Matrox Parhelia Q's

[ctk1981]

Well now that some time has past I had a few questions about these cards.

Has anything been done driver wise to improve these cards performance in games or are they about the same as when they were reviewed ages ago?

Is driver support pretty good for them?

Heres what I plan to be doing. Since I have built a gaming rig that will be specifically for games, Im thinking about dropping a Matrox Parhelia into my daily machine which currently houses a FIC Radeon 9700 Pro. When I built my friends computer we used a Matrox 450 at the time...I am still impressed with the 2d the matrox product puts out. It is still better than ATi which I consider to have pretty good 2d. Is that Parhelia better or worse in this aspect?

Does it have hardware dvd support also like the Ati products? Just as good there too or about the same?

So in other words all I will be doing with this card is playing dvds, surfing the internet, and occasionally gaming on it in Lan games. But normally the other machine will be my rig for games. Im sure it can handle it, just wanted to see if anything has changed since the reviews were done. Oh....one last question. Any place in particular to pick these up at a good buy?

 

[nick1985]

i have heard that matrox 2d is better than ati 2d. you will be fine for gaming with one(although it isnt the best gaming card, it will run most games just fine) and you can get one at this website

 

[Goi]

The Matrox Parhelia produces GeForce3/Radeon 8500 like performance and features, at a higher price, but you do get Matrox quality 2D. Game capabilities wise, its certainly playable on almost all current games, but don't expect it to compete with anything faster than a GF4 Ti4200.

I'm not sure about its DVD/video capabilities, you'll have to check out the reviews...

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: nick1985
i have heard that matrox 2d is better than ati 2d. you will be fine for gaming with one(although it isnt the best gaming card, it will run most games just fine) and you can get one at this website

I don't know if that's true any more.

Matrox's 2D on their G450 line, etc. is better than ATI's Rage series, but I think my Radeon 9100 easily matches the G450 quality.

That said, maybe ATI's 2D is more variable, since the Sapphire 9100 I have was slightly better than the Sapphire 9000 I first tried.

But if you're really concerned about 2D, the only answer is DVI with an LCD. I have that too, and it beats any VGA solution, Matrox or otherwise.

 

[ShionUzuki]

I all. I just got here. (heh. i am a nOOb) anyways...

I have a Matrox G550 on my work (which is main unfortunately) rig. 2D is simply great. (I read a video signal detailed analysis somewhere on the web a few months ago featuring all kinds of cards from Matrox to BBA to Gigabyte to Asus). That particular G550 they used (well dispite no cards/DACs are identical) has the best analog video signal quality (closest to a sin wave function). The G-Series drivers are simply stable, and when I use the G550 on my P95f+, image is PURE at 1600x1200 (though higher i.e. 2048x1536 may get worse because of the crappy 64-bit DDR frame buffer interface... though i don't know if it's the monitor's limitations or not). I am currently running the G550 and P95f+ at 1280x1024x32bpp@75Hz. I choose Matrox because I use it for around 8 hours daily, and it must be stable, crystal clear, and easy on the eyes. For this reason I have been using Matrox cards from the pre-Millennium ages. Whenever I look at nV/3dfx solutions, I feel lucky to have Matrox around... (which sucks because Matrox = no gaming. heh.) Note: Stability is probably why AMD throws in a G450 on their Athlon 64 demo rig "at" the IDF. For an alpha machine like that stability is definitely a plus.

btw as a BBA Radeon 8500 user (well... 8500s are worse than 7x00s in 2D anyways but who cares), I say it doesn't come close to my G card as i remembered: as I put the card into this rig I need to take breaks ever 2 hrs or so. That's why I swapped the card out, and uninstalling the catalyst drivers... is a pain (Okay I haven't seen a Radeon 9xxx card so I don't know how much they have come along after 8500)

Anways... back to the Parhelia subject...

I hope you are aware of the "banding issue" with ALL Matrox Parhelia cards on the market right now. Most of you hardcore ones probably know about it, but for those who don't know.... basically the problem is whenever you try to run a 3D game in windowed mode, lots of strange lines appear on the screen. This problem is not sloved when you use DVI connections... so probably not the DAC's problem. There is no answer solving this problem on the Matrox Tech Support forums (btw their tech support is top-notch besides of this incident). Most think this is a bug hidden in the silicon as there's no solutions given from the officials... so that's a big minus for anyone thinking about the Parhelia. However, for some reason, when you run windowed 3d apps like 3D Studio MAX / Maya / CAD / all DCC programs, this is not a problem at all. (Besides lately Matrox is targetting Parhelia at Workstation users w/their 3 screen 3D acceleration)

Let's see 2D now... I don't have a Parhelia, but Parhelias should even outperform a G550 in terms of 2D quality. They use 5th order filters so I suspect a Parhelia must generate EXTERMELY clean video signals w/virtually no ghosting @ 2048x1536. Other than that, the text altialiasing should be a big plus for 2D quality. Personally I won't be worried about Parhelia doing bad in 2D... Matrox's 2D is simply legendary.

Of course, seeing that you have a Radeon 9700, I would be worried about 3D the most in your case. Simply put: Parhelia has mediocre 3D , and is the only problem about parhelia (and for 9/10 of the populations probably the most important factor) Please note that Anisotropic Filtering is still limited to 2x in drivers (though it really should have supported 64 samples... which leads me to think it's another bug on the silicon). Also note FAA does not work perfectly all the time... sometimes it does 16x FAA nicely... but sometimes the function does not detect some lines. As you are probably aware that Parhelia is not a DX9 card... so if you want to do shaders programming, stick with Radeon 9700s.

Okay... there are a few advantages about Parhelia gaming... SurroundGaming. Personally I really want to try that... some says it's a feature that really improve gaming experience, but again who's paying for the monitors . ***I am not sure about this*** but I heard FPS are a bit more stable and does less of that 200fps-->50fps-->100fps stuff.

About DVD... if i am correct it should be great... seeing that Matrox has a professional video authoring department. I think Video authoring is what Matrox is all about. Besides Matrox also targets Parhelia at video workstations (da*m they target it at every sector...) and use them with their professional RT.X solutions. NOTE: i think there are problems with Parhelia and some 3rd party pro video caputere boards and some Hauppauge WinTV TV cards)

It's a good all-round card... really... but FPS gaming on Parhelia in terms of speed is PURE CRAP comparing to ATI/nV chips, even though it has support for SurroundGaming, along with some silicon bugs. And i must emphesis that if you are a hardcore gamer, don't even bother!

It is known that there are Parhelia AGP8X cards made by Matrox, and is supposed to fix all of these bugs with fixed FAA also. But we probably won't see that anytime soom before Matrox gets rid of all the current Parhelia 4X cores it made.

And there's almost Pitou the supposedly next-gen MGA core logic w/DX9 full. And of course... it is said to be taped out, but on hold.

 

[ctk1981]

Thanks for the information. Gaming on this machine isnt a big concnern. I may do it once in a while for a few hours or something while a friend is over playing lan games. All this machine will be used for is surfing the internet, playing dvds, watching tv, burning cds/dvds, etc. And since I sit down to this computer the most, I want some great 2D. Theres nothing wrong with the 2D I have now, but Im still amazed by my friends 2d on his G450! Im still checking into stuff kicking ideas around. Its hard to say what I will end up using.

 

[wicktron]

If gaming is not a concern, just go with a G450 or a G550. If you want minimal gaming, and have the money to spend, go for the Parhelia, you won't be disappointed by its 2D.

 

[BlueFlem]

Matrox does a good job of 2D/Video rendering. The hardware is top-notch. Driver quality could be better (I never had much luck with their driver updates). I played a bit with the Parhelia and its OK for 3D games but not games that are FPS intensive.

 

[Goi]

Techchannel.de just recently did a graphics card signal quality test of 62 graphics cards, all the way from the Matrox G450 to the 3dfx Voodoo4/5 to the Parhelia, the GeForce4s and the Radeon 9700 Pros. The results are pretty interesting to say the least. The 8500 and 8500LE took up 2nd and 3rd place respectively, and the G550 came out tops.

Here's the Bablefish Translated Link and here's the Results Table

Top 10
1) Matrox G550
2) Hercules Radeon 8500 AIW
3) Hercules 8500LE
4) FireGL 8700
5) Creative Ti4600
6) Gigabyte Radeon 8500
7) Asus GF2 GTS
8) Matrox Parhelia 512
9) MSI GF4 Ti4600
10) MSI GF4 Ti4200

Surprising turn of events to say the least...

 

[ctk1981]

Hmm..ouch. Decision time. Im leaning towards giving up gaming completely on this machine and doing the G550. After I added a new Sony DVD Burner into this computer Im more concerned with stability than with gaming. Could clock back my P4 to 133mhz FSB, use a stable card like the 550, get another stick of 512MB ram for a total of 1GB. Should be a solid machine then.

Im going to keep thinking on it however. I just keep going back to my friends computer because I was so amazed by the 2D and DVD quality he has. Funny part is...he games pretty regular really, Im assuming he doesnt crank up the res or eyecandy. Hes never complained though.