Thinking about buying a Matrox Parhelia for surround gaming? Think again...

[Geotpf]

(note: I'm posting this...um...everywhere)

I bought a Matrox Parhelia w/3 17" monitors for Surround Gaming purporses. Yes, I know it's overpriced. Yes, I know it performs at Geforce 3 speeds. I could live with both of these aspects of the card. It's 2D quality is beyond great, and having 3 monitors worth of desktop is terrific for net surfing. I really want to be a happy Matrox fanboy. HOWEVER, when I buy a $400 videocard for surround gaming, I expect it to actually work in games. This card does not. Flaming rant mode is now ON!

Here's a list of games I have tried with the card:

1. Half Life: Works fine, does not support surround gaming.
2. Freespace 2: Work fine, does not support surround gaming.
3. America's Army: Works fine, supports surround gaming.
4. Reef Demo (came with card): Works fine, supports surround 3D.
5. IG3 Demo (came with card): Works fine, supports surround gaming.
6. No One Lives Forever2 Ohio Teaser Level: Works fine, does not support surround gaming.
7. 3dMark2001: Works fine, can be run in surround gaming resoulutions, but image is stretched.
8. Codecreatures Benchmark Pro: Works fine, supports surround gaming, with stretched images.

Ok, so far so good. A few games don't support surround gaming, but that was to be expected. But here comes the world of hurt.

9. Unreal Tournament: Works fine, except the menus and in game text get corrupted if you change the resolution or run the game twice without rebooting. Claims to support surround gaming, but I sure as hell can't get it to work correctly (the image only shows up on the leftmost monitor and a little bit of the middle one, rest is blank).
10. Quake 3: Supports surround gaming, but spontaneously reboots during play, and all in-game menus and text are unreadable in surround mode.
11. GTA3: Supports surround gaming, but image is stretched and therefore unusable in that mode. Suffers slowdowns when it is raining. Upon leaving one city and entering another, all textures on buildings and the ground are missing/garbled, although it eventually fixes itself.
12. AVP2: Works fine, and supports surround gaming, but that only works when cheats are on, so unless you are serving the game, you can't use surround gaming in mulitplayer.
13. SOF2: Does not support surround gaming. Lights and explosions are slightly corrupted, otherwise works fine.
14. RTCW: Supports surround gaming, but coronas on lights appear where they would be if you were in single monitor mode (you can shut these off). Sometimes it screws up and doesn't set the FOV correctly, making it unplayable. This happens randomly; it will work fine for one server, and then you leave and the next server is hosed. It also crashes with a "Q293078 - Error Message: STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER" error at random times, as well as whenever the map timelimit is hit.
15. Crimson Skies: Menu text is garbled, and crashes all clients when you attempt to join a LAN game. Software mode works fine, but I did not spend four hundred dollars on a video card to run a game in software mode.
16. Kyodai Mahjongg (yes, a tile game): Won't run at all. Crashes with a "IDirect3DDevice can not be made." error.

Oh, and you know the icing on the cake? They haven't updated the drivers for it since July 26th!!!! What the hell have they been doing the last month and a half?

I'm really ready to run over this piece of crud with my car and buy a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 or a ATI 9700. AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

AFAIK, the game has to support the required resolutions for surround gaming. This isn't Matrox's fault. If you bought the card without doing your research, then you have nobody to blame but your stupid self.

 

[ahartman]

Of course, you've checked at the matrox forums (official support) and MURC (best Matrox site on the web) to try to have your problems diagnosed...

 

[Geotpf]

Originally posted by: KnightBreed
AFAIK, the game has to support the required resolutions for surround gaming. This isn't Matrox's fault. If you bought the card without doing your research, then you have nobody to blame but your stupid self.

Quake 3 and RTCW both support Surround Gaming...and both games randomly reboot the system. I'm not really annoyed that it doesn't support all games for surround gaming...I'm annoyed that it crashes. I'm also annoyed that I need to go to software mode for Crimson Skies, and that this silly Mahjongg game (which they are aware of-see http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/enhanced_games/kyodai.cfm ) doesn't work. It seems like I spend as much time fighting with this video card almost as often as I have been playing games on it. I just spent several hours ATTEMPTING to play RTCW, and I needed to vent. If it was only one or two games, I wouldn't have a problem. But it's like every other game.

 

[Vehementi]

Originally posted by: Geotpf
(note: I'm posting this...um...everywhere)
I'm really ready to run over this piece of crud with my car and buy a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 or a ATI 9700. AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!

If you're going to do that just mail it to me...

I can have 3 monitors hooked up to my 8500LE (VGA, DVI, and S-Video/BNC)

 

[BFG10K]

Yes, I know it performs at Geforce 3 speeds

Overall it's much slower than a GF3.

Even GF4 MXs hammer the Parhelia in a lot of cases.

 

[AnAndAustin]

I think that's a bit extreme BFG10K, GF3 level perf is about right all things considered, not that that's what you should expect from a $150 let alone a $400 card!

Geotpf I take it you set up the games by editing the appropriate scripts, I take it that still needs to be done manually in most games doesn't it? Have you thought about driver incompatabilities, many people have probs when shifting between diff gens or between ATI and nVidia cards pretty often. What card did you have in there before, you may need to 'destroy' the previous drivers, perhaps consider a fresh install?

Of course in all probability the majority of the probs probably lie at Matrox's door, they've been out of mainstream 3D for quite a while and July 26th is certainly a fair while back, I doubt those drivers were 100% compatible or stable back in July. I think Matrox are just feeling the probs of trying to compete at the top mainstream level, and with an inferior card it can't be good news, surely they haven't shifted a whole lot of these cards and it mustn't be very economical to be pouring cash on driver development ...

 

[BFG10K]

The thing that surprises me is the lack of drive updates since the Parhelia was released. That's a stark contrast to ATi who has been simply outstanding at bringing up their 8500 from Ti200 speeds to Ti4600 speeds in some cases.

 

[MrGrim]

I feel sorry for you. With the money you spent on that POS you could have had a very nice second system or a simply awesom main rig.

 

[Moishe]

I do feel sorry for ya. I know how it is to decide to "settle" for one thing in order to gain another.
I bought a Matrox g200 16mb when they came out and was actually happy with the performance and stability, BUT they convinved me that they don't give 1 flip about drivers. I think Matrox should make the choice to either roll-over and die or win. I have no doubt that given someone with some brains n there they can make a great gaming card, but this kind of stuff just puts additional nails into their coffin.

It sounds to me like the card is probably good, but the drivers are CRAP. if they were to fix the drivers they would (probably) gain in speed and stability.
But this is matrox.
IMHO you should get rid of the card like a hot potato for as much money as you can get for it and Wait til christmas then buy the best card. ATi's driver rep at it's worst IMHO is waaay better than Matrox.
Mo

 

[BCompDude]

Whomever said that the Parhelia was as slow as a Geforce 4 MX. . .lol. Definetely *not* the case. In fact if you reference Anand's review you will see that it is more on par with an Radeon 8500 (not an LE). If you look at the benchmarks it defeats the 8500 more than it loses to it and when it loses it doesn't lose by much (generally). And the settings that most people *like* to play in (read: high resolution with all of the settings bumped up, like AA etc.) the Parhelia wins all of those. Not only that but it LOOKS better. I happen to have both ; ). Also, look at the minimum frame rate on these games, the Parhelia has a much higher min than the 8500 in most cases.

I am *not* saying that the Parhelia is the best card out there but if you are going to diss it at least do it with some facts eh? Lets at least be objective about it.

 

[Actaeon]

The Perhelia outperforms the Ti200 in many cases, and loses to the Ti500 in many others as well.

Still a fine card by todays standard for performance, and 2d quality.

Nothing against the Parhelia, but if only they lowered the price....

 

[Sensor]

Have you managed to improve your compatibility using the Parhelia in the past two weeks? I was considering getting one specifically for surround gaming, but it feels like resources -- personal opinions more importantly than "corporate" reviews -- are pretty slim and under-informed.

--Ed