Matrox Interview @ ExtremeTech!
Posted by: [PM] on: 06/21/2002 03:55 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ] · 989 views
ExtremeTech has published an interview with Matrox' Dan Wood, VP of Marketing. This time there are some first facts revealed (clock speeds, features, OpenGL, Fragment Antialiasing support etc.). Head over for the latest information about the soon to be available GPU from Matrox. Here is a snip:
Why Parhelia is different:
The vision behind the Parhelia was that it was more important to sustain high performance with quality features enabled and to offer innovative new features like Surround Gaming than to focus our engineering investment on making a part that only delivered high (and sometimes meaningless) benchmark numbers with lower quality settings. Other companies are already doing that, and Matrox's goal is to offer different solutions to the market.
Image quality first: We're really excited about Fragment Anti-aliasing 16x (FAA16x), which we see as a unique approach to anti-aliasing. FAA16x operates on the principle that only pixels on the edge of a triangle need to be anti-aliased. The algorithm recognizes these pixels and treats them differently then interior pixels of a triangle. Our hardware actually looks at every pixel being rendered and checks to see if the pixel fully covers an entire raster element. If the raster element is fully covered, then the pixel is written to the back buffer as usual. If however, the raster element is only partially covered (which is typically the case on a polygon edge) than the level of coverage is calculated by the chip down to a 1/16th sub-pixel fragment, and this fragment value is written into a special fragment heap that is stored in local memory. As soon as another fragment is created that can be combined with the first to fully cover the raster element, the fragments are combined together to produce the correct result. This approach has the benefit that enabling 16x fragment anti-aliasing is typically only costing about 20-25% performance versus no anti-aliasing. Source & full interview: ExtremeTech
Image quality first: We're really excited about Fragment Anti-aliasing 16x (FAA16x), which we see as a unique approach to anti-aliasing. FAA16x operates on the principle that only pixels on the edge of a triangle need to be anti-aliased. The algorithm recognizes these pixels and treats them differently then interior pixels of a triangle. Our hardware actually looks at every pixel being rendered and checks to see if the pixel fully covers an entire raster element. If the raster element is fully covered, then the pixel is written to the back buffer as usual. If however, the raster element is only partially covered (which is typically the case on a polygon edge) than the level of coverage is calculated by the chip down to a 1/16th sub-pixel fragment, and this fragment value is written into a special fragment heap that is stored in local memory. As soon as another fragment is created that can be combined with the first to fully cover the raster element, the fragments are combined together to produce the correct result. This approach has the benefit that enabling 16x fragment anti-aliasing is typically only costing about 20-25% performance versus no anti-aliasing. Source & full interview: ExtremeTech
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