Ace's Hardware does Parhelia

[Athlon4all]

here

 

[BDawg]

Is that thing still around? I thought it was made obsolete by the GeForce 256 DDR.

 

[Athlon4all]

Not quite that extreme. Read the review to find out

 

[BDawg]

Originally posted by: Athlon4all
Not quite that extreme. Read the review to find out

As you can tell from our review, it's not exactly a great solution for gamers or professionals working with high-end 3D applications, either. So, the question is, what exactly is it?

LOL!

 

[majewski9]

Parhelia is new card and is not comparable to GF 256!

Well a good first try by Matrox to get back into the 3d graphics market. I think that with some tweaks parhelia can be more competitive.

 

[BDawg]

Originally posted by: majewski9
Parhelia is new card and is not comparable to GF 256!

Well a good first try by Matrox to get back into the 3d graphics market. I think that with some tweaks parhelia can be more competitive.

I really didn't think I needed to add the </sarcasm> tag...

 

[NFS4]

As you can tell from our review, it's not exactly a great solution for gamers or professionals working with high-end 3D applications, either. So, the question is, what exactly is it?

BUAHAHA.

 

[Lucky]

As is typical of Matrox products, the Parhelia has very high quality 2D. It supports 10-bit per component color (30-bit "GigaColor") throughout the entire graphics pipeline. This combined with its multi-display support makes it appealing to 2D professionals who may need to do a little 3D work or gaming from time to time. The Parhelia can support either dual digital flat panel displays (DVI) or two analog monitors (HD15) and one flat panel. It also features glyph anti-aliasing to provide hardware anti-aliased fonts. The multi-monitor zoom function is quite good as well. All these features are likely to be very compelling to users of desktop publishing, image/photo editing, and 2D CAD.

 

[grant2]

Ouch, Poor parhelia!

The more recently released v228 drivers were also tested, but we found that the performance actually decreased relative to our v226 results.

This fabled "New drivers will really increase performance!!" doesn't seem to be showing up

Jedi Knight 2 - High Quality (1600x1200, AA)
42.9 GeForce 4 Ti4200 w/ Quincunx
36.8 Parhelia (v226) w/ 16x FAA

Even high resolution & 16x FAA isn't enough to save Parhelia from a low end gf4...

(NASCAR 2002 (1600x1200x32bpp)) - From Parhelia's perspective, #19 is the GeForce 4 MX440. The GeForce 4's are the only cards to break 30 FPS here

Now Parhelia is trailing even nvidia's BUDGET chip ... I suppose if 22fps still wasn't slow enough, you could enable 16FAA & Quincunx to put parhelia just below the ti4200 again..

Warrior Kings (1600x1200x32bpp)
22 - Radeon 8500
20 - Parhelia
16 - GeForce 4 Ti4600
have been reports of performance issues with NVIDIA cards using anything other than older NVIDIA drivers in Warrior Kings.


It would have been interesting to try a Geforce 3 to try to pin down if that really IS the case.

Perhaps more significant, however, is the fact that the Radeon 9700 (R300) will carry the same US$399 price tag as Parhelia. Preliminary benchmark results published online have shown the Radeon 9700 to deliver 2 to 2.5 times the performance Parhelia is capable of in some games. With the Radeon 9700 looming off on the horizon, it's very difficult to make a recommendation to a gamer for the Parhelia, given its current price.

It's hard to disagree with this sentiment.

Matrox zealots constantly chant "There's more to life than wanting 150 fps in Quake 3" but they never mention that in MODERN games parhelia is still only getting 20-37 FPS at high resolutions so how can you blame people who want to something faster? (most people claim to discern up to at least 60fps)

 

[Fun Guy]

Not to mention that my G550 drivers are still buggier than hell, with windows opening wherever they want, whatever size they want, with no predictability. I even have extra windows opening up for background processes that I can't close unless I reboot and go to single display before going back to double.

So now I'm supposed to trust that they'll make good on drivers for present or future products when they can't even make good on products already in production for a while? "Thank you sir, may I have another!?!"

 

[kami]

As you can tell from our review, it's not exactly a great solution for gamers or professionals working with high-end 3D applications, either. So, the question is, what exactly is it?

Wow, now that's classic!