Matrox Parhelia

**Bing Fung** · 18 June 2002, 23:06 Tuesday

Looking forward to this one....

Thanks for the update Paul!

:T

Bing

**SiliGoose** · 19 June 2002, 10:43 Wednesday

There's a cover-page article about it in the new MaximumPC. The "surround gaming" feature has me a little more than excited.

I need to figure out where to put the other two monitors.

-Sili

**Bing Fung** · 26 June 2002, 00:00 Wednesday

Anandtech does a review of Parhelia, as does a few other sites. The general consensus thus far is slight disappointment as it is slower than the GF4 and only faster that the Radeon 8500 in some areas, most times it's slower than those tow cards

I was really wanting more out of this release, but I guess there is always next year...

Read the review here

Bing

**JonMarsh** · 26 June 2002, 10:13 Wednesday

The current version of the Parhelia (with current drivers) is probably only for the person looking for absolute best 2D desktop video quality (a typical Matrox feature), which will be most apparent on larger CRT displays- desktop or otherwise.

So far, I haven't seen any published comments or evaluation on DVD playback quality.

It's also disturbing that to install the drivers for XP, you have to download the latest Windows UPDATE and it requires the .NET support- 8O non of which I'm wild about doing- it would be a hassle for my HTPC, which obvioiusly isn't on the 'net. This is just plain stupid, Matrox... :M

(was that a "flame" on my part? :E did mild mannered JonMarsh actually "flame" someone :?:

-Jon

Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

**SiliGoose** · 26 June 2002, 10:23 Wednesday

John Carmack's latest .plan update (6/25):

The Matrox Parhelia Report:

The executive summary is that the Parhelia will run Doom, but it is not performance competitive with Nvidia or ATI.

Driver issue remain, so it is not perfect yet, but I am confident that Matrox will resolve them.

The performance was really disappointing for the first 256 bit DDR card. I tried to set up a "poster child" case that would stress the memory subsystem above and beyond any driver or triangle level inefficiencies, but I was unable to get it to ever approach the performance of a GF4.

The basic hardware support is good, with fragment flexibility better than GF4 (but not as good as ATI 8500), but it just doesn't keep up in raw performance. With a die shrink, this chip could probably be a contender, but there are probably going to be other chips out by then that will completely eclipse this generation of products.

None of the special features will be really useful for Doom:

The 10 bit color framebuffer is nice, but Doom needs more than 2 bits of destination alpha when a card only has four texture units, so we can't use it.

Anti aliasing features are nice, but it isn't all that fast in minimum feature mode, so nobody is going to be turning on AA. The same goes for "surround gaming". While the framerate wouldn't be 1/3 the base, it would still probably be cut in half.

Displacement mapping. Sigh. I am disappointed that the industry is still pursuing any quad based approaches. Haven't we learned from the stellar success of 3DO, Saturn, and NV1 that quads really suck? In any case, we can't use any geometry amplification scheme (including ATI's truform) in conjunction with stencil shadow volumes.

There you have it. Matrox's only chance now is to release at a very low price. (which probably won't happen)

-Sili

**Bing Fung** · 26 June 2002, 11:36 Wednesday

Good points Jon, The DVD playback and implementaion could make it a niche specific card. The 2D image, well we all know that Matrox is king when it comes to that, however I think Nvidia and ATI have since caught up in that department as well.

Sili, once John Carmack has spoken, we know it's gospel.....

Bing

Matrox Parhelia

Matrox Parhelia

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