Matrox and Parhelia questions?

[Fenrir(AVA)]

I was just wondering if Matrox will put out just this one card and be gone for another 2 years, or will Matrox have a product time line similiar to Nvidia or ATI. What I mean is with the Parhelia GPU will they have updates revision, new chipsets, etc?

[Sasq]

This sounds more relevant to the crystal ball

[Fenrir(AVA)]

Any other comments, or no one knows?

[Silencer]

Hi all!

This is a great community here!

Well, I´ve read, that the Parhelia 512 is the G1000.
A few pages says, that matrox will bring out cards up to the G1600 till 1st quarter 2003.

[Greebe]

Sliencer, the G1000/G1600 was just a rumour. They are refering to Parhelia

[Silencer]

sigh.

ok... does it indicate, that no hope out there for a nv30 - parhelia competition ?

[Greebe]

There is alot of room for improvements in the drivers. ATM there has been nothing addressed but bugs and no performance optimizations as of yet.

The bugs are being nipped in the bud fast and just those have improved performance considerably since the first build (as mentioned in other threads).

[Silencer]

good point.
but, if you see the history from ATi or nVidia, you´ll see, that the drivers only push the performance around 20-30%.
I think, thats a bit too low for the parhelia to challenging the NV30.
However, I hope that they can improve the memory bandwith of the parhelia. The chip seems to be slow, but he is fully functional at 220MHz according to the white papers.

[Greebe]

Well regardless of whatever ATi or Nvidia hopes to have they are building on the same driver base for years now and thus is highly tweaked... Parhelia is designed from the ground up with a completely new set of drivers.

[Greebe]

What are you basing the low mem bandwidth issue on may I ask?

[Silencer]

I don´t know exactly.. but anandtech and JC says, that something is wrong with the bandwith.
According to the whitepapers, the memory bandwith of the parhelia should be very high (much more than a GF4 Ti4600 provides).
For me it looks like, that the Parhelia uses only 2 Pipelines active and 2 passive now. Otherwise I can´t explain the low performance.
Also I think, that the GPU is fast enough with 220MHz to handle all processes, because its based on a 512bit architecture.
However, matrox should hurry up the improvement of the performance -> RV250 (Radeon 9000) is near.

[Greebe]

Are you refering to 3Dmark2k1se build 330?

If yes then that's due to the benchmark only addressing two of the four pipes.

I'll ask JC when he's online in the morning tho

[Silencer]

No..
I refering the gpu shootout with ut2k3 @ anandtech.
Something big is wrong with the 256bit memory interface, I think.
and i think the parhelia shows only a part of its true performance, whats why I think, that only 2 Pipelines are working.
Since the first benches came out, I search for a reason, why the Parhelia is that slow and now I think, that only the memory interface or the pipes are working incorrect.

[Greebe]

Now you sound like mbrock

[Silencer]

? why?
I only want answers. matrox doesn´t give answer, so I search answers for myself.

don´t understand me false.. I like the Parhelia and I like Matrox, but I want to know, why this card is slower than a R200.