Matrox Unveils Parhelia 512 GPU

Matrox Graphics is re-entering the field of high-end 3D graphics adapters with the announcement of its newest part: the Parhelia 512 GPU. Characterized by Matrox as offering ‘high fidelity’ graphics performance, Parhelia is a 512-bit 2D/3D GPU with a true 256-bit DDR memory interface providing over 20 gigabytes per second of raw memory bandwidth. The chip also incorporates four Microsoft DirectX 9 compatible vertex shader units into a single vertex processing array, single-pass quad texturing with four pixel-per-clock throughput, and a 36 stage shader array comprised of four programmable texture and five programmable pixel shader stages on each of its four pixel pipelines. Parhelia also offers true 10-bit per color channel support for the simultaneous display of over one billion colors, dual 400Mhz RAMDACs fully gamma correctable to 10-bit per channel accuracy, and dynamic allocation of up to 64 texture samples per clock for higher quality texture filtering with minimal performance impact. Matrox is also equipping Parhelia with a 16x fragment antialiasing scheme that antialiases only pixels on triangle edges and applies a full 16 times super-sampling to those pixels while leaving interior pixels sharp and unblurred. Other new features include hardware displacement mapping, support for three-monitor surround gaming, and high fidelity dual monitor display.