Of course not everyone will have a G550 in Matrox's vision of future e-commerce, but this shouldn't be too much of a stumbling block. The way Headcasting is being positioned only the creator has to have the G550 card (for real-time instances anyway). Users who are not on the Matrox G550 bandwagon can expect to see a lower definition rendering of the virtual head derived from software-based skinning. The application is driven by streaming audio so even users on 56K modems should be able to interact with Matrox's talking heads.

So popular is this CRM technology expected to be that Matrox have coined it Visual Online Commerce (VOC). The real test will be how the G550 stands up to existing solutions from nVida and ATI, as for the moment Matrox appear to by shying away from the gaming market entirely.

The G550

The G550 improves upon the G450 chipset by tackling 2D, 3D, DVD and Dualhead capabilities head on with integrated dual independent transmission minimized differential signaling transmitters (TDMS) that enable the chip to drive two fully independent digital flat panels. Additionally, the G550 integrates dual CRTC's, 360MHz Ultrasharp RAMDAC's and a TV encoder for PAL, NTSC, SECAM support.

On the 3D side of things, the G550 is capable of rendering two dual-textured pixels per clock using VCQ2 (Vibrant Colour Quality2) rendering architectures. The chip also supports single pass trilinear and anisotropic filtering. Also supported are: alpha blending, fogging, specular highlighting, environment mapped bump mapping (EMBM). The G550 video card will come with DVI and analog outputs, 32MB DDR memory and retail for $125USD.