what if reviewers bencmarks the parhelia with quake3?

[TdB]

I don´t think that parhelia will beat the compeptition in a standard quake3 benchmark, and we all know that some reviewers think that quake3 performance can be extrapolated to 3d-performance overall, which is what most reviewers care about.


do you think this will hurt matrox reputation, in the high-end gaming market, there has, after all, been alot of hype about parhelia being a gf4ti killer?

is quake3 performance a too big selling-point(among reviewers) to be ignored, or will they understand that gaming has moved beyond the point where a quake3 bench doesn´t tell the whole story?

what are your thoughts about benchmarks and their significance in reviews, in general?
do you think it is a good idea that most reviewers uses the same benchmarks? can we avoid naughty speedhacks in drivers if they didn´t?

[Jediphx]

Well let me first say that I expect Parhelia to be fast and furious at Q3 and other games But I personally feel that quake 3 is fast enough. Reviewers really should concentrate on how the game looks and less how many FPS it gets. I know I know its a classic arguement but I will tell you I played Ultima 9 on my G450 and G550 and yes it was slow and jerky at times but the graphics were so beautiful I was immersed in that game and THAT IMHO is where the entertainment should come from in games. (I played both games with a ATI AIW radeon I had laying around also and yes they ran much faster but were not nearly as visually appealing)

1.Graphics
2. Storyline/plot
.........10. FPS

[DuRaNgO]

TDB, it has been guessed that the Parhelia may not be the fastest at Q3 running in 800x600 with settings normal, but when run at full rez and full aa and triplehead(oops, the competition can't do that one ), the P will "shine" at the top which is what we all want as long as the lowest fps is above 60

And that WOULD be a gf4tidsdsddfj killer

[TdB]

Originally posted by DuRaNgO
TDB, it has been guessed that the Parhelia may not be the fastest at Q3 running in 800x600 with settings normal, but when run at full rez and full aa and triplehead(oops, the competition can't do that one ), the P will "shine" at the top which is what we all want as long as the lowest fps is above 60

And that WOULD be a gf4tidsdsddfj killer

exactly, but how many of the famous reviewers do that?

last time i checked, neither tomshardware nor anandtech, benchmarked with fsaa or anisotropic filtering.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020522/index.html

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1619

i know these are not the best reviewers, but there are the most famous. admittedly, they are starting to use other games than quake3, i just fear, that most of the new features on parhelia will be downplayed by the most famous reviewers.
alot of people i know, judge a card by reviews at those sites.
after all, it is easier to judge a card by a pretty benchmark-comparison table, than its featureset, atleast if you don´t know much about hardware.

[DuRaNgO]

True, I guess we'll have to start supporting dudes like Wolfgang from cypherlabs, eh?

[TdB]

yup!

[icemaker]

I don't care if the Nvidia Geforce 4 beats the Parhelia, but I would like the Parhelia to be as fast as a Geforce 3 TI Series . I know for a fact Matrox makes way better video cards then ATI or Nvidia, but the speeds might not be at par with other Gaming cards. Nuff Said. Excuse me grammar

P.S.
Nvidia sucks IMHO! I hate being forced to use a product

[{PainCresT}DAn]

Well I guess people forget that Nvidia likes to sell stuff and not caring that there next gen card is really an oc'd version of there previous card + 1 or 2 features... You can't say that about the P... how many generations of GF card do we need to go through before we get 2x the performance... TNT2 x 2= GF3 Ti500 now how many generations... GF256 GF2 and GF3 so you would have to wait what about 2 to 2.5 years before Nvidia comes out with 2x the performance. I can say confidently that Matrox is more than 2x the performance of there previous card and it took them 2 years... So when people say that Nvidia pumps out cards quicker its because they are trying to make money not to truly advancing there technology that quickly because you know investors are impressed is ASP (Average Sale Price).

[xortam]

Interesting way of looking at it {PainCresT}DAn but I don't agree with your last statement. Of course Matrox is focused on making money rather than simply advancing technology. Matrox just takes a different approach than NVIDIA in regards to its business plan. For one thing, NVIDIA has a lot more resources than Matrox. I don't upgrade my HW often so I prefer the approach that Matrox takes.

[TdB]

IIRC the g400 max was about twice the speed of the g200, so i would say matrox is better at speedbumping their cores too.

[rugger]

I am actually very interested in seeing Anandtechs review, especially the UT2002 preview they have been testing video cards with lately.

And for what I have seen of Anand's reviews, he will probably go to the effort of finding out where the card is fast and where it is slow. He might not focus on it and the Parhellias extra features as much as we would like, but he doesn't seem too much into turnkey reviews.

Tom on the other hand, I have no clue what is goint to happen here

[{PainCresT}DAn]

xortam I do agree with you but what I mean is that investors will push companies into pushing things out quicker than they should be pushed. Therefore the hardware is not as well developed as they should be.... And anyway I was talking to a friend yesterday and he just recently purchased a GF4 Ti4600 128MB card and he said that he wasn't all that impressed, he was hoping that the performance/visual quality would have been. His problem was that with his previous card (64MB GF2) he could run at 1024x768 with settings dumb down and things where ok, in firefights FPS would drop about 20 to 30 FPS but now with his GF4 he's trying the same rez with all the eye candy on and it chops up worst (30 to 50 FPS)than the GF2 with no eye candy.

[xortam]

Originally posted by {PainCresT}DAn
xortam I do agree with you but what I mean is that investors will push companies into pushing things out quicker than they should be pushed....

Agreed. The industry philosophy of the last 5-7 years has been "Get the product out and we'll fix it in the next release." I've always been more architecture and quality oriented but that's clashed with modern management philosophies.