Accelerated-X™ Summit Series
Graphics Hardware Supported

Xi Graphics has supported Matrox graphics cards since as far back as the introduction of the G series, around the mid to late nineties. Their cards have proven over the years to be a favorite with our customers who want high quality grahics, low power usage, and long production times.

Many, if not most, of our commercial customers have long time horizons, and often want to field systems that have several years of production life followed by another several years of service life in the field. The problems caused by fast obsolescence of graphics cards by ATI and Nvidia are usually not ecoomically worth the gains in graphics processing speeds and new graphics features to warrant a system redesign with the attendant changes in documentation, training, and spares provisioning.

Not only is the Matrox hardware supurb, the Matrox product line is well suited for system builders who have varied requirements, in that it is quite flexible and innovative, and seems to be targeted at serious systems rather than the consumer market, especially the gamers.

The Matrox cards that are supported in the current Summit Series are listed below, and a few are singled out for special attention because of some special features or capabilities.

For Xi Graphics to be able to develop hardware-accelerated graphics drivers for a graphics chip/card, the card/chip manufacturer must provide us (under NDA, of course) with full programming docementation of the hardware. For over a dozen years, Matrox has done just that, enabling the Summit Series to provide a broad range of support for many Matrox product over the yeas.

Comments: The hardware support for PseudoColor - a color lookup table, known as an LUT - is a performance advantage for some applications, e.g. Air Traffic Control which uses an 8-bit color plane as an overlay.

Matrox pioneered the use of "MultiHead" cards - more than one monitor port per graphics chip - and has pushed this concept throughout its product line. Some cards support 2, 3 or four monitors per chip. Using the four-head QID Pro card, one Xi Graphics customeer has constructed a huge interactive wall display system that has twelve of the cards in a single computer chassis to drive a 48-channel projector display that has over 70 million pixels. The fact that the Matrox cards are typically low power enables all of the cards to be in one box and not burn the house down.

Another Matrox innovation that we perticularly like is the "Remote Graphics Unit" which allows the graphics card, mouse, keyboard, and the audio to be located on a desk close to the monitor(s) which are a long distance from the display computer (located in an equipment room up to several hundred meters away. The Summit Series support for the RG-200 and RG-400 products is bundled with the products by Matrox, with Xi Graphics providing the SW maintenance directly to the customer.