX6
and the addition of bump mapping basically just requires the
generation of an extra bump map for the textures used.
Games that are currently lined up to support bump mapping:
    • Slave Zero from Accolade
    • Heavy Gear 2 demo from Activision
    • Expendable from Rage Software
    • Messiah from Shiny
    • Descent III from Interplay/Outrage
    • Draken from Psygnosis
    • SpeedBusters from Ubisoft
    • Rally Masters from DICE
    • 3 DID engine games
    • Midnight GT Racing, Hostile Waters and Dispatched from Rage
Software
    • ShadowMan from Iguana
    • Team Alligator and Jump Runner from 
The Tech Demo
Matrox are having a tech demo coded for the G400 to showcase it's
feature set and power. It consists of an outdoor scene in a wood with
a log cabin, stream and water fall around which a fairy flies, around
the trees, in and out of the cabin, through a hollow log and over the
stream. The demo really is eye candy overload, huge 2048 x 2048
textures are used (20 -30 MB's in total) with bump mapping all round,
the bumped textures of the tree bark and stone really are something to
see. The water fall generates waves in the stream that accurately
reflect the surrounding trees and butterflies that fly above it, all
in real time. It also makes use of the G400's stencil buffer to
accurately map the volumetric shadows of objects to the contours of
the surfaces they fall upon. It did tend to suffer from a bit of slow
down but it was an early work in progress running on a PII 400 with
the scene containing some 30,000 polygons.   
 
OpenGL
The G400 will have full OpenGL support including OpenGL triangles,
strips, fans and vectors. I'm sure I don't need to raise the spectre
of the MGA-G200 OpenGL ICD or lack of should I say, the  G400 is
scheduled to ship with a full OpenGL ICD. I raised the concern of the
OpenGL ICD situation for both the G400 and for the MGA-G200 in light
of the fact that at the time of the preview there was still nothing
more than the limited beta1 ICD and Matrox were being very quiet on
the subject. Matrox realise that mistakes were made initially with the
G200 ICD and they had not anticipated the kind of backlash they would
receive over it, but they are now pumping massive resources into the
OpenGL ICD development for both the G400 and the G200. Dan was quite
adamant that the introduction of the G400 in no way meant that there
would be any dropping of support for the G200.
At this preview there wasn't an OpenGL ICD on show but Quake 2 was
shown running on the Direct3D wrapper which did produce a quite
impressive turn of speed with around 41fps at 1024 x 768 but again
this should not be considered to be indicative of the performance of
the full speed hardware running on the OpenGL ICD which should see a
much improved performance. 
 
How High?
After the run through of the preview I was given the opportunity to
get a little hands on experience of the G400. Firstly Quake 2 played
great at 1024 x 768, very fast and even at 1600 x 1200 it played well.
A quick switch to Tomb Raider III and low and behold the option to run
at a staggering 2056 x 1536 was available, so I thought I must at
least try it out even though it couldn't possibly be anything more
than a slideshow, could it? I was wrong it was very playable, it's
hard to ascertain the speed of Tomb Raider at the best of times and
version III seems to be locked at a maximum of around 30fps as were
the other versions. Lara was running, jumping and wiggling her bits at
a very respectable rate. Tomb Raider III doesn't have a fps readout or
not any that I know about I'm afraid so I had nothing more than the
"feel" to go by.
I then noticed they had one of my favourites installed, Motorhead so
that was next. I like Motorhead both as a racing game and as a good
Direct3D benchmark as it supports a wealth of 3D features so I knew at
least I could get a fps readout from it. Again the option of running
at 2056 x 1536 was available so I chose that and was a little
disappointed to find it running at 8fps but I thought that wasn't too
bad at such a ridiculously high resolution. However going back to the
graphics options menu I realised that, doh, I wasn't actually running
it with the G400 driver but a built in display driver  provided with
the game. So I switched it over to the G400 display driver and tried
again, and there I was riding around at 2056 x 1536 at 26fps, a very
playable speed for Motorhead, I was most impressed
http://www.matroxusers.com/g400/G400_Press_Preview_01.html

Parole,parole,parole...
Driver alpha? Xchè Matrox sa la differenza fra driver alpha, beta e finali?
La G200 quando uscì fece + scalpore: si aspettano ancora driver stabili e
suporto opengl (non quella schifezza di wrapper).
Il futuro è nVidia, 3dfx e ATI: basta! Matrox fa leva solo sulla pubblicità
e sul'ignoranza di chi vende e compra pc. Chi ha Matrox si deve pentire di
dire di avere un PC. Io avevvo una MGA-G200 e me ne sono liberata x una
Diamond Monster Fusion AGP: il 3d è senza paragoni (dove sono le glide nella
G200? e nella G400?) x non parlare deò 2d (io 1280*1024 24 bit @100hz con la
G200 non li facevo...ora si).
ciao a tutti da
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Spawn
Powered by Diamond Monster Fusion AGP Banshee
sp...@nfmail.com
UIN: 21080895
"L'arte rinnova i popoli e ne rivela la vita. Vano delle
scene il diletto ove non miri a preparare l'avvenire"
----------------------------------------------------------------------

 G200 non li facevo...ora si).
Evidentemente sbagliavi qualcosa, perche' io li faccio con la mia vecchia
Mystique 170 4 Mega... (in realta' faccio 1152x864 a 24 bit e 100 Hz... ma solo
perche' 1280x1024 mi sembra piccolo...)
Ciao
Paolo.

G200 non li facevo...ora si).
Un altro che pensa che il pc serva solo per giocare.
Poi a 1280x1024@100Hz con quale monitor ci vai?
Ammesso che tu abbia un monitor tale, pensi che ce l'abbiano tutti?
Secondo me una G200 LE da 150.000 rimane la  migliore scelta per il pc da
ufficio. Ma non pretendo che chi non la prenda debba vergognarsi di dire che
col PC non ci gioca.
Achille