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

Re:what am I missing about vid cards?

[GauteL]

Well a couple of points:

1. The noted fps is average, not worst case. The actually interesting part for gaming is worst case. If a gaming card gives you 150 fps average, you are mostly pretty sure that worst case is good enough. If a gaming card gives you 40 fps average, you have a bigger chance of hitting unacceptable frame rates. I'd like to see reviewers report worst case though
2. A 150 fps in todays games does not equal 150 fps in tomorrows games. This means that a a card generating very high frame rates are more future proof than a card that generates 90 fps, which shouldn't be noticably less than the above.

Matrox cards always look good on paper

[e40]

However, there are always problems:

1. The hardware never lives up.

2. Three words: drivers, drivers, drivers. Or, should I have just said "software, software, software"? Putting out beta drivers and leaving them out there for over a year without a final release is par for the course at Matrox. OpenGL promises, you say? Yeah, been there, done that.

I won't trust Matrox ever again. I was screwed by two generations of cards. Yeah, yeah, shame on me for trusting them a second time.

Re:Matrox cards always look good on paper

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

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

There post-G200 cards were certainly promoted as 3d cards. They came with lots of 3d games in their boxes. I'm not saying they were bad cards, but they were certainly sold as 3d cards.

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)

Speaking of ancient cards, it's worth noting that the nvidia detonator drivers are the very same for everything from TNT to Geforce 4, despite the very radical differences between them. No, the ones out of the box may not have been so great--but for likely all eternity you'll be able to download new, great ones, with lots of new features, which brings me to...

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

Man, how could you have a "great big stack" of video cards and honestly say something so contrary to reality? There's a whole lot of software in between your game and your graphics card. Obviously, by upgrading this software, you can get improvements in frame rate, quality, and yes, features. Like the time I downloaded the new nvidia driver and, suddenly, I had anti-aliasing. Like every time you I download a new DirectX SDK and look at all the demos--they do stuff previous versions could not do. Software and hardware have to work together to give you a good user experience.

Re:what am I missing about vid cards?

[MeepMeep]

You're right - there's not much point in having FPS exceed the refresh rate of your monitor. I think that quick spin-arounds may be slightly smoother, but it's pretty subjective - that's just the way it feels to me.

However, those refresh rates are an average over many different sorts of scenes and can drop much lower during intensive scenes - e.g. if you just walked into a rocket arena with 30 guys throwing rockets at each other with particles nice lighting and everything, that's when you probably won't be getting 150 FPS anymore. That's when you really need those FPS.

Also, most people want a bit of headroom for future games.

As well, some people want more quality - better lighting, more polys, etc. If your card can do 150 FPS without anti-aliasing, maybe it can do 85 FPS with funky lighting and AA on (just an example).

However, your original point is correct - excess frame rate beyond your monitor's refresh is not really visible, but the extra power comes in handy for other things.

MeepMeep

It'll get better

[T5]

The Parhelia is Matrox's first attempt at a competitive 3D card. As the process shrinks, the speeds will go up. And the drivers will mature over time.

How much better it'll get is a valid speculative point. Did they hire any of the old 3Dfx crew?

Neverwinter Nights benchmarks?

[Dr. Spork]

It seems to me that NWN is currently the single biggest cause of "forced" graphics card updates. I've seen several reports that even with a GF4-4600 and a top-of-the-line processor, some situations cause unacceptable FPS slowdowns when the AA is enabled (though the game looks otherwise great).

I seriously doubt that people are buying these cards to play Quake or Serious Sam, so why is it always these games that get benchmarked?

Because various 3D engines use different technologies, and these are in turn supported differently by the card manufacturers, it's not possible to simply extrapolate from Quake results to NWN.