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Parhelia-512 lures NVidia, ATI fans with greater speed and more colors.
Targeting graphics professionals who prefer quality to raw performance, Matrox is unveiling its new Parhelia-512 graphics processing unit, sporting 80 million transistors. The chip, Matrox's first major GPU overhaul in three years, is expected to be available in Matrox graphics cards by this summer.
"We're not looking to compete with NVidia and ATI directly," says Liv Stewart, a Matrox spokesperson. NVidia's GeForce4 and ATI's Radeon 8500 probably offer more sheer performance, but the Parhelia- 512 will offer the best overall quality of graphics, she says.
Color Burst
The Parhelia-512 will offer top-notch quality through new technologies as well as improvements to existing ones, Stewart says. For example, the chip supports what Matrox claims is the first true 10-bit-per-color channel support. That means it can display over 1 billion colors, compared with the current high of 16.7 million colors. Improved color channel support will create more variation in shadows and dark colors, and text will be more readable, says Dan Wood, Matrox vice president of technical marketing.
Another new technology is the chip's 16X Fragment Antialiasing (FAA-16x). Antialiasing removes...