Matrox's Comeback Kid - The Parhelia-512

Triple Head & Surround Gaming

Since they were the pioneers of mass-market desktop multimonitor solutions, it should come as no surprise that the Parhelia-512 shines (no pun intended) when it comes to multimonitor functionality.

The chip itself features two 400MHz RAMDACs that have been optimally positioned on the GPU's die itself to allow for proper shielding from other high speed components on the GPU. The card will also feature 2 external TMDS transmitters for dual DVI outputs on all cards (the cards will ship with two DVI-to-VGA adapters). A third RAMDAC clocked at around 230MHz is used for a third output (up to 1600x1200) to enable Triplehead output and something Matrox likes to call Surround Gaming.

Surround Gaming is very simple for a game developer to support (it currently works on all Quake III engine games and Epic is making it work with Unreal Tournament 2003) and it enables you to increase your field of view angle and effectively gain peripheral vision through the use of two flanking monitors alongside your main display.

The effect is fairly realistic; say you're walking through a door in a first person shooter, you'll be able to see, out of the corner of your eye, impending doom as an opponent waits beside the door with a shotgun. This is made possible through the increased FOV and the fact that you have monitors on either side of your main monitor that help act as your eye's peripheral vision in a game.

The feature is mostly a novelty one considering the relatively few people have three monitors or the deskspace for three of any significant size. The triplehead output can be useful for professionals that still don't have enough desktop space with two monitors.

10-bit Color Components

While 3DLabs' announced support for 10-bit color components (10:10:10:2 RGBA) they also announced support for 16-bit color components (as well as a programmable depth) to enable 64-bit color. The benefit of 10-bit color components vs. the present-day 8-bit components can be seen in certain situations and the fact that Matrox coupled the output with 10-bit DACs to offer higher fidelity image output will definitely make things look better on analog displays but it's clear that the industry is demanding much more than 10-bit components:

"I have been pushing for a couple more bits of range for several years now, but I now extend that to wanting full 16 bit floating point colors throughout the graphics pipeline…so intermediate solutions like 10/12/10 RGB formats aren't a good idea." - John Carmack, April 2000 .plan update

Again the limiting factor here for Matrox is die-space otherwise we'd surely see support for full 16-bit floating point colors throughout the pipelines.

The Parhelia's 10-bit color mode can be enabled through their control panel and it will require a quick reboot to take effect. Unfortunately the mode currently causes MS Word (as well as other applications that don't properly support 2-bit alpha channels) to crash and thus can't be left enabled all of the time.

The card also supports hardware accelerated text anti-aliasing for modes such as Cleartype under Windows XP. Matrox is claiming an impressive performance boost in 2D performance.