Introduction

Matrox has been in the business of graphics cards since yon early days of S3, Rendition, Western Graphics, and Orchid. While Matrox made an attempt two years ago at capturing some of the performance market, their offering was hard-pressed to compete against the cunning marketing and raw power of the NVIDIA machine. At the time, they had a product with superior features, but people often shunned the G400 and the G400 Max because, while they were powerful enough at the time, NVIDIA's cards had power to spare, and would be useable longer.

Matrox at first threw down the gloves, saying that its G800 was going to take the market back and make them king of graphics, but the product kept slipping and Matrox continually kept mum about it, and eventually the G800 never saw the light of day. In its stead, Matrox released the G450, which increased the RAMDAC speed so that the dual-display feature was stronger, able to display higher resolutions at higher refresh rates. It seemed that Matrox had all but forgotten about the enthusiast and home market at this point.

To be fair, of course, Matrox's products have long been intended for the business and OEM market. Years ago, ATI and Matrox went down to the schoolyard and had it out over whose product was best: Matrox's Mystique 3D accelerator, or ATI's new Rage chipset. In the end, neither of them really won. Matrox's card was better on paper (And some would say in practice, thanks to ATI's older Mach drivers), but ATI had its fingers deep into the OEM market, with graphics chipsets that were easily integrated into motherboards, and more importantly, cheap.

Matrox has long had a following in the video enthusiast market, with its Marvel and Rainbow Runner series add-on cards being top-name in the video editing market. ATI would continually try to eat away at the sales with its All-in-Wonder series, but when it came down to it, Matrox's supplies, while expensive, were considered to be state of the art. Matrox also pioneered the concept of multi-monitor displays on a single card, starting in on the consumer market with the G400 line. Matrox touted it as a great feature for games, but the requirements (Two monitors) were rather steep for most single-computer gamers, and few publishers integrated the feature into their titles.

Now Matrox returns to the market, and in tradition, brings something new with it. Enter the dizzying world of the Matrox G550.

The Specs

General characteristics and key features

• 0.18-micron technology
• 256-bit DualBus graphics chip
• 64-bit Double Data Rate (DDR) external bus to frame buffer memory
• Up to 32MB frame buffer configurations supported
• Full AGP 4X device with multi-threaded bus mastering
• Support for AGP 1X, 2X and 4X
• Dual integrated RAMDACs
• Dual integrated TMDS transmitters enabling multi-display output to two digital flat panels
• Integrated TV encoder
• Matrox DualHead® display technology
• Multiple independent displays with a single AGP card:
• Analog flat panel (RGB monitor)/analog flat panel (RGB monitor)
• Analog flat panel (RGB monitor)/TV
• Analog flat panel (RGB monitor)/digital flat panel
• Digital flat panel /digital flat panel
• Digital flat panel /TV
• HeadCasting Engine for Visual Online Communication
• Extended Vertex Shader with 256 constant registers
• DirectX 8.0 Matrix Palette Skinning with up to 32 matrices
• Supported for HeadCasting applications only
• Dual pixel pipelines with dual texturing units per pixel pipeline
• High quality DVD/video playback with DVDMax
• Independent full-screen playback on secondary display
• Vibrant Color Quality (VCQ) rendering
• 32-bit internal precision, specially enhanced for multi texturing using 32-bit source textures
• UltraSharp RAMDAC technology
• High-speed integrated primary RAMDAC (up to 360 MHz)
• Flicker-free display up to 2048 x 1536 @32bpp on the primary display
• DirectX Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping
• Bilinear, trilinear and anisotropic filtering
• 32-bit Z-buffer including 8-bit stencil buffer

2D drawing engine

• Benchmark-winning 2D performance
• World's fastest Windows® acceleration
• UltraSharp RAMDAC technology for highest quality analog output and ultra-sharp text quality
• Optimized for 32bpp, 24bpp, 16bpp, 15bpp and 8bpp
• Full acceleration of GDI and DirectDraw functions including new Windows 2000 GDI features
• Linear frame buffer with support for packed pixels
• Programmable, transparent Bit-Block Transfer (BLTter)
• Hardware cursor with alpha assist
• Linear packed pixel frame buffer
• 32-bit ultra-fast VGA core
• Transparency and color keying

Display engine

• Dual integrated CRTC controllers
• Drive two independent displays from one graphics chip
• Dual integrated RAMDACs
• 360 MHz primary and 230 MHz secondary
• Integrated dual TMDS transmitter enabling multi-display output to two digital flat panels
• Integrated TV encoder
• Support for NTSC, PAL, SECAM
• Supported a up to 1600 x 1200 desktop resolutions
• Matrox DualHead display technology
• Multiple independent displays with a single AGP card:
• Analog flat panel (RGB monitor)/analog flat panel (RGB monitor)
• Analog flat panel (RGB monitor)/TV
• Analog flat panel (RGB monitor)/digital flat panel
• Digital flat panel /digital flat panel
• Digital flat panel /TV
• Supports up to 2048 x 1536 @32bpp on primary RGB monitor or analog flat panel
• Supports up to 1600 x 1200 @32bpp on secondary RGB monitor, analog flat panel or TV
• Supports up to 1280 x 1024 @32bpp on primary and secondary digital flat panel

3D engine

• HeadCasting Engine for Visual Online Communication
• Real-time acceleration of animated photo-realistic faces with lip synchronization
• Extended Vertex Shader with 256 constant registers
• Stores all constant data for up to 32 Matrix skinning of a 3D mesh
• DirectX 8.0 Matrix Palette Skinning with up to 32 matrices
• Up to 4 independent matrices /vertex
• Up to 12 independent matrices /triangle
• Up to 32 independent matrices /draw call
• Supported for HeadCasting applications only
• Dual pixel pipelines with dual texturing units per pixel pipeline
• Floating point 3D setup engine with dynamically re-allocatable resources:
• Pipelined floating point and culling engines
• Optimized support for Direct3D and OpenGL® triangles, strips, fans and vectors
• Flexible vertex format natively supported
• Vertex buffers natively supported
• DirectX Environment -Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM)
• Vibrant Color Quality (VCQ) rendering
• 32-bit precision internal rendering for single and multi-texturing
• 32-bit source textures
• 32-bit output
• Full sub-pixel and sub-texel correction
• 8-bit precision for filter coefficients
• Highly saturated & separated analog color output
• Texturing support:
• Dual texturing units per pixel pipeline
• Perspective-correct texture mapping
• Texture sizes up to 2048 x 2048
• Support for all texture formats
• Texturing from local and AGP memory
• Opaque texture surfaces
• Alpha in texture palettes
• 11 level mip-mapping support
• Texture transparency
• Mip-mapped non-power-of-2 texture support
• Full subpicture-blended DVD as texture source
• Filtering support:
• Bilinear filtering
• 8-sample-per-pixel trilinear filtering
• Anisotropic filtering
• Alpha blending:
• DirectX and OpenGL blend modes
• Supports all permutations of passes including lightmaps, environment maps, reflection maps, etc.
• Z-buffer support:
• 16-bit
• 24-bit plus 8-bit stencil buffer
• 32-bit
• Full sub-pixel precision
• Specular highlighting (any color)
• Vertex and table fogging
• True color RGB, flat and Gouraud shading
• Environment Mapping
• Guard band clipping
• Single, double or triple buffering
• 3D image effects combined with no exclusion conditions
• Sort independent anti-aliasing
• Hardware dithering including dithering of LUT textures

Video and multimedia features

• Planar YUV support
• Multiple YUV pixel formats
• Independent front-and back-end scalars
• Supports overlay modes a high resolution
• Independent X and Y scaling with high-quality 12-tap scaling filter
• 4-tap horizontal
• 3-tap vertical
• High-quality DVD, MPEG-2 and video playback with DVDMax
• Full-screen output to secondary display independent of primary display
• Non-scaled full-screen output of native forma DVD and video to TV
• Full-hardware subpicture support and blending for high-quality DVD playback
• Aspect ratio conversion supported for proper display of 4:3 and 16:9 content
• AGP 4X bus mastering of video data
• Independent hardware color controls for video overlay
• Hardware color space conversion
• Support for unlimited number of simultaneous video windows and sprites
• Parallelized video input and output port
• Support for HDTV
• HD playback support of up to 1080i (1920 x 1080)
• HD0 input support of up to 720p (1280 x 720)
• User-controllable flicker filter, up to 6 lines
• Underscan and overscan capabilities
• Support for picture-in-picture and multiple video windows
• Full WDM support for video capture
• Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) support
• Unique Motion Video Rendering (MVR) architecture
• Native support for non-power-of-2 textures
• Facilitates preservation of 16:9 aspect ratio when texture mapping video s reams
• Mip-map non-power-of-2 texture
• Multiple YUV source texture formats for video stream texture mapping
• Video editing architecture enables real-time A/B roll capability

Compatibility

• Matrox Unified Drivers
• Operating systems
• Windows® XP Professional and Home
• Windows 2000
• Windows 98,Windows 95 and Windows Me
• Windows NT® 4.0
• Linux
• Platforms
• X86, X86-64 and IA-64 ™compatible
• AMD ®3Dnow!™, MMX ™,and Intel SSE ™&SSE2 ™optimized
• AGP 4X, 2X, 1X compliant
• Compliance
• DirectX 8.0 and lower
• WinLogo 2.0 & WinLogo 1.1 compliant
• Microsoft DirectShow and Broadcast PC
• OpenGL
• WDM and VMR

The Specifications Spin

Well, the hardware is certainly no slouch, but what does this mean to you? The chipset can only support up to 32 MB of RAM onboard, and the memory pathways are only 64 bits wide, so the performance will be limited by memory bandwidth. Matrox hasn't really designed this card to be a 3D monster, however, so they took certain sacrifices in the design of the card to decrease costs and improve 2D performance in other areas. Nonetheless, the chip supports hardware-accelerated Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping, Vertex Skinning, a 32-bit Z-buffer, and trilinear and anisotropic texture mapping. However, the chip is clearly lacking hardware texturing and lighting. It may not be the fastest chip on the market, but she at least draws very pretty pictures.

Matrox also claims to have the industry's best DVD decoding with DVDmax. This will be a pretty strong comment in today's market however, with Matrox's arch-nemesis ATI making beautiful waves with its Radeon chipset. Matrox will have some pretty big shoes to fill with a statement like this, and I'm excited to see what Matrox has to offer us.

Matrox's key field has always been excellent 2D. What's that, you ask? Well, Matrox's cards have always been known to have superior image quality in even the highest of resolutions at 32-bit color. What's more, the G550 is twice as powerful, being able to supply the same image quality to two different monitors at the same time. Matrox was first to market with a multi-monitor solution, and the concept has since been "innovated" by other companies, such as NVIDIA and its TwinView. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, of course, and hopefully more cards in the future will not only implement this feature, but make indisposable use of it as well.

One final note of comment on these specifications is the operating system support. While newer cards support newer OSes, they often neglect support for legacy operating systems, since, obviously, nobody uses them anymore. Businesses don't always have this option, however. Sometimes you have that one key application that makes your entire department come together, and it just won't work in Windows 98. The corporate system wins out again, with a nex-gen card that still respects the needs of businesses. Matrox has also committed Linux driver support with the G550, which is clearly an excellent step. One is hopeful, of course, that Matrox will work together with its customers in developing open-source drivers, but even if not, giving official support for Linux demonstrates Matrox's commitment to corporate users who wish to implement Linux on their work systems. If Matrox were to take advantage of this opportunity with an open market, they could also tweak their drivers and deliver support for Solaris, IRIX, and other flavors of everyone's favorite non-Microsoft OS.

The heart of the matter - Matrox's G550 video processor

Headcasting

Matrox has always been about radical innovation, despite its few successes in the retail market. Today, following the announcement of Matrox's new graphics chipset, the G550, Matrox once again courts the finicky wiles of consumers and businesses by introducing an interesting new feature called Headcasting.

Digimask technology is used to create facial textures for a 3D model from everyday photographs.

Headcasting is a new technology designed to supplement videoconferencing over IP technologies by easing bandwidth requirements. Instead of using video compression like most videoconferencing setups do, Headcasting uses the idle 3D acceleration power lying within the graphics card, using it to create an animated avatar on the screen. The "rendered head" uses vertex skinning, a technology introduced by ATI's Radeon accelerators, to convey realistic facial motions and expressions. Coupling this with an adaptive voice-recognition technology, the computer can determine mouth positioning for various phonetic sounds, and accurately depict that on the modeled face. Finally, using two photographed images of a persons face (Frontal and side-view), the computer makes a set of textures and maps it onto the face, creating a 3D-rendered head resembling your own that moves as you speak.

LIPSinc technology powers the audio syncing behind Headcasting.

The end result is a virtual face that mimics your own movements and impressions as if you were using a videoconferencing kit. There are, of course, some expressions which voice alone cannot depict (Raising an eyebrow, blinking, glare), but the software can be modeled to interpret potential expressions based on rising and falling voice levels, as well as inflection. Matrox, being a business-oriented company, is primarily pitching this to businesses as an alternative to videoconferencing, although it has viability in the home market for home users who want to talk to their friends but can't do videoconferencing over dialup. By removing the video data from the transmission and sending only audio, keeping a live transmission up over 56K is made much more feasible, with fewer pops and lags than would normally be had when using videoconferencing.

Virtual Presenter provides an automated method for an avatar to deliver a presentation while being controlled and narrated remotely.

Matrox also pitches Headcasting as being a way to convey information without a physical presence. The scenario is this: Imagine if you were giving a presentation at work, but couldn't be there to present it due to being overseas. You get connected to the Internet, and then connect to a remote computer set up in the conference room, where your avatar gives your presentation for you as you conduct the meeting in PowerPoint.

The Gospel According To Gamers

Unfortunately, these features are of little consequence to most gamers. Furthermore, from the appearance of the pictures given by Matrox, the skinning of the 3D faces from the photographs could use some work. Of course, since the software is still in development, the skinning software has plenty of time to change by the time Matrox releases the G550 in 3Q 2001. So far, the features mentioned cater mostly to the savvy businessman, but how do they relate to gamers?

Imagine the MMORPG of the future, with well-balanced gameplay and interactivity. You encounter a trader in town and he shouts you a greeting into his mic. You see his facial expression change and his mouth move as he speaks. You tell him that you've finally learned how to dupe items, and you see him raise an eyebrow. Suddenly you see him start to laugh, and that's when he tells you: He's a GM, and your account is going to be suspended!

The G550 video card with DB-15 VGA and DVI connectors

It may seem pitiful, but the technology affords many different applications. Console game designers can easily make multi-language games with characters whose lip movements sync no matter what language track gets played. Online chat rooms similar to Sierra's old ImagiNation Network and other internet worlds would be made that much more immersive, as your avatars would have realistic facial motions with their speaking. Game designers would also be able to make these games more easily, due to the reduced amount of programming needed to control the facial motions manually, as done in Metal Gear Solid 2.

The current estimated price of the card is slated to be $125, so it becomes an even more attractive part for business-class PC, as well as a part for a home-office PC or a front-room entertainment server. The chip is also pin-compatible with Matrox's G400 and G450 processors, meaning that they can re-use a lot of their old equipment and facilities to save costs, and save headaches on the part of current integration customers. This may also attract them some new business from newer customers that have long favored ATI's chipset, such as Dell and Gateway. Matrox will have to continue to innovate to compete with the integrated-chipset market, however, with Intel and S3/VIA making inroads in the motherboard market with their integrated graphics subsystems.

In the end, the card itself doesn't present much in the way of innovation, but the chipset bears the markings of a new technology which, following some further development, could change the way you play your games.

Re-Printed From SLCentral