review at chip.de

[thop]

all credit goes to wienerschnitzl for finding this. i just opened a new thread else folks would probably not see it. it is in german though.

REVIEW

direct links to the benchmark pics:

Q3A
Aquamark
Serious Sam 2
3DMark 2001 SE
3DMark 2001 SE MultiTex
CodeCreatures
ChameleonMark
AA % loss Q3A
AA % loss Aquamark
AA % loss Serious Sam 2

things are starting to look better. it beats the 4600 in every AA test (except CodeCreatures).

And look how it shines in the 3DMark MultiTex with AA enabled

[Kruzin]

And those tests show EXACTLY what has been said all along.
When you turn the res up, and the eye candy on, Parhelia is on top.
At low res, low detail, it's not the fastest, but is more than playable.

[torhelge]

that's soooooo true

[Snake007uk]

OMG now thing are starting to look up!!!!!

when i get my im gona turn everything on !!!! and ill be happy at 45fps !!!!!

Snake

[Kosh Naranek]

The framerates mentioned at the resolutions where P is on top .. is playable but NOT great framerates and not framerates I would be playing a game like UT2003 in.

And besides .... if It hadn't been for 16xFAA P would have crashed and burned.

[maharajah]

Looks good.
At 16x12 with everything on, not only is the P playable, it's between 1x and 2x faster than the 4600. And this is with rough M drivers vs. an extremely optimized N driver.
Someone in another thread asked how a review site can be biased when you can see the numbers. Well, look at this review. If you (cough THG cough) just showed the benchmarks with the eye candy off, the P just sucks sour, worse than a monkey's butt. However, the complete story paints a very different pic.
Was this review of an oem or retail product? My knowledge of German is 0.
Once again, looks good. Maybe no sleep for me tonight

[Jazzz]

This review is much better, i think it is clear that there is an issue with the drivers and i think matrox have gone for stability over high fps with later releases the fps will hopefully go up especially in opengl games

[thop]

retail (220/275). i want to see some overclocking results now

[YngwieM]

Now we're getting some interesting info...

Way to go, Matrox...

Have you noticed the Chameleon Mark (developed by NVidia!!)benches??

[string]

funny that these days even chip.de (which for most of us germans is like the hardware journal for newbies) makes more comprehensive and in-depth reviews than toms-hardware. (last mentioned makes such a "big" review that even john doe from xy-hardware site would do it better. (test fsaa +a in surround gaming, surround gaming in special etc etc. they just ran their default test setup and didnt cared of anything.)
in german we would say:
perlen vor die säue geworfen.

[TdB]

And look how it shines in the 3DMark MultiTex with AA enabled

thats because there are no polygon edges in that test.
It is the only test that use 4 layer textures though, so parhelias 4 tmus/pipe, allows it to pull ahead of the competition.

EDIT: correction serious sam:se, also uses up to 4 layers of textures in some levels, most often only 3 layers, so parhelia should beat everything in this test, since it has twice the tmus(Texture Mapping Units), it should render SS:SE in a single pass(the gf4ti only has 2tmu/pipe, and must do multipass, AFAIK), with 4 pixels per clock.
i wonder what is holding it back?
drivers perhaps?

[thop]

[maharajah]

Originally posted by thop
retail (220/275). i want to see some overclocking results now

Thanks thop. Yep, definitely looking forward to some OC action.

[GT98]

Ah a feel a bit better now...

[Rags]

I still stand by my statement that benchmarks don't show the whole picture. They tell nothing about how well a card will play in a game. They don't show the smoothness, the minimum, etc. That is something that can only be done when the hardware is in your hands.

Rags