Carmack on Parhelia

[BuddMan]

Why are you going to buy the 256MB version?? You will not see massive improvements from 128MB or even 64MB for that matter. The biggest improvements will be in the driver releases and overclocking the card if you decide to do so.

[xortam]

I sure would like to see Carmack expand on his comments concerning the P running Doom III. Does he mean that the P will barely run it or adequately run it and at what settings? When does this game get released?

[Marshmallowman]

Seems no current card will run doom 3 well.

I think Carmack comments really only apply to his niche..

FPS-FPS

I think DM must be a winner for any flight sims or open area type games....

Doom 3 sems to be in a closed environment, but it still has a huge hardware requirement...(what happens when programmers can't write efficient enough code...blame the hardware)

I like first person shooters, but I prefer the more open ones like Serious Sam and unreal 2k is more to my liking.

[nggalai]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram


Just curious, what does he mean by "quad based approaches"?

All current implementations of higher-order surfaces (HOS). Those implementations use quads instead of triangles, and so does the Parhelia. This makes it a bitch to use with triangle-strip-based models.

According to CNN's E3 report, DooM-III is scheduled for a Christmas 2003 shipping. Who here believes that Matrox won't tune their drivers until then?

"performance competitive" just means that it won't run D3 as fast as NV or ATi hardware, that's all. You don't know whether we're talking 30fps instead of 45fps at the release date, or 8fps instead of 30fps. We'll have to wait for the DooM3 test to find that out for sure. No need to bitch about it already now.

He says 4 texture units which is not true the card has 4 pipes 4 texture units per pipe totaling 16 texture units.

Am I missing something?

You can "only" use 4 TMUs to render one pixel (4 textures per pass), or rather: 4 pixels with four textures per pass (four pipe design) if you don't use any anisotropic filtering, on the Parhelia. This is relevant regarding destination alpha; in short, you only have 2bits available when using the Parhelia's 10bit/pixel framebuffer (10:10:10:2 / 8:8:8:8). The DooM3 engine apparently needs 8bits to work properly.

ta,
.rb

[xortam]

Thanks for the info nggalai. I suppose the test SW might be available about a month before the game is released.

Saw an interesting statement in the FiringSquad review (don't know which thread to post it in so it might as well go here):

Matrox has told us that there are parts of the Parhelia that aren’t even enabled today because of the lack of software and the Parhelia will be ready for tomorrow’s software and games as well.

[Dogbert]

I might be senile, but I think JC has access to ATI R300 and his review might be in comparison with the R300 (?)

[MK]

xortam - Yeah, i read that too. Could it be that the mediocre performance is due to the early chip & driver revision ?

MK

[Drizzt]

The man is an idiot.

(again, it must be the third time I say it)

[nggalai]

Drizzt,

I'm sorry, I haven't read your other post on that subject--but how exactly is JC an idiot?

ta,
-Sascha.rb

[tom0603]

To be honest who cares about how one game performs. I know that Doom 3 will properly be the benchmarking game for the future, but other games than FPS exist. Personally I like RTS and racing games (cars mostly) an unfortunately there doesn't exist a single decent benchmark for these games.

I reviewed a Parhelia for my own website, and I can only say I want one. I don't care about playing FPS games i just want a card with incredible 2D quality and that are fast enough for the few times i want to play a game. I would however appreciate if the price came down to perhaps 300 USD as this would make it a better choice.

Thomas

[Dogbert]

I remember that a while ago games were benched with Mercedes truck racing (?).

[Cheesekeeper]

Originally posted by MK
xortam - Yeah, i read that too. Could it be that the mediocre performance is due to the early chip & driver revision ?

MK

Quite possibly. But if the chip is part of the problem, they're screwed. By the time they get a second release Parhelia out, with a chip that's able to match NVidia, both ATI and NVidia will have their next gen chips out too.

Matrox are adament that the Parhelia will support the next generation of games - I'd like to know which next gen games they had in mind. I'd say that any from the following list are safe:

- Uncle Ken's Holiday Slideshow
- Learning to Read With Flashcards
- Pacman 2003 2D
- Sierra's Paralax Shooting Gallery

[Fenrir(AVA)]

Thats about all of the next-gen games it will run, think you got the list right. Hopefully it is not the chip but some other problem with the card. I wan Matrox to become a serious player for the 3D gamer market, I am tierd of only have just 2 real choices.

[Cheesekeeper]

Carmack has made in interesting turnaround. When the tech specs of the Parhelia we first released, he had a number of very positive things to say about it.

His most recent comments will probably seriously affect the market receives the Parhelia. No matter what anyone thinks of him as a person, Carmack is VERY influential in the 3D graphics market. His comments will not only possibly affect the decisions of consumers who are considering purchasing the card, but will also likely affect whether other game designers start directly supporting the hardware.

This release has been a PR nightmare for Matrox - they are going to need to bump up the speed in pretty short order if they want to turn it around. Whether this is via driver releases, or clock speed improvements, they will need to get some sales happening. Even if everyone on this forum were to buy a Parhelia (and at present it doesn't seem like that's going to happen), I'd doubt that would come close to coving the investment involved in designing it in the first place.........

[Drizzt]

Originally posted by nggalai
Drizzt,

I'm sorry, I haven't read your other post on that subject--but how exactly is JC an idiot?

Not too much detail in the other post 'cause my english level doesn't allow me to write too complex thougths, however:

I seem to remember me that I am a programmer.
Could it be, I'm not sure, but probably having a nice software running on about the 40% of italian medium and big companies and another specialized software sold worldwide make me qualify somehow as a programmer.

So each morning I get up, go to work and start coding.
One day, I find a piece of code that is half a second too slow.

Now, I have two way to solve the problem.
1) Optimize the code.
2) Say to da bozz: "It's not really a problem. I'm targeting the software for 2004-2005 processor and Database engines. There will be no problems on a Athlons 8000Mhz".

The results are
Case 1: nobody says me "Good Job!", simply because I've done what I'm payed for
Case 2: I'm fired.


JC is an idiot. The task of a programmer is to write code NOW , to optimize it NOW and to work with the hardware wich we have NOW.



And what really upset me is that THEY NOT WORK EVEN WITH FUTURE HARDWARE!!!!

All the use they do of a card features is Frame per seconds!!!
Morrowind is probably the first game in the last year to use a feature of a card (pixel shader) apart from the rendering engine itself!!!

Where JC has made innovation?
Where JC has made innovative effects?

SHIT!!!
A FPS is simply becoming a task for level designer and game designer.

When there was only texturing on the video cards, all the programmers wanted more texturing power. After the implementation of T&L, all that programmers want is more powerful T&L units so they can add polys.
For what are they paid, so?
"A.A.A: searching for a programmer.
Requirements: Ability to buy the most powerful cards avalaible in shops. Without coding capacities should be better."


Well, too much anger and too many thoughts flowing freely in Italian to be translated here in english.

Again, a man who say
"Why have much better colors and innovative feature like Trueform and DM on a card instead of adding more texture unit?"
is an idiot.

(a man who say that says only 2 bit color more is more than an idiot. He's a poor mathematician. THEY ARE 2 BIT MORE BUT THEY ARE THE RIGHMOST BIT!!!! IDIOT!!!)

I'm really [incazzato].