Intervista con Matrox

GD: Matrox has always been held in high regard when it comes to 2D image quality. With the release of Parhelia, you're also targeting 3D image quality. How do you draw the line between good image quality and good 3D performance?

Kamran/Matrox
"We believe the minimum bar for good 3D performance is smooth game play. As long as the game play is smooth, the benefits of increasing the image quality outweigh any benefit of increasing performance. Lets get into a little more detail about what image quality really means.

Try running a Parhelia at 1024x768 with our unique new Fragment Anti-Aliasing-16x (FAA16x). You will easily notice that the quality of the edges is superior to that of other cards running at 1600x1200 with 4X FSAA. The fact is that one of key reasons to run games at high resolutions is to reduce aliasing artifacts. The higher the resolution of the edge pixels, the better the quality of the edges. Now, if you consider something that Matrox is calling the Effective Edge Resolution (EER) to determine effective edge quality, you'll see that FAA-16x at 1024x768 provides a greater EER ((1024x4) x (768x4) = 4096x3072) than 4X FSAA running at 1600 x1200 (((1600x2) x (1200x2) = 3200x2400). So in terms of edge quality, you will actually see better results with a Parhelia at 1024x768 than another card at 1600x1200... and the performance of Parhelia will be much higher in this case - in fact, it could even mean the difference between playable and unplayable levels of performance. Now, the only other reason to run at higher resolution is to improve texture detail. However, since most applications today do not provide greater than 1024x1024 textures, the difference in texture detail between resolutions is fairly minor to non-noticeable. In order to further reduce the gap in texture quality, you could even increase the resolution to 1280x1024 and enable anisotropic filtering for the case of Parhelia with FAA-16x. Then, try a side by side "pepsi challenge" to see if one can tell that the Parhelia is running at a lower resolution. If the overall quality difference is minor to non-noticeable (and better on the edges), why even run at a higher resolution? Also, note that the cost of FAA-16x actually gets lower as you increase the resolution. This is because for typical scenes, the ratio of edge pixels to interior pixels decreases as you up the resolution. Now compare this to 4X FSAA where the cost increases proportionately as you up the resolution. In fact, some cards cannot even support 4X FSAA at 1600 x1200.