The real kicker as far as Matrox is concerned is the
integration of their new Headcasting engine. Before we go into too much detail, lets explain what exactly this is. In Matrox's own words, "the Head Casting engine was designed specifically to accelerate the 3D rendering of high-resolution human facial animations over the internet." The G550 Headcasting Engine is a hardware implementation of a Vertex Shader for accelerated matrix palette skinning (MPS). It does this by improving on the 96 constant registers specified for by Direct X 8.0 to a total of 256. The 256 constant registers embedded in the G550 chip act in the same way as a cache, enabling the VOC (visual online
communication) animation data to be rendered more dynamically in real-time than would otherwise be possible.
FULL STORY @ PCSTATS (http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=733)
