Matrox G1000 to be announced on the 14th? The honey unveiled!

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 should mention that the chip is quite big – about 80 – 90 million of transistors. However, the one should run pretty fast in order to acheive the highest level of perfomance.

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.

News source: Reactor Critical