Very sad ady!

[Tilsan]

Originally posted by Booker
Ant,

I'm in Australia so what ever the price is double it

I paid $570 which I didn't think was too bad. I paid around $475 for my Matrox 2 years ago.

I love the Matrox products but I am worried by the time it's released her in OZ the price will be through the roof.

Will wait and see what happends. If the Next Gen Matrox card rocks and is in my price range well there is always a friend who will buy a GF4

Booker

I too am a bit concerned about this. Not that I couldn't afford a grand for a card, but not even a Parhelia is that much better than a $600 nVidia "peh" Also I can get a whole system for that much

Cheers Till

[Greebe]

Guys if it's been said once it's been said a thousand times, there will be several versions at different price points. Don't expect them all to be sky high $igns

[rugger]

But they will ALL be expensive here in australia.

eg, the G550 is about $279 here!

[ChronosZero]

I don't know what the problem is. Given today's exchange rates, you're only paying a 40-50% premium on a G550.

I know that electronics and such are priced higher in Oz, but at least you folks pay much less for groceries than we folks in the States do. I still remember my first trip to Wolly's when I lived just outside of Sydney a couple years ago... AUD$50 for a trolley full of food?!? My brain almost fell out. I can't even get two little plastic bags of groceries for that in Colorado.

[rugger]

Very true

Originally posted by ChronosZero
I don't know what the problem is. Given today's exchange rates, you're only paying a 40-50% premium on a G550.

I know that electronics and such are priced higher in Oz, but at least you folks pay much less for groceries than we folks in the States do. I still remember my first trip to Wolly's when I lived just outside of Sydney a couple years ago... AUD$50 for a trolley full of food?!? My brain almost fell out. I can't even get two little plastic bags of groceries for that in Colorado.

Thats a lot of premium for a LOW end card. I can buy a Leadtek Geforce MX 440 (with tv out) for that price and have $50 to spare afterwards. ATI cards are expensive like that too.

About food, your right. If you shop well, (lots of fresh vegetables, and not a lot of highly processed foods and only some meat) eating is pretty cheap here. Unfortunately, meat prices are quite expensive now.

[ChronosZero]

Re: Very true

Originally posted by rugger


Thats a lot of premium for a LOW end card. I can buy a Leadtek Geforce MX 440 (with tv out) for that price and have $50 to spare afterwards. ATI cards are expensive like that too.

Not that I would recommend that card either. If someone can't wait for the new Matrox, it would be best advised to go with something that has pixel and vertex shaders, which the MX series do not have despite the GeForce4 name. This is the point where I grumble something really unpleasant about NVIDIA's marketting department.

About food, your right. If you shop well, (lots of fresh vegetables, and not a lot of highly processed foods and only some meat) eating is pretty cheap here. Unfortunately, meat prices are quite expensive now.

Yeah, meat was a little pricey when I was there too. The worst offender I recall was turkey. It costs about US$0.80/lb here, which is about 20% of the price down under.

[rugger]

Re: Re: Very true

I wasn't recommending the Geforce card either, just using it as a comparison object to demostrate the sheer markup that occurs over here

If I was in the position of having to recommending an Nvidia card to anyone, It would have to be either a Geforce 3 Ti200 or a Geforce 4 Ti4200, which arn't much more expensive than the matrox G550 (about $50 more for the GF3 Ti200)


About meat, I mean other meats, like beef, lamb (and even mutton of all horrid meats) all rose in price quite a lot early this year Good for the farmers, unplesant for the rest of us.

[superfly]

Originally posted by Ant
I've only seen a very well informed rumour on prices that mentioned a 64MB Parhelia in the region of $300. Even the cheapest Parhelia will outperform anything around at present if everything is to believed. I'd presume it will be nViidias next generation GPU that will provide the competition for Parhelia not its current offerings. I don't think there will be any huge difference in performance over the Parhelia product range. Instead what you will see is of course more memory but the Pro boards will have added funtionality rather than raw performance to fit the needs of the 3D/CAD professionals they will be targetted at.

Guess it's a tough call...


On one hand,we have a parhelia with better overall specs and memory bandwith,but may have to settle with a 64 meg version at those price points(250~300$)....


While on the GF4 4400 side,even though it can't boast the specs that matrox has,it does have 128 megs on board,wich will likely be more helpfull in the longer run....

[Reckless]

Re: Re: Re: Very true

Originally posted by rugger
[B]I wasn't recommending the Geforce card either, just using it as a comparison object to demostrate the sheer markup that occurs over here

There isn't that much difference to UK prices. Prices in the country of origin or where a manufacturer needs to push hard tend to have lower prices than 'remote' - to them - parts of the world. Cost of a product should be looked at in comparison to what else is around - and I'm sure just about all here will agree the G550 was a big failure!

[Parhelia Pro256]

"Guess it's a tough call... "

Not even close, with the right memory management, 64 can crush 128 as all of the 128 will rarely be used as efficiently as the 64 can be

[GT98]

LOL maybe I can "blackmarket" the cards to you guys? Say on the Customs label that its a gift to you so you can avoid the taxes etc on it?

[superfly]

Originally posted by Parhelia Pro256
"Guess it's a tough call... "

Not even close, with the right memory management, 64 can crush 128 as all of the 128 will rarely be used as efficiently as the 64 can be

Oh really...Even when AA is used(especially 4x AA),which uses up quite a lot of memory and using 4xAA at anything above 1024*768 isn't really feasable for a 64 meg card without getting quite a large performance hit...


Or how about games using even more/higher quality textures than they do now,or once the use of stored geometry data within local card memory becomes more wide spread,to aid in overall performance,such as in games using either the unreal 2/unreal warfare or even the DOOM 3 engine....


More than 64 megs will be neded for that,no matter high effcient the memory management is,it's never a replacement for the real thing....


Personaly,i could live with a 128 meg parhelia that "only" uses 200 mhz DDR sdram,which is dirt cheap since it's been available in large quantities for the last 2 years and with the use of a 256 bit wide bus,still dish out nearly 13 gigs of bandwith,which is still quite a bit more than even GF4 4600 has....

[gsgrunt]

I'm too drunk right now to read and comprehend(or spell) all that has been posted here but... I was burned before by G400MAX. I pre-ordered after some hipe like what is happening now. When if finally arrived I love the visual quality in Q3 but ended being more then a bit disappointed in the overall card for gaming. If history repeats itself, most of us won't be able to the new Matrox card until after nVidia releases a new card or new driver that boost 3d performance past what Matrox is presenting here. I'm a graphic card whore, I will buy anything(more money then sense). I will per-order this new Matrox product, won't get it till Xmas and regret that I ever ordered it.

[az]

Supafly: The Parhelia seems to be capable of some kind of AA (called FAA) which does:
- not hit performance too much (because it seems to be edge-anti-aliasing instead of full-scene)
- not need that much memory (see above)
- look pretty (no unsharp textures because they're not anti-aliased),
so I won't worry too much about not having enough memory

AZ

[superfly]

You might br right,but i'd still settle for a version that still uses 128 meg's of 200 mhz DDR sdram...


If nothing else,it's always beneficial for upcoming games where it's almost a given that they'll use even more textures than current games do and they'll be even higher resolution as well...


It also allows extra flexibility when it comes to storing at least some geometry data directly within the video card's memory,while still having enogh left over for frame buffer and texture storage issues...