ExtremeTech
by Brock Lithgow
4/1/2008
Matrox Stuns Industry With High-Performance GPU
The world of discrete graphics just got a lot hotter! Matrox, a company known for high-end graphics hardware, first released the Parhelia many years ago. It turned out to be a power-hungry quixotic part that was quickly made obsolete by ATI's 9700 Radeon. Since that time, the GPU has been repackaged and recycled with die-shrinks, and even feature reductions to keep costs and prices down. The part seemed destined for obscurity.
What changed?
Matrox received one billion dollars of investment capital from a Japanese publisher intent on taking the market away from ATI and Nvidia. The funds have been largely secret until now, and a large engineering team has been working feverishly to create a part that could rival, and even surpass, the top offerings of the competition.
Intel cut deal with Matrox and the company will be the first to market a 45 nanometer GPU chip! Not only does this cutting edge Intel technology help keep power consumption down and clock speeds up, the new Matrox chip has twice the transistors of the chip used in the Nvidia 9800GTX! You will see in upcoming benchmark screenshots that the performance is as much as two and a half times greater as well. Crysis has just gotten a lot tamer!
?
Facebook
Twitter