Was surfing around Reactor Critical when I came accross this interesting news, which, prior to this post, was mentioned by iampedro in the Hardware Hangout forums.
This is what Reactor Critical had to say:
It has been a long time since we last heard from Matrox Graphics. As we know, their latest G550 chip resembles its G400 that is now 3 years old. However, during a number of weeks a lot of rumours has been circulating around the Internet about Matrox coming with a brand new GPU. At first we did not believe the information as the year before we also heard of G600/800/1000 and nothing actually happened. Fortunately, this time the rumours seems to represent the truth – Matrox Graphics is really preparing the new chip called G1000 also known as code-named Parhelia.
We received quite a lot of information from different sources (Thanks to all who contacted me!) and now will try to summarize the information about the upcoming GPU G1000 and a typical videocard based on it:
- 4 rendering pipelines with 4 TMU per each one;
- DirectX 9 support. It also includes Pixel Shaders and Vertex Shaders 2.0 as well as all the other features of the new API from Microsoft such as Displacement Mapping and increased to 40-bit color-depth. Since DirectX 9 shaders require more power compared to the previous versions, the 4 vertex shaders pipelines will be implemented in the chip.
- What is quite interesting, Matrox will introduce 512-bit 2D graphics core – a big leap forward in contrast to the modern graphics processors.
- A typical videocard will be a Millenium G1000 and it will include 256 MB of DDR SDRAM memory. As with the 3Dlabs` P10, 256-bit bus-width will be used.
- Of course, the GPU will have dual 400 MHz RAMDACs, support AGP 8X and other important features of a next-gen graphics processor.
We want you to keep in mind that although the announcement will take place on the 14th of May, the Millenium G1000 will only be available 1 – 2 month later. The price is being determined, but it should be relatively high.
Stay tuned and maybe we will tell you even more.