Parhelia article at extremetech

[Jazzz]

I haven't seen this posted here so i thought id post it, Extremetech has a very nice little interview with Dan Wood from matrox it is a very interesting read http://www.extremetech.com

[Parhelia Pro256]

Quote from Ol' Danny boy

"The vision behind the Parhelia was that it was more important to sustain high performance with quality features enabled and to offer innovative new features like Surround Gaming than to focus our engineering investment on making a part that only delivered high (and sometimes meaningless) benchmark numbers with lower quality settings. Other companies are already doing that, and Matrox's goal is to offer different solutions to the market."

ET: How do you expect Parhelia to stack up versus the competition, particularly versus Nvidia's GeForce 4 Ti 4600? Are there areas where you believe you have specific advantages and disadvantages? Please elaborate.

"P4rH3l_14 RUl_3S"

[KeiFront]

Verry interesting article, a must read.

For the linux users:

"ET: Will there be Linux drivers available when Parhelia ships? If so, for which distros? If not, are Linux drivers planned for later release, or will Matrox be making available sufficient information to allow open-source drivers to be written?

DW: The plan is to have Linux drivers available on our web site at the time that the Parhelia ships (right around the corner). These would be solid 2D multi-display drivers (up to TripleHead) that will work with any distribution that uses XFree86. The next step following this release would be to work on porting our 3D OpenGL driver to Linux. Note that this work is expected to take some time."

[Umfriend]

I found this somehwat funny:

ET: Given that 3D graphics invariably involves performance tradeoffs, and given the number of demanding features that are implemented in Parhelia (64-sample texture filtering, Surround Gaming, FAA, etc.) what kind of performance can gamers look forward to when running with all of these features enabled with three displays going at 1024x768x32?

DW: Our recommendation is that people run most titles at 2400x600 for the best blend of performance and benefit from peripheral vision.

The notion that due to superior image quality you could use relatively low res ([3x]800x600) will be very hard I think on reviewers. They would actually have to see whether 800x600 on P with all eye-candy looks better than 1600x1200 on competitors and then compare FPS between the two.

How to compare two cards on different resolution that have equal quality? That would be quite a challenge methinks (but then, I've never tried, so what do I know?)

Umf

[Dr Mordrid]

Yup. The apparent resolution can be higher than the real resolution given features like FAA-16x and the advanced filtering.

The Parhelia can play tricks on the eyes in the situation discribed by DW. Happens all the time in the real world (TV for example) and Parhelia takes advantage of it.

Dr. Mordrid

[Umfriend]

Exactly, so it could be that a GF4/5/6 or R300 ends up with higher FPS (average/minumum, whatever you like) in equal output resolutions, but that to have the same quality of image the P could actually be run on lower resses.

AFAIK, reviewers sometimes mention image quality, but mostly compare FPS on a same res basis. What would it take from a reviewer to compare FPS on an equal qual basis as opposed to an equal res basis? Do we know any reviewers from whom we can expect that? (I don't know any, but then I don't know many)

Umf

[Dr Mordrid]

Not that I know of. Not enough of them have taken their heads out of computer journals long enough to study neuro-optics for that to happen

Still, it should be readily apparent. The same mechanism is why a still frame on TV looks lousy but when played normally it looks like the quality is great.

Dr. Mordrid