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In the Forums... |
Posted: May 4, 2001 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen Top-notch Quality Matrox designs its own chips, manufacturers its own boards, and markets everything by itself. This strategy is a difficult to achieve as demonstrated by the late 3dfx but can also be rewarding. Matrox has the advantage in terms of getting what they need done, exactly the way they want it. Suppose you are a company that makes graphics processors, and you sell your chips to third party board makers. These board makers can pick and choose from a variety of components and the consumer will have no idea if those components are bad. These minor components can show off your chip as a true successor or a blatant failure. NVIDIA is saying that its GeForce2 chips had a killer 2D engine but a lot of the board makers used mid-grade quality filters that made the output look dull. Matrox doesn’t have this problem. It knows exactly what combination of components will give their graphics processor the best output. Features The following specs are the same as the Matrox G450, a card that I’ve already reviewed. Please take a look at it as I explain the bulk of the G450 series technology in that review. 0.18 micron technology 166MHz Core AGP 1X, 2X, 4X 360 MHz RAMDAC 32MB DDR memory 64-bit DDR/SDR external bus to frame buffer memory Support for OpenGL and DirectX 256-bit DualBus DualHead Display Vibrant Color Quality² rendering Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping UltraSharp DAC Integrated second RAMDAC Integrated TMDS transmitter Integrated TV encoder High-quality DVD playback Primary display resolution up to 2048x1536x32-bit Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic filtering Symmetric Rendering Architecture 32-bit Z-buffer including 8-bit stencil buffer The following are specification specific to the Marvel G450 eTV: Full-suite video editing High-quality DVD and video playback Web friendly MPEG-2 capture and playback Matrox eDualHead TV Out S-video and composite video input and output Timeshifting with picture-in-picture TV tuner with Personal Video Recorder Closed captioning (North America) Teletext browsing (Europe) |
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