the big parhelia review conclusions thread

[mikeul]

"The card is smooth. I don't care what the benchmarks say, even on my slow system it's been a pleasure to work and play with."

700 Mhz is not exactly what I call slow...
Sure, the parhelia is smooth, no doubt about that, but it's far too expensive, especially compared to competing cards.

[Kruzin]

Obviously it's an expesive card, as Matrox cards have always been.
If it's not the card for you, that's your decision to make. Many people will buy the card for it's strong points. It does have strong points and features that are more important than benchmarks and Carmack's opinion to many of us.

[Cheesekeeper]

I'm still hoping. Matrox cards have always scored much more highly subjectively than they have in benchmarks. If we can get results of a side-by-side comparsion, saying that the Parhelia looks as smooth or smoother than the others, this would be a great thing. For accuracy, the reviewers shouldn't know which card they are looking at when they make that determination. In those cases, standard benchmarks become irrelevant (to me anyway). It would be nice to know that this would also be the case for Doom 3 and other next gen games as well, but that we can't know for some time.........

[GT98]

Originally posted by Technoid
To Much Nvidiot Thinking!

When Nvidia started to go head to head against 3Dfx they emphasised image quality over raw FPS!

They said that 30+ at 32bbp is much better than 60+ at 16bbp!

3Dfx countered with “60+ fps is the only that matter”!

3Dfx is dead now….

Nvidia started to adopt the same philosophy…

Their fans are definitely praying the FPS hymn…

Lets also consider that Nvidia is getting too big for its own britchs..they are strong arming their end manufactures (why did you see all those companies come running back to ATI after the R8500 came out) and they are even pissing in M$ cheerios with the NV2 Graphics processor pricing in the Xbox. And the driver cheating in benchmark programs. I think theres going to be some more interesting things going on down the road when it comes to Nvidia.....

[mhm]

Like so many others I really could care less about [insert any FP shooter here]. How about the upcoming SimCity 4 across 3 monitors.
Even with one monitor to be able to see all those tiny details clearly.

[TdB]

regarding the "smoothness" on the parhelia; it actually makes sense:
when I am running games, the situations that are making the framerate drop below acceptable, is always tied to the use of alpha-textures or "cut-thrugh(sp?)"-textures(explosions, smoke, clouds, and trees, etc. extreme-stress scenarios for fillrate), these framerate-drops are almost unbearable with fsaa, because these texures are render with 4 times the precision and 4(almost) times the framerate-drop, requirering 4 times the fillrate.
However the parhelia doesn´t apply 16xfaa on those textures, they are ignored because they are not polygon-edges, and would therefore not have the same lowpeaks compared to traditional fsaa, and the betaboyz seems to have 16xfaa enabled all the time, so i can see why they are saying it runs "smoother" than other cards with fsaa enabled, even though the average framerate is the same.
Simply put: 16xfaa should not give the low-peaks in framerates as normal fsaa.
this is only an educated guess, and I would love to know if I am right, betaboyz please comment.

[Nuno]

Parhelia is a nice card. I don´t understand the need to bash a card if you´re not thinking about buying one.

The P has some weak spots, namely the price (and Matrox cards didn´t use to be expensive - I think both my G200 8 Mb and G400 32 Mb DH were very good value), and the lack of memory bandwidth saving/ occlusion culling features. I was also a bit disapoint with its raw performance as I always expected to see it at least at GF4 levels.

I do use a Geforce4 Ti4400 and I´m happy with it. But I always run it with 2xAA and anisotropic filtering (8-tap), wich really slows down the performance, but still at acceptable levels. And that´s the good thing about Parhelia - turn on anisotropic filtering and FAA and it´s performing on par with a GF4 with those features on.

Triple head (more than surround gaming) is also a wonderfull feature, you really never have enough desktop space. Pair a Parhelia with 3 LCD´s and you´re on desktop (and stile) heaven.

So I wouldn´t trade my Ti4400 for a Parhelia (I really can´t aford 3 LCD, hehe) but I surely wouldn´t mind having one.

And it has something that no other card has: the Matrox touch, and you can´t beat that

So I´m waiting for Parhelia refresh, that should be a nice card (assuming Matrox will not be back to 3-year development cycles...)

Oh, and I´m glad they left headcasting out...

[typedef enum]

Let me preface my statement with the following: I have liked Matrox products for a long time, and I've been "behind them" for as long as I can remember. I've been following the Parhelia launch for quite some time, and was eagerly anticipating the results...

With that out of the way...The one thing that I believe deserves some attention is the notion that Parhelia is able to deliver a more "smooth" framerate over the competition...In other words, it has been described, in many threads, that Parhelia may deliver lower performance than, say, a Ti4600...BUT, it's more smooth.

I don't have the links sitting in front of me, but I have seen at least a handful of graphs showing the dips/increase in framerate over time, and the Parhelia was _as_ consistent as either the GF4's or 8500's. In other words, Parhelia dipped in performance in virtually the same fashion as any of the other cards...just @ a lower framerate.

If I remember correctly, I believe the game used was Serious Sam...but I've read so many reviews, I've sorta' lost track.

Anyhow, I think one has to take the performance numbers as-is. The strength of Parhelia lies in the ability to compete with the GF4's of the world when cranking up the IQ...only then, does it really shine.

The only other dissapointment, from my POV, was the lack of Anisotropic filtering selection(s). Matrox _must_ address this in the very near future, because a "2x" setting is just not acceptable, IMHO. If it ends up slowing down performance to an unacceptable level, then so be it...

[Cobos]

Just did a little bit of research...
I was a bit shocked when Firingsquad said that the 2D quality of the GF46 Leadtek card was almost as good as the Matrox card... Which of course removes one of my biggest problems with any non-Matrox card. So I went to Norways cheapest webshop and checked the prices there.
Leadtek A250 Ultra 3889,- NOK
Parhelia retail 4045,- NOK
(1 USD = 7,4 NOK)...
So in other words, you want the best 2D quality in any consumer card, be prepared to pay in the 520USD range... Here in Norway anyway

Cobos