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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."
this card is not woth the asking price. It's nice to see Matrox trying to get back into the game, but the technology in the card is well... so last year.
:P.
I predict that this card may eventually be popular in high-end workstations, with matrox fans (if there are any), and with people who for one reason or another just don't like nVidia.
It may also take some market share away from ATi, but I don't suspect it will cause a huge dent.
The stats really just don't impress me. Then again, I'm a heavy Windows gamer, and from reading their white papers on this card they must not be trying for the gamer market.
I'm just gonna sit back and wait for the GeForce 5, just like I waited for the Voodoo 5500. Hopefully nVidia doesn't go out of business
Linux is dead.
LU
It says about the same thing that the above review does. Here's the link
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
...by the "omg this is gonna rock" fanboy hype. It looked great on paper, but the GF4 4600 gives it a right good spanking. Well, there are going to be lots of artists trying to get their hands on this one...
it'll be like the old Matrox G400 - runs decent and looks great. I guess it all comes down to speed vs. pretty. Maybe they'll fix it in the drivers! Of course that's what they all say.
I for one am a little troubled by the attitude displayed in all the available "reviews." Their major concern seems to be frame rates in SS and Q3A, two games built on old technology. What I'm concerned about is high-resolution performance with AA enabled. I have no intention of ever again running a game below 1024x768 with AA enabled. Why would you, when the Parhelia can do it without breaking a sweat?
I wonder what The Carmack has to say about this card. I'd like to see some benchmarks of the Parhelia running DooM3 at 1024x768 w/ 16xAA. Now that the NDA's are lifted, I hope he'll wake these people up to the fact that there is life after Q3A.
Here:http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i =1645
2 06 25/index.html
Here:http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/0
And here:http://www.theinquirer.net/24060221.htm
Anandtech and Tom's Hardware have also posted reviews.
Anand says that it isn't worth $400, especially in terms of frames per second. And Geforce4 Ti 4600s are only $300 online and the Radeon 8500 is only about two benjamins, and both offer better performance.
Or you could get a GeForce4 Ti4400 for $220 + shipping and have a card which is still faster and supports only 1 less monitor. I'd *consider* the Matrox if I had dual (or triple?) LCDs due to the dual DVI, but considering at the moment I only have two 19" CRTs I think I'll keep my Ti4400.
Thanks,
--
Matt
I've got a nice Matrox dual-head video card for my workstation at work and quite honestly I don't know how I did anything before having two nice 20 inch monitors taking up all the desk space in my cubicle. :)
m or check out these screen shots of Jedi Knight II: m es / knt2.cfm.
Matrox is noted more for it's workstation class video cards than it's 3-D gaming abilities, but after seeing some of the info on "surround gaming," I don't know . . . I sure wouldn't mind playing the lastest game spanning 3 nice LCD monitors.
For more info, you should check out
http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/surrgame.cf
http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/enhanced_ga
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Lets face it guys not everybody is a gamer people do still have real work to do and lets face it a lot of the nvida stuff out there is about average for clarity and high end connectivity. This card is set right for the low end DTp and the high end corprate people (for those corps that try not to give all there emploies headaches from looking at those blurry intergrated video on tiny monitors)
Personaly I have a rig for productivity a few rigs for games and the laptops for running around. Productivty machines get multiple monitors and nice cards with soso procs and should be nice and quiet. Gaming machines hey if it sounds like a 747 it's ok as long as you cant hear it over the rocket jumps.
No sir I dont like it.
Anandtech
Tom's Hardware
Tech Report
Extreme Tech
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.
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
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.
Please note that it also was the last one; as of the G450 TV-out doesn't work anymore under Linux (and the Parhelia probably won't be much better). Check out the G400 prices on ebay. They're good business, probably because of this. [source: mplayerhq]
0x or or snor perron?!
The new Parhelia is a great new card. It won't appeal to everyone, as it doesn't have the frame rates that everyone seems to think are the only indication of performance in graphics today. Everyone seems to think that fillrate == king and that all the other features are secondary. Which is why nVidia sells most of it's cards with only enough features to get them out the door, most don't have tv out, multiple monitors, tv in, etc. ATI has done a great job of creating multiple products that do many different things.
Matrox's new card has one feature that no other card can match yet, and that's the three monitor support. There is no other single card that has the low price and three monitor support. And no AGP/PCI solution will let you play one game on three monitors.
I don't think that I'll be buying one, but that's just because I don't think that it should cost 50% of your systems total value for the video card.
With anti-aliasing pictures may look good enough or better even at lower resolutions leading to higher frame rate.
Optimizing for (subjective quality)*(framerate) may have an optimum at a lower resolutions than cards without AA.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
"You want great looking Anti-Aliasing? The Parhelia is for you. You want killer frame rates? You might have to look elsewhere."
Why does this so vividly remind me of 3Dfx vs NVidia a little over two years ago ? 3Dfx had their uber-AA system, but it would drag Quake3 to about 8 frames per second while the butt-ugly TNT2 just cruised along at a clean 40 fps (which was remarkable back then). 3Dfx collapsed months later when they learned one of the golden rules of computing : quantity over quality.
Granted, Matrox' prime market isn't the gaming sector, they've truly carved their throne in the business sector, filling in the gap left behind by Number Nine, but now they're trying to market at the gamers with this feature-packed chipset, yet I fear they're going to fall flat on their ass just like last time. If we've learned anything from NVidia, it's that people are willing to buy gobs of GPU power at insane prices. Your Geforce2 is too slow to play UT2 in 1600x1280 ? Then get the Geforce4, with two GPUs this time for more power.
If Matrox wants a share of my gaming budget, they'll have to start putting more raw goodness into their boards. Heck, just figure out how to link two or four Matrox GPUs and make then spew pixels like there's no tomorrow.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The lastest issue of Maximum PC has an extensive review of this card, going into great depth on how it works and what the improved functions get you. If you want to know the nitty gritty details of this card, get that issue. The card they tested was a beta, so they warn not to rely on their benchmarks, but they said that Matrox had to pry it from their fingers, particularly after they tried out its triple-screen views for gaming.
i remember changing the FOV in quake 1 and 2 was considered a cheat, so servers would not let you on if you were using a nonstandard FOV setting. I would doubt that anything has changed in that arena, so I bet you would not even be able to play online using "surround gaming" since it needs an FOV change.
A lot of the tests available have been unfair to the Parhelia.
Many were done at 640x480 which is not the card's strength.
Give the card games with huge textures and run it at 1280x1024 and above and you will see how it outshines even nVidia's best offer.
However, there are not many games (any at all?) which really can stress this card at that level. So, apparently Parhelia buyers must have to see the nVidia GeForce and ATI Radeon cards be better suited for today's games.
As usual it is a question of the hen and the egg. Which comes first? The game or the card.
Parhelia appears today a tad early to the market.
You need it because when you are running dolby surround sound and have 12 guys shooting at you, the framerate drops dramatically. That frame-rate-above-refresh-rate is important because you need extra slack for extreme situations!
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?
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.
Not everybody care about games. I for one, haven't played a game on my box for as long as I had it. But, I stare at this screen for 13 hours a day, and all I care about is that the things I look at (no, it's not pr0n :-) ), doesn't make my eyeballs fall out.
I've got a Matrox G450, and I'm pretty happy about that. AFAIK, Matrox is supportive of Linux, they have themselves released GPLed software. It's not going to be my last Matrox card.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I recently purchased both a Radeon 8500 and a GeForce4 Ti4200 (I went for the radeon first, but had compatibility issues with my motherborad and had to give it to my girlfriend). I've noticed one thing in comparing the two cards. The FSAA on the GeForce4 looks like total crap when compared to the Radeon 8500. The difference is remarkable. The Radeon made things look amazing with 2x AA, and the GeForce4 at 2x makes you check to see if you even turned the AA on after seeing the Radeon. At 4x, things don't improve for the Nvidia card, things just get blurier.
Since the Geforce 4 actually works correctly in my machine, I'll take it over the 8500 any day, but Nvidia has to take some lessons from ATI in the anti-aliasing department.
There's a big difference between refresh rate and frame rate--if you truly meant you can tell the difference between 60 frames and 75 frames per second, you are far more perceptive than I.
They also included the Nvidia Chameleon demo, in which the gf4 only defeated the matrox by a slight margin, with inferior quality.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Everything's a bit light on right now, as most sites only received their hardware late last week.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
2D drivers will be available immediately, say Matrox. However, OpenGL drivers may take a long time to appear as they have to port the Windoze drivers to Linux.
You can also finger his email account if you are so inclined. (But you spammers will have to figure it out the address for yourselves.)
To summarize:
not as fast as a GF4 or Radeon
AA is nice, but not fast enough
10 bit color is nice, but not nice enough
drivers suck...at the moment
That would only be valid if the only colors you were counting were pure red, pure blue, and pure green.
May we never see th
Ever use the TV-Out on those Geforce cards? Talk about an afterthought. Most of them seem to only implement the bare minimum circutry necessary to get the TV not to roll, and leave it at that; no further testing needed. I wonder if the Parhelia will have the reasonably nice TV out my ancient G200 has?
I read the internet for the articles.
I use a GeForce 2 GTS. I bought it about 2 years ago, it still serves me fine. A GeForce DDR would have cost me less money, but wouldn't be able to play GTA3 and Morrowind that well now. I think I did a pretty good purchase, even though the card was rather expensive at the time.
My next card will be in the same mold. I think I'll wait about a year before I buy it though, but it depends on wether some new extremely good games really NEEDS a better card.