What are your first impressions of the Parhelia ?

[yuppi]

The review at 3dcenter showed me exactly why I ordered this card. I can play most of my favorite games at the resoultion of my LCD with FAA. I didn't expect more. Okay, some more stable drivers perhaps. But as i know matrox that is just a matter of time (short time and not of ages as with ATI).
My first G400 had bad drivers too, but they became rockstable very fast.

[isochar]

This card is clearly not for FPS fans. Any other game it's probably the best.

That said, FPS is the dominant game-type for most gamers. I personally play a good handful of them. I was really hoping that this card would give >85fps with FAA at high resolutions. The 32-bit performance is rather disappointing across the board. I hope the sites put up 16-bit performance.

[blade-be]

*most* of your *current* games
what about doom3, ut2k3, ... ? I'm wondering how this baby is gonna perform on future games. If it can hardly keep a decent framerate with current games with the features that make this card worthwile (16x FAA, 8x aniso), how the hell is it gonna run future games at a decent level ?

[HedsSpaz]

Keep in mind that the BB's have had favorable things to say about the card, specifically that it 'plays smoother'.

Nevertheless, I must confess to being a bit concerned as well. I had hoped for a bit more than this, but as it is garaunteed to perform beter than my Kyro II at the least, I can't say that it's going to be a bad purchase. I definately miss the image quality of my G400 (which is still in my secondary system, for a little longer) and am looking forward to a return to the crisp display of a Matrox card. It's ultimately a matter of tradeoffs between quality, features, and performance. Between the features and the quality that I know I will get, slightly lower performance is acceptable to me, and of course as the drivers mature things will definately get better.

So thats my couple of cents, not that it's actually worth even one cent, but hey...

Ian

BTW, is anyone else unable to do an order lookup on their preorder? When I login to shopmatrox.com it says I have no open orders, what gives?

[isochar]

That's a valid point. As the newer generation games come out, you just slowly start taking off the extra eye candy to improve performance. The Parhelia can't even do that.

[cheesen]

hope that matrox can do somerthing about the drivers in XP.... my old G400 is 50% slower when running XP compared to ME

[Fenrir(AVA)]

I am not so sure seeing such poor performance for what the card is. The drivers with updates would only increase performance say 10_15% 20-25% if your lucky. Seems to be the card holding itself back more then anything. Just to slow compaired to everything else, and the resolution used is not optimal at all, I would say not even playable in multi-player situations if you use 1280*1024 like I do, 1600*1200 in some. I was hoping for so much more from this card, looking at the specs I thought it would deliver, what went wrong?

[Maniac]

Alot of us do not have Athlon 2100+ fully decked out system like most of the reviewers were running the tests on. I wonder how a slower system would affect Parhelia.

I must admit Matrox has some balls to be completely out of the high end gaming arena for two years, and then introdure a product that has mediocre performance at best...

[MrGaribaldi]

Originally posted by blade-be
*most* of your *current* games
what about doom3, ut2k3, ... ? I'm wondering how this baby is gonna perform on future games. If it can hardly keep a decent framerate with current games with the features that make this card worthwile (16x FAA, 8x aniso), how the hell is it gonna run future games at a decent level ?

Check Anand's review... He tested with the latest build of the ut2k3 demo with scripts specially written for testing with the P...

Besides, new games are going to use multi-textures, use shaders etc. more than current games, which won't incur such a big dent in parhelia's performance...


As for the performance, I think that getting a new hsf for the card and increasing the core speed wouldn't exactly hurt anyone... (With the exception of when you push too far...)

[moreau]

Originally posted by MrGaribaldi


Besides, new games are going to use multi-textures, use shaders etc. more than current games, which won't incur such a big dent in parhelia's performance...

I think this is where we need to look. How will the card perform in multi-textured games which are written for next gen hardware (like Parhelia, etc...)

CEM

[isochar]

UT2k3 is the first example of nextgen software and it doesn't paint a pretty picture.

[moreau]

Originally posted by isochar
UT2k3 is the first example of nextgen software and it doesn't paint a pretty picture.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1645&p=15

If that is true, then it doesn't look so good for the GF4 Ti 4600, either.

1024x768, W/Anti-Aliasing

Parhelia = 43.6
4600 = 42.8

matrox is using 16x AA while the Nvidia uses 4x.

Just a thought.

Plus, there is displacement mapping, tesselation, etc. which we have to look forward too...

personally, I'm looking forward to playing at 1024 with AA in my favorite games. even gonna try surroung gaming...

Cheers

[isochar]

Ah, but the G4 ti4600 user can turn off AA and go back over the 85fps mark. The Parhelia user turns it off and doesn't come close to going over 85fps.

[moreau]

This is implicitally encouraging:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1645&p=9

It looks like there may be something in the drivers holding the card back a little.

I wonder if anyone from Matrox can comment. Haig? Beta Boyz?

Cheers...

[Kruzin]

Of course the drivers are a factor.
They are still very young, and have much room to grow.
In just the last couple weeks of testing, we've gone through a bunch of driver builds. The difference from the first set of drivers we got to the current set we're testing has netted me almost a 5% increase in benchmarks...and that's just over a couple of weeks.