Matrox Mystique's position in the
mainstream market
|
Matrox Mystique's technical advantages Matrox Mystique provides the ideal all-in-one solution for mainstream business, home office, PC games, entertainment and multimedia users with a fast 3D texture mapping engine, the fastest 64-bit GUI, high-performance video, and no-compromise VGA. Matrox Mystique also provides stable and ergonomic drivers, and the most versatile video upgrade path for hardware MPEG, live video capture, video out to television, TV-tuning and more. Mystique's competitive advantages and key markets For the Home office and business user - Apart from a low price, the Home Office/ business user is mostly interested in fast 2D acceleration, good video playback, and upgradability with additional memory or video add-ons when choosing a graphics accelerator. Mystique's main competitors in this field are ATI and Virge-based boards, which offer reasonable 2D performance. Rendition and 3Dfx based boards, on the other hand, do not offer the 2D or video performance nor the upgrade flexibility necessary to be a viable solution for this market. While ATI and Virge's 2D performance is good, it does not equal the Mystique's. In addition, the boards do not offer the wide variety of video options nor the amount of features available from Mystique, nor the fast 3D acceleration which is perceived as a future need for this market. |
Matrox | Rendition | 3Dfx | Virge | ATI 3D Rage | |
Fast Windows | yes
43M WinMarks |
no | no | yes
41M WinMarks |
average
32M WinMarks |
Fast video playback | yes | no | no | average | average |
Upgradability (video and memory) | yes | no | no | yes | yes |
For the Family PC user - The Family PC user demands fast 2D, DOS
and 3D performance, as well as full motion, quality video playback, all at an
affordable cost. Therefore, the same competitors as the Home Office users apply
to this market. Again, 2D performance for ATI and Virge-based boards does not
equal the Mystique's. Their DOS and 3D performance also lags far behind and
affects the Family PC's game-play performance. Mystique offers a variety of
video add-ons for high quality hardware MPEG, live video capture, video out to
television and a TV-tuner which are not available with other products. |
Matrox | Rendition | 3Dfx | Virge | ATI 3D Rage | |
Fast Windows | yes | no | no | yes | average |
Fast 3D | yes | yes | yes | no | no |
Fast DOS | yes | no | no | no | no |
Fast video playback | yes | no | no | average | average |
Upgradability (video and memory) | yes | no | no | no | yes |
For the Gamer - In general, the Gamer is mostly interested in the
graphics board's performance in 3D, as well as its speed under DOS for new
titles and legacy games. GUI performance and video playback are also
requirements for the gamer, who might use these functions for DirectDraw games.
Mystique's main competition in the games market is therefore 3Dfx and
Rendition-based accelerators, which both deliver fast 3D performance. ATI and
Virge based boards, on the other hand, do not offer fast 3D nor fast DOS
performance, and are consequently not seen as Matrox competition in the gaming
market. While 3Dfx's processor offers a wide range of 3D features and fast 3D rendering, boards based on this chip operate in an analog pass-through mode. This forces the user to have another graphics board in the system in order to display any graphical information on the desktop. This additional requirement, combined with the fact that most boards based on the 3Dfx chip will probably come standard with 4 MB of RAM, translates in a costly graphics subsystem. Rendition-based boards offer a good range of 3D features and 3D rendering performance. However, Rendition's 2D and VGA performance is poor, which is unacceptable for gamers who are still concerned about DOS performance. In addition, most boards based on this chip come standard with 4MB, however the maximum resolution is limited to 800 x 600 in true color, which is a 2MB resolution. Hence, the extra 2MB are not being used for anything but a z-buffer and texture cache. |
Matrox | Rendition | 3Dfx | Virge | ATI 3D Rage | |
Fast 3D | yes | yes | yes | no | no |
Fast DOS | yes | no | no (only with separate board) | no | no |
Fast Windows* | yes | no | no (only with separate board) | yes | average |
For the PC Enthusiast - PC Enthusiast's primary demands are high
performance in 3D, DOS, GUI and video playback. This user wants the best of
everything, therefore the most likely competitor to Mystique in this market
would be 3D f/x-based boards coupled with a very fast 2D board such as the
Matrox Millennium. Mystique's advantage is its lower cost and the fact that it
offers a much wider range of video upgrade solutions. |
Matrox | Rendition | 3Dfx | Virge | ATI 3D Rage | |
Fast Windows | yes | no | no | yes | average |
Fast 3D | yes | yes | yes | no | no |
Fast DOS | yes | no | no | no | no |
Fast video playback | yes | no | no | average | average |
Upgradability (video and memory) | yes | no | no | yes | yes |
Matrox Mystique's position in the 3D
Games market
|
Basic requirements for 3D hardware acceleration A growing variety of 3D technologies are being introduced, each giving emphasis to different aspects of 3D acceleration. Some confusion and concerns have raised over what features are required when evaluating the 3D capabilities of a hardware accelerator compared to features that might not be deemed as essential. Based on Microsoft's Direct3D specifications, in order for a 3D title to benefit from hardware acceleration, the following base-line requirements have to be present: |
Basic 3D features | |
| perspective correct texture mapping - without this, the game would be distorted by resulting artifacts |
| point sampling - the most common way to scale a texture to fit a 3D polygon |
| high resolutions (512 x 420 and 640 x 400/480) at 16-bit color depths - lower resolutions often would not require hardware acceleration |
| hardware lighting (for Gouraud shading) - without this, basic 3D rendering cannot be performed |
| double-buffering - without this function animation of 3D scenes cannot be done |
Optional features: | |
| fogging: this is a visual trick only used in some games to clip extra polygons (see below for details) |
| bi-linear filtering: this technique can be used to improve quality of low-resolution textures (see details below) |
| mip-mapping - optional quality-improving technique (see "Anatomy of a 3D graphics accelerator") |
| alpha blending- optional quality-improving technique (see "Anatomy of a 3D graphics accelerator") |
| etc |
The majority of games written to the Direct3D specification will only
assume the presence of the baseline requirements, which it needs in order to
accelerate 3D to an acceptable performance level. Any optional feature in the
game will be turned off if not detected in hardware by the game or if using
these features in hardware translates into a major performance hit (some games
leave it up to the end user to enable or disable features in order to optimize
performance.) "While bi-linear filtering, alpha-blending, and fogging are nice quality enhancements, performance and the ability to run on as many systems as possible is the most important thing. Any competent developer should be scaling their games to take advantage of these features, but not require them. It is in their interest to run on as many 3D accelerators as possible." - Andrew Johnston, President, WizBang! Software Productions, Inc. (Developers of HyperBlade from Activision) |
Understanding Fogging and Filtering | |
Q: | What is Fogging? |
A: | Fogging is a trick used in some software titles to do depth-cueing. When
drawing a 3D scene, the game will decide through clipping planes which polygons
are too far or out of the scene so as not to draw unnecessary polygons. There
are right, left, top, bottom, front and back clipping planes. The volume made by
the six of these planes is called the frustum and is what makes up the scene.
The top, bottom, right and left planes are determined by the edges of the
screen, the front clipping plane decides what is behind the viewer, and rejects
it. The back clipping plane decides at what distance to stop drawing the scene,
since it is necessary to stop drawing the scene in front of the viewer at some
point to keep the polygon count at a reasonable number. In some titles, the
player might see the scene being "built-up" on the horizon, which is
caused by the back clipping plane moving along with the user's viewpoint.
Fogging fades the background to a specified color over distance, therefore "hiding"
the clipping effect in a way that might look more natural to the human eye. |
Q: | Do all titles need fogging? |
A: | No. Many titles are designed in such a way that you can never see the
'horizon', either because they are taking place indoors or the horizon is
blocked by a large object (such as a range of mountains) In the case of games
that take place indoors (such as Quake), the scenes are rendered in such a way
that the line of sight never goes beyond a certain distance before hitting a
wall. Other games do not require a change in scenery (such as Virtua Fighter),
therefore the background polygons and textures never change, requiring less
calculations. |
Q: | Are there other tricks that can be done to achieve similar effects to fogging? |
A: | Yes. One thing that can be done is depth cued lighting. This means varying
the intensity of the lighting of polygons in the scene so the scene fades to
black in the background (as seen in Scorched Planet). This is essentially a fade
to black, instead of a fade to white in the case of fogging. With both fogging or depth-cued lighting, the software must be written to use these clipping methods. |
Q: | Will titles not run on Mystique because it does not support fogging? |
A: | This is unlikely. Most developers will build their applications to use
whatever features are available in hardware and either disable, work around or
emulate any other optional ones. |
Q: | What is bi-linear filtering? |
A: | Bi-linear filtering is a technique used to minimize the effects of
upscaling low resolution source textures. Ideally, 3D games would use very high
resolution, 24-bit color texture maps, which would result in high quality 3D
scenes. However, since most graphics accelerators require textures to be stored
in off-screen memory to be rendered, using such large sized textures would be
impossible, or the game would be limited to very few textures. Essentially, the
textures are reduced to a low resolution (low quality), and when they are scaled
up to fit on a large polygon, the individual pixels of the source texture map
turn into large blocky artifacts. Bi-linear filtering is an attempt to reduce
this loss of quality by 'blurring' or 'smoothing' the pixels. |
Q: | Wouldn't it be better to have higher quality texture maps to begin with? |
A: | Definitely. Most developers have traditionally used a texture compression
method, or palletized textures, to reduce the space used by each texture by
assigning palettes of colors, or CLUTs, to each texture. These texture formats,
which are supported by Direct 3D, are built into the Matrox Mystique's hardware,
allowing the game developer to use higher resolution textures and fit them in
the same memory space as a lower resolution 16-bit texture. Using these higher
resolution textures results in much higher quality scenes and eliminate the need
to filter the resulting output. |
Q: | Can we see proof of this? |
A: | If you look at different versions of Mechwarrior2, you will see that the
Matrox version uses modified artwork on the ground. These new textures use
CLUT8 format instead of 16-bit, but double the resolution, which results in a
much smoother image than in other versions of the game. |
Q: | Will a lot of titles do this? |
A: | Some developers already use CLUT textures in their games and because of the support for this technique under Direct 3D, it is reasonable to assume most of them will take advantage of this format in the future. |
Game Developers' position on Matrox
Mystique
|
"The Matrox Mystique is an impressive enhancement to our 3D gaming
engine. Its raw rendering performance and advanced architecture combine to
provide immense acceleration to MechWarrior® 2." - Howard Marks,
Executive vice president, Activision Studios. "Destruction Derby II runs very well on the Matrox Mystique. The Mystique's powerful 3D engine delivers the full arcade experience of Destruction Derby II to today's PC gamers." - Martin Edmondson Head of Reflections, developers of Destruction Derby II. "By taking advantage of Microsoft's Direct 3D technology, Radical Entertainment Ltd. titles: NHL PowerPlay, The Divide: Enemies Within, and Independence Day, will be able to benefit from the use of superior 3D hardware like that of the Matrox Mystique," says Ian Wilkinson, President and CEO of Vancouver's Radical Entertainment Ltd. "What this means to consumers is outstanding 3D graphics performance in our games that will blow away hard-core gamers." "Matrox's Mystique is badger-twistingly fast. Its 2D engine is fast. Its 3D engine is fast. Even its simple DOS performance goes like a piano down a flight of stairs. But in the polygons-per-second race in which the Mystique does very well, most card vendors sacrifice analog fidelity. Unlike other 3D cards, Matrox's digital-to-analog process produces the most beautiful image my Trinitron has ever been fed. By contrast, the otherwise speedy Diamond Edge produces a dismal image, to say nothing of its laughable, CGA-esque DOS performance. The Mystique is so good that despite office ridicule, I wouldn't remove it from my system even when the Matrox alpha drivers were crashing it every 15 minutes. Now that they're stable, why would I choose another?" - Chris Lowery, Thinkfish Productions. "Using Microsoft's Direct3D interface, Kinesoft Development will be looking to maximize the potential of next generation 3D hardware such as the Matrox Mystique," says Peter Sills, CEO of Kinesoft Development Corp. "We are also very impressed at the level of price/performance of the Mystique, as it will offer our users incredible 3D experiences for a very reasonable cost." "C-Labs is very excited to design products targeting the Matrox Mystique, " says Chris Muench, Software Engineer at C-Labs Inc. "Its performance levels and innovative architecture are a good match to our advanced software architecture, and the results are going to be out of this world." "The Matrox Mystique is an awesome 3D games accelerator, whose advanced rendering functionality is being fully harnessed in upcoming hits from Criterion Studios. Criterion believes that with the Matrox Mystique, Matrox has hit upon a winning architecture whose combination of power, ease of development and likely market share represent a platform that game developers cannot afford to ignore." - Mike King, VP of Marketing at Criterion Studios. "Matrox Mystique appears to do a terrific job of satisfying the needs of the serious game player by delivering high frame rates at high resolution and with high levels of realism. The overall result is a very compelling entertainment experience which should really excite game players." - David Kaemmer, VP of Technology at Papyrus Design Group. "Now THIS is how 3D hardware is supposed to perform!" - Eric Gregory, Protozoa. "The first time we at OT Sports ran Monday Night Football with the Matrox Mystique card, our jaws just dropped. We had always said that new 3D hardware would really show our game at its best, but we couldn't believe how good the Mystique made us look."- Doug Whatley, Technical Director, OT Sports. "Matrox's excellent performance, and support for DirectDraw and Direct3D, gives users a highly compelling game experience with state of the art DirectX games like those from Microsoft."- Stephen McGill, Consumer Product Manager, Microsoft UK. |
Some developer contacts: | |
Andrew Johnston
President, Wizbang Software Tel: 206-236-9912 email: ajohnston@wizbang.com |
Doug Whatley
Technical Director, OT Sports Tel: 410-771-8577 email: dwhatley@OTSports.com |
Practical tips to testing 3D hardware with Direct3D Testing the performance of 3D graphics accelerators by running Direct 3D games requires that certain criteria be observed. The following guidelines ensure accurate and representative test results. 1. 3D hardware acceleration on/off Some titles take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration, but some 3D titles that state they are based on DirectX may just be using DirectDraw, which means they would not take advantage of 3D hardware. Make sure the title uses Direct3D. Even though it uses Direct3D, a title may not take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration. A title may opt to just use the Direct3D software renderer rather than go to the trouble of checking what hardware is in the machine, etc. (An example of this is the trial version of Hyperblade from Activision.) This may have been done in a beta version of a game in order to reduce bug counts or make a tight deadline for release, but most Direct 3D games will be written to take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration. Finally, for those games that do take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration, make sure the game is using it: in some cases, the game will detect that the 3D hardware is there and us it, in other cases, the hardware acceleration must be set via a switch (as in Monster Truck Madness, or Hellbender). 2. Resolution/color depth Some games may require a certain resolution or color depth in order to take advantage of 3D acceleration. Some will support several resolutions but perform differently in each. Most games will have a low resolution mode, and some will let you use it with 3D hardware. This is somewhat pointless, since most of today's software renderers can do a decent job at low resolutions. The reason for 3D hardware acceleration is to be able to gain that increase in resolution from 320x200 to 640x480 with fast 3D rendering. The initial desktop resolution and color mode may or may not determine whether the game can take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration. For games that run full screen, this will not be a problem, since DirectX initializes the display to the requested size and depth. For games that run in windowed mode, it may be necessary to lower the desktop resolution and color depth in order to take advantage of hardware. 3. Cockpits/Dashboards on/off While in some games, the cockpit/dashboard/control panel/ may have some useful information, the main reason to have these in most games is to reduce the total number of 3D pixels that must be rendered in order to maximize performance (the performance difference would be mostly apparent if the game were running in software only). Generally, switching these off, and going to a full screen view, results in a more immersive gaming experience, and since the entire screen is being rendered, it requires more processing from the 3D accelerator. Therefore, running the 3D image at full screen will be a better indicator of the 3D graphics boards' capabilities. 4. Perspective correction on/off Some titles may have an option to disable perspective correction. On some cards, this may result in a slight performance increase. However, perspective correction is essential to maintaining a realistic looking 3D scene, and therefore should always be enabled when testing. |
3D Testing Recommendations When trying to judge the relative performance of different 3D boards, the use of a standard measure or benchmark can prove very useful. There are a number of different ways to benchmark the various 3D boards that exist on the market currently. 3D testing may either be based on a real-world application such as a game or on a benchmark utility such as the Microsoft Tunnel application. 1) Application based testing The first thing to do when testing application performance is to ensure that the same application(s) is used on all of the different cards. Comparing the way that one application looks on one card versus the way that a different application or version of the same application looks on the other does not provide a meaningful measurement of each boards' capabilities. For an application based test to be relevant, all the sound/joystick/resolution/quality settings should be identical when each card is tested and the same levels and game sequence should be used in each case. One potential problem when testing performance using a game is that many games will not display an actual frame rate on the screen. An accurate frame rate is by far the best way to quantify performance, and estimating frame rates empirically can prove to be a very difficult and inaccurate measurement. It is therefore strongly recommended to test with a game that can display a frame rate. 2) 3D benchmark recommendations There are typically two different bottlenecks to 3D acceleration in hardware; the maximum triangle rate and the maximum rendering rate, measured in texels per second. The maximum triangle rate is best tested by drawing thousands of small triangles on the screen, while the maximum rendering rate is best tested by drawing a small number of large triangles. Both numbers are important in understanding how an accelerator will perform in real world applications. Using a spinning object test such as the Microsoft Twist test to measure the peak rendering performance of hardware does not effectively stress the hardware capabilities, since only a small number of pixels are being rendered at a time. One way to make such a test more effective would be to add a simple textured backdrop to the scene such as a sky and ground or wall, and give it some motion. This would ensure that every part of the image is being rendered and texture mapped continually - not just blitted. Although calculating the maximum pixel fill performance of a graphics card and the maximum triangle rate is important, a real-world game test still provides a better indication of true 3D performance. 3) Perspective correction One further consideration is to ensure that perspective correction is being applied. In the example above, a "moving" backdrop would be perpendicular to the viewers' eyes (like standing in front of a wall and looking at it head on), and this type of view has no perspective to it. Some graphics engine do not actually support true perspective correction (which is required by all objects that are not perpendicular to the viewer's perspective), but instead support affine texturing. Affine texturing produces 'warping errors' when used to map textures onto an object that requires perspective. The more perspective is required (slant from viewer and depth in the scene) and the larger the object is, the more apparent these warping errors would be. Card manufacturers who use affine texturing instead of true perspective correction attempt to minimize the warping errors produced by their affine texturing by breaking up a large triangle into a large number of smaller triangles and then performing the affine texturing on these smaller triangles. While this minimizes the warping errors due to affine texturing, it results in a significant hit in performance. Therefore, adding a backdrop which remains perpendicular to the viewer's perspective in the test mentioned above would not accurately show the difference in speed between hardware which performs true perspective correction and hardware which uses affine texturing. A simple way to account for peak rendering performance while stressing perspective correction capabilities would be to enclose the "plus" sign in the Twist test inside of a large open 3D box. The camera or viewer's position would be inside the box looking down at the rotating plus sign from the top, through the open side. The box itself could be rotating around the axis of the camera in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. The point of view would be inside the box, so that the walls of the box cover the camera's periphery. Of course the inside of the box could be nicely texture mapped. This way, every pixel would need to be perspectively corrected and rendered at every frame, and the peak pixel fill performance of the hardware would be effectively stressed. Creating this more effective test only requires the addition of 5 faces of a box (or 10 triangles) with very simple motion - yet this simple change adds a lot to the significance of the test. 4) CPU Bandwidth A test which measures how much CPU time is left for game play computing once a card has reached its maximum frame rate can also be and interesting one. This measurement is important because it is difficult for any test to accurately reflect the various CPU loads and mixes of polygon numbers and sizes that will be required from one game to another and between two frames. Measuring the amount of CPU bandwidth available once hardware rendering becomes the bottleneck provides an indication of how much additional information could be handled simultaneously by the system. In order for this test to be representative, it should stress the hardware as much as a real world game would. Most 3D game and multimedia titles on the market today use a limited amount of polygons on the screen - usually less than 2000 polygons at a time, and most of the time less than 1000. Therefore such a CPU bandwidth test should use a sample game scene comprised of 1000 to 2000 polygons to reflect a real world situation. 5) Specific notes on a few 3D titles. 1 - Direct 3D titles Hellbender and Monster Truck Madness by Microsoft Make sure you are using the rev. 1.1 of the demo versions or 1.0 of the full version of the games when you test, since previous versions may have had hardware-related bugs. The demo versions can be downloaded at: http://www.microsoft.com/games/ Configuration - Hardware acceleration is enabled by going to the Options menu (ALT+O while in game), selecting graphics options, switching the resolution to 640x480, and setting the hardware acceleration flag. Performance - The performance of this title will depend on several options. Probably the most significant is whether the cockpit is on/off. The cockpit in both Hellbender and Monster Truck Madness is very large. This was done to make the software rendering performance acceptable. Game performance should be compared with the cockpit off (see notes in generalities above). Switching the cockpit off can be done by toggling the option on the same options menu as above, or by pressing the I key for Hellbender and the D key for Monster Truck Madness during the game. Hyperblade by Activision Note: There is currently a demo version on the Activision web site. This version is DirectDraw only, and does not take advantage of any 3D hardware. There are some betas in circulation that do take advantage of hardware. In these betas, you can display a frame rate by pressing Q to bring up the menu, selecting View, and then Display Frame Rate. Pressing Q again will return to the game. This option will be disabled in the full release of the game, and in some later betas. Microsoft Organic Art Anniversary screen saver This "package" of 23 screen savers was released by Microsoft for the anniversary of Windows 95. Ten of the screen savers use hardware acceleration, and can be distinguished by the fact that they do not leave a "trail" behind them. The screen saver can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/95saver.htm To try out any of the screen savers, right click on you desktop, click on Properties, and click on the Screen Saver tab. Select the MS Organic Art as the screen saver, and click the Settings button. From that point, in Preferences, click on the Hardware Acceleration check box, set the resolution to 640x480x16, click on Apply, and then click on the Playlist tab to select which ones will be played. In order to get stats about frame rate, etc. you go to the registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Computer Artworks/Organic Art/MS and change the value "ShowMemStats" from 0 to 1. Now when you enable captions in the saver config, you will get stats instead of the date and time. These will show, among other things, frames/s, triangles/s, whether the buffers are in VRAM or System RAM, and whether the renderer is hardware ("h/w") or software ("s/w"). Note there's a small performance hit associated with drawing the caption bar itself. 2) Other titles Note: It is preferable to test Direct 3D titles in order to ensure all boards are tested with the same application, therefore providing a more accurate comparison. However, the following are examples of direct ports that can also be used to get an indication of the boards' performance. MechWarrior 2 from Activision Since this game has been ported to a wide range of 3D cards, it could be a good test application for performance testing. Unfortunately there is no way to print out the frame rate of MW2 on screen, but the speed at which the 'sky' is scrolling across the top of the screen is directly related to the frame rate of the game, therefore a good indication of the hardware's rendering speed. Scorched Planet from Criterion Studios Demo versions of this game have been directly ported to 3D FX based boards as well as the Matrox Mystique. No frame rate counter is available in this game, but by flying around the screen at the maximum speed (by pressing the END key,) the user can get a feeling for the frame rate at which the game is running. |
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