Matrox Parhelia Benchmarks and Review

Crankshaft writes "Matrox Parhelia boards are due to hit retail shelves by the end of the month. Cards have been sent out and the benchmarks are up, showing the card's strengths and weaknesses. You want great looking Anti-Aliasing? The Parhelia is for you. You want killer frame rates? You might have to look elsewhere."

Comments

Tom also has a review of it

[BitchAss]

It says about the same thing that the above review does. Here's the link

More reviews

[InnereNacht]

Here:http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i =1645

Here:http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/02 06 25/index.html

And here:http://www.theinquirer.net/24060221.htm

Re:More reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

Please people, use html. Slashdot mangels long URLs, I'm sure most people would like to just point and click instead of select-copy-paste-edit-enter.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1645

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020625/in dex.html

http://www.theinquirer.net/24060221.htm

Links to other articles

[dat00ket]

Here are links to the articles at a few other sites that have reviews up:

Anandtech

Tom's Hardware

Tech Report

Extreme Tech

Anandtech looked at UT 2003

[pm]

The review at Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com) uses the latest demo from Unreal Tournament 2003 as one of the core benchmarks. It didn't make much of a difference. In the review, the Parhelia scored about as well as Radeon 8500LE.

In the review Anand attributed it to three things. Quoting from Anand's review:

1) Low GPU Clock (220MHz vs. 250 - 300MHz)
2) Sub optimized drivers
3) A lack of serious occlusion culling technology

Whatever the reasons, the Parhelia didn't score well on one of more anticipated and graphically intensive games that will be released in the near future.

Re:uhh..

[blink3478]

The triple-headed desktop is probably the most understated feature of this card. Talk to anyone that deals with graphics day-to-day - 3d animators, video editors, graphic designers, and the extra screen real-estate is a big boost in productivity.

Here's a few triple screenshots from Matrox's site. and I believe that odd three-panel monitor is from Panoram Tech.

D

Re:Matrox cards always look good on paper

[GeckoX]

1: did you say beta? I think I heard beta...now why were you assuming that beta drivers would do it for you?

2: Matrox has NEVER promoted their current cards as 3D cards, who told you to buy one for gaming? Give them shit, not matrox.

3: From PERSONAL experience, Matrox has traditionally supplied the most stable drivers with the most features RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX!!! You can go pull an old G400 card off the shelf of some store room, plug it in, install the drivers and it'll be as stable as if you went and downloaded their latest (Obviously you'd have to to get support for the newer OS's but the point is valid)

4: THERE IS ABSULUTELY NOTHING DRIVERS CAN DO TO ADD FUNCTIONALITY THAT DOESN'T ALREADY EXIST IN THE HARDWARE ITSELF!!!

I think you'd find that if you had taken the time to properly inform yourself on your purchase, you would have avoided this problem. I have been using a matrox G450 dual monitor card for over 2 years at work, never once have I wanted to change it and get another card, never once have I had any problems of any sort. At home however, where I do my gaming, you certainly won't find any matrox cards. (A great big stack of various s3, ati and nvidia cards, but nary a matrox in sight.)

In conclusion, please don't slam a very good company for your own failure to be an informed consumer.

Re:uhh..

[GeckoX]

Have you tried multi-monitor offerings from ATI and nVidia?

I own latest/greates examples of both and I'm here to personally tell you that it is still very much a Matrox only game, which just had the ante uped.

ATI's and nVidia's feeble attempts at multi-monitor support are a nice try at best, and a total fucking insult at worst.

Re:Short-sighted

[agallagh42]

Yes you can. On a non-interlaced screen, framerate is noticeable up to 60ish. I saw a great little demo with little white cubes sliding across the screen. The one going at 30 fps looked very bad, and the one at 60 was nice and smooth. It's when the framerate goes beyond the refresh rate of the monitor that it gets silly...

Re:ogl2.0 standard isnt even frozen ..

[afidel]

i mean, play a game written for the gf3 on a gf4 system. its slower then on a gf4 because the gf4 is lacking the features the gf3 has so it has to take a non optimal path.

Only if you are stupid and buy into the gf4MX line, if you get a gf4Ti then you have all the capabilities of a gf3 and more so no game which is optimized for the gf3 feature set would run slower. By the way no game these days is written for a specific card, some design decisions may be swayed as to what max quality features to support based on a particular cards capabilities, but they should run on any card that meets either opengl1.2 or D3D(version X where X>=7) specs.