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Graphic Wisdom III

by Len "Ecclesiasticus" Hjalmarson

Article Type: Hardware / Graphics
Article Date: June 11, 2002
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Listen, my son, while I share with you wisdom.
Get video hardware, and get more oomph for your games.
Do not dwell in the land of the 3-D challenged.
Seek the land of plenty pixels and 32-bit color.
Then you will be happy,
Yea, your flight through the heavens will be smooth and delightful.
(apologies to King Solomon)



Back in the days of King Solomon, the most important part of any upgrade was the CPU. Those days passed quietly in the night, as camels, tents, nomads and 16-bit processors faded into the pages of history. Like the opening of Fellowship of the Ring, “truth became legend, and legend became myth.” Did we really have only 256 colors for SWOTL? Whew!

Like any good nomad, we respect both water and the animal. In our days both CPU and 3-D accelerator are equally important, and any system build needs to consider a good balance of system hardware. But a new revolution has begun.

Unfortunately, in the past two years there were fewer graphics boards competing for our dollars. Matrox dropped from the picture after their G400, and 3dfx was absorbed by the N Empire. The scene at night in the desert was becoming less complex. ATI didn’t quite compensate for the glorious days of the rivalry between the two Patriarchs, and for some of us, ATI wasn’t even a player.

Meanwhile, the warlords at NVIDIA decided to be omnipresent, if not quite omnipotent. They managed so many different entries in the video hardware market that the combat simulation fan had to be an avid reader of hardware news and reviews just to follow the constant flood of new entries. Add to this the complexity of a GeForce4 that wasn’t really a GeForce4 (MX), and we beleaguered purveyors of religion could barely keep up with the changing environment.

This article is not a hands-on review or even an exhaustive survey of brands and boards, but rather an up to date consideration of the rapidly evolving 3-D accelerator scene.


The Tribes
My son, do not be dismayed when they confuse you;
They will speak softly, but carry a big stick of RAM.
Neither be concerned when the labels get long,
For “ant” has only three letters, but who can number the ant?


Creative 3D Blaster Titanium

The first problem many gamers face when they consider a new video accelerator is the confusion of brand names. Hercules, Creative, Guillemot, Elsa, Leadtek, VisionTek, Asus—what’s the difference between this incarnation of GeForce4 and that one?

Very little difference, until you move not across brands but across GPU types. The Ti4400 is the same GPU whether it sits on an ELSA board or a PNY board.

Don’t be confused by brand names. “A rose by any other name…” The same silicon brain inhabits Creative’s 3D Blaster Titanium as inhabits Leadtek’s A250 Titanium. Ignore brand names and consider only the brain that drives the board.

The 3-D accelerator scene has become too narrow. At the moment there are only two contenders: ATI’s Radeon and NVIDIA’s GeForce4 GPU. But wait! Matrox has just announced that there won’t be a G550, but there IS a Parhelia 512.

Not only that, 3D Labs has not been idle but has just announced the P10. Both these new chips incorporate new technology, working smarter while also working harder. We’ve seen reviews of GeForce4 products 'til we can recite the stuff by memory. Time to look at some new hardware.


Here Comes the Sun
Named after an atmospheric effect where the sky looks to have two or three suns (we call it “sun dog,” but that didn’t have a good ring to the marketing staff), the Matrox Parhelia GPU is bringing Matrox back to the gaming and professional markets. The multiple-sun metaphor is a good one, however, because we’ve all seen these great lighting effects in our favorite game, but who has seen them on three displays at the same time?

I know, you’ve dreamed about flying IL-2 Sturmovik with your forward cockpit view in your face, and side views on two other displays, but how could a lowly game fanatic achieve such a thing?

I remember talking to Matrox staff at E3 in 1998; they were showing the dual display features of the G200 at that time. I liked it, but I wished out loud they would take it one step further. Hmm…? I wonder if my patent still stands? ;-)

Ok, let’s have a peek at the raw specs of the new hardware.
Matrox Parhelia 3-D:
  • 512-bit GPU (First ever)
  • 80 million transistors on .15m process
  • 256-bit DDR interface
  • Quad texturing per pixel, per clock cycle
  • Quad Pixel Pipes
  • 5 Pixel Shaders per clock
  • Quad Vertex Shader Array
  • 64-256MB of DDR memory on unified architecture
  • 350MHz DDR memory
  • AGP 8X support
  • 300MHz Core Clock
  • Dual 400MHz RAMDACs
  • 10-bit GigaColor Technology
  • OpenGL 1.3 and DX8.1 Compliance
  • TripleHead Desktop
  • 2K x 2K texture support with 32-bit color
  • 64 Super Sampling Texture Filtering
  • 8-sample anisotropic filtering on 4 dual textured pixels per clock
  • 16X Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) (Edge AA)
  • 8-Layer PCB design for solid signal routing
  • Vertex Shader 2.0 support


MATROX Parhelia 512

Hmmm? Not too shabby. At these specifications the raw pixel pushing power is almost 10 percent greater than the GeForce4 Ti4600, at 1200 M/pixels per second and 4800 M/texels per second. Memory bandwidth has also doubled due to a 256-bit memory bus. Total? 20 GB of memory bandwidth.


So…What’s the Big Deal?
  1. With twice as many texture units per pixel pipeline, the peak fill rate of 4800 is TWICE that of the GeForce4.
  2. Moving to 10-bit color technology will give us the best images we have ever seen.
  3. 64-bit supersampling is going to make your games, particularly the shooters, look incredible.
  4. Matrox anti-aliasing method will incur even less performance loss than GeForce4, and there will be no texture blurring in the scene as occurs with full screen anti-aliasing.
  5. Three head display technology. If you have the screen hardware, you can have THE POWER.


With 80 million transistors, the Parhelia-512 is about 21 percent larger than the GeForce4. Just like the GeForce4 and Radeon 8500, the Parhelia-512 GPU uses a .15m process.

The most striking feature on the card is the 20GB of bandwidth. AGP 8X support is interesting, but probably also present in GeForce4 (probably not announced until DX9 is released). The Parhelia 512 is also capable of 256MB of memory, twice what we are seeing in current boards.


The Wisdom of Matrox
Do not fear, my son, when your frame rate goes south,
Neither sweat nor curse,
Lest you fall into error and tweak wrongly,
And your system crash.

Instead, consider your options, that it may go well with you,
And your purchase decision be wise.
Understand the latest technology, and receive the counsel of your elders.
Then you shall have victory,
And your missions will have good success.


So what are the new features of the new hardware?

Hardware Displacement Mapping (HDM) (sounds like a solution to urban blight) may be one of the biggest features to impact the simulation market. HDM is a process where low resolution 2-D objects (like the terrain in your flight sim) are encoded with high-resolution detail and then through the special processes the high-resolution 2-D displacement map is implemented into a Level of Detail (LOD) 3-D Scene with very high levels of geometry. At the same time, the entire process is designed to maximize quality, efficiency and performance.

Currently all our sims use 2-D environments. But with current hardware, the 2-D has to be translated into 3-D via a “mesh.”

Meshes are sets of connected triangles that represent the surface of an object. To create a "realistic" view, the number of triangles has to be increased by many orders of magnitude. The process to enable this kind of rendering requires many features including dynamic generation of complex geometry while at the same time allowing the data to be stored in a simple and compact method.

In order to accomplish this, Matrox designed two special processes as part of HDM and is licensing the features to Microsoft for inclusion into DX9.

HDM can be applied to static environments, such as simulation terrains, as well as to dynamic skinned objects like 3-D characters. Any 2-D bitmap can be converted to a 3-D HDM.

This method will revolutionize this generation of terrain, but it will also increase the object detail (imagine that photo-realistic P-51 Mustang) with no performance penalty. But don’t expect to see this in simulations this year.


Surround Gaming
Don’t be concerned when you are surrounded, my son,
But scan your environment carefully.
Attack where you see that the enemy is weak, and remember…
“Lose sight, lose the fight.”


Dual display technology is giving way to triple display. Obviously, this solution will appeal mostly to high-end CAD engineers, since most of us don’t have the resources or the desk real estate for such a solution.

But for those who do, this is one cool ability. This "out of the box" feature is supposed to work on any 3-D title. Matrox has been using Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2002 to show off the new feature.

“Thank you, O wise one! But the Parhelia will have up to 256MB of memory. Will my games run faster, or look better? Will women notice me?”

With current games there is no advantage to more memory. But Matrox is obviously thinking of the future. The games released by the spring of 2003 may take advantage of increased frame buffer, and certainly where three unique displays are running concurrently you will need up to 32MB of frame buffer per display.

Matrox is introducing a new method of anti-aliasing (AA). Their method is commonly known as "edge" AA which does not process the full image but instead only the 5-10 percent of the screen that they argue needs anti-aliasing support. They are implementing a 16X FSAA method.

Matrox maintains that their method is superior to either Super Sampling (SS) or Multi-Sampling (MS), because both SS and MS need to be over-rendered and filtered for the entire scene. When using edge anti-aliasing, only the subpixels on the edge of a rendered texture are filtered.

Say for example you are flying your F-18 over rolling hills. Instead of processing the entire image, the edges of your aircraft, the wing lines and frame lines, are processed. The edges of the weapons you are carrying, and the nose cone and fins of the missiles, are processed. The edges of the hills and processed, etc. There is a huge bandwidth savings, and none of the blurring of textures that we have seen with FSAA.

My son, if your image is pale, consider your ways,
And look to your processing pipeline.
Why should your world lack contrast,
When you can enjoy beauty and richness?


The Parhelia 512 supports 10-bit color, giving the capability of having 1024 sample bits to cover a given color component. The end result is over 1 billion simultaneously displayed colors, sixty-four times more precise than 24-bit color. What does that have to do with your current simulation running in 32-bit color?

8-bits of the 32-bit color code you are currently running are actually shades of grey. With Parhelia we are talking about 30-bits of true color. Every pipeline in the Parhelia 512 is capable of 10-bit output. And this will affect your 2-D display also.


My Kingdom for a Wide Display

Panorama triple display

There isn’t much point in having surround gaming without a proper display. How about this one by Panorama Tech?

Imagine running up to 2048x1280 on 2.4 million pixels of desktop imaging hardware. Imagine the clarity and resolution and brilliance of IL-2 Sturmovik or Combat Flight Simulator 3 in 10-bit color on such a display. It boggles the mind (if not the pocket book).

I'd love to see a seamless curved display of such a type, and I imagine it's only a matter of time. As prices continue to fall and technology improves, this will eventually be the hardware of every combat simulation pilot.

Up Next: Creative Labs and 3D Labs give us the P10 VPU (Visual Processing Unit)




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