Parhelia review at Aces!

[Ribbit]

http://www.aceshardware.com

Doesn't make P look too good, I'm afraid...

[moreau]

[moreau]

ok,

Listen world, I get it. You don't have to produce anymore previews, reviews and shootouts showing that the Parhelia is slower than a GForce 4.

I get it.


But, please, please, please don't tell me that a card that runs above 40fps at 1600x1200x32 with 16xFAA in Q3 and JKII is "mediocre" gaming card.

End editorial...


Dr. Moreau

[moreau]

A few points:

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000263

the line graphs show all cards in this test dropping below 30fps.

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000262

jedi knight at 1600x1200 w/FSAA

[Ribbit]

I was more concerned about the aniso filtering shots. http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000268 I know the current drivers are limited to 2x, but Matrox' 2x aniso looks worse than nVidia's! What's going on there?!?

The 2D CAD results weren't exactly gratifying either. I thought this stuff was Matrox' forte. http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000270

Edit: Added links.

[GT98]

what the hell is the deal with the UT Benchmarks? I can run UT at 1600x1200 with FAAx16 on at 70-90 fps on my machine. Some of the testing seems really lame and incomplete.

[CaineTanathos]

you can with the parhelia ?, did you run the benchmark gt98, or just ingame fps ?

[CaineTanathos]

ey at 1024X786 , 96 fps(P) vs 75 fps(4600), thats like 20 percent slower. But the parhelia runs at a clock speed that is 36% slower than the 4600..., DUH.
I think this is better than in the other reviews of the parhelia.
Ok at 1600x1200 the 4600 is faster. why ? proberly because Matrox didn't optimize it , yet.

But I also read that the 228 drivers for the parhelia's only managed to get 61 fps at 1024, a little bug , but isn't the 230 also been released

Ok the renegade benchmarks:
again proberly because of the clockspeed and matrox will sqeeze some fps out with driver optimization and with and some overclocking will work too

Hmmm the renegade graph below the page is pretty weird.
the 4600 and the P has some similar results (4600 is higher yeah yeah). but the 8500 has complety different results

ok we never saw that benchmark of Nascar 2002 :d

and with Unreal Tournament 4.36 , its slowest but again the clockspeed difference

Dungeon Siege : clockspeed story, something interesting 8500 has the highest minimum fps

Warrior Kings : YEEEHA !!!!

the fps in Serious Sam: SE can be improved I think

a nice result with FableMark

CodeCreatures : nvidia promoting software, but the P beats the 8500

a pretty good review

[az]

PLEASE stop talking about clock speed.

P runs at the speed it runs at, and a 4600 runs at the speed a 4600 runs. There's NO WAY you could get a P up to 300 MHz. Well, you CAN o/c the P, but also the 4600. P is slower at the clock speed it runs stable at than a 4600 does at the clock speed it is stable at.

It's like saying "yeah, my car is slower, but if it had more horsepower, it would have been faster".

AZ

[GT98]

Originally posted by CaineTanathos
you can with the parhelia ?, did you run the benchmark gt98, or just ingame fps ?

This is in game performance playing against 6 bots on Deck16

[isochar]

Hm, did you do any tweaks GT? On my machine with everything set at high at 1280 @ 32bit I get a peak of about 74fps and an average of about 41.

[Maniac]

Oh man the P. really looks bad in that second benchmark. Its only getting 45fps while the ti4600 is getting twice the performance with up over 90fps. Normally I'd be the first to use the argument...who cares if its not getting 200fps like the Geforce... it looks way better and is still more than enough to play. However 45 is right on the border, I need 60fps to really be competitive in most online deathmatch games. With the P. I need to turn down the settings to do that, but with the Geforce I can leave it on the highest IQ.

This quote sums up the review:

"It's disappointing to see a next-generation GPU with a 256-bit memory interface pushed around by a budget GeForce 4 MX440. "

[huntley]

The Parhelia looks bad in ALL the reviews to date, not just Aces.
The strange thing is, the Xabre is getting GOOD reviews, but is a less capable card. Why is that? Price. The Xabre is realistically priced whereas the Parhelia is priced the same as the forthcoming ATI R300.
Parhelia = Radeon 9700 ? HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa !! What a joke. Actually the cruelest joke is on the poor customers who bought it at such an inflated price, my guess is that there are not too many of them.
The R300, when released, will slap the Parhelia silly.
Before release, the P was talked up a huge amount, and everyone seemed keen to get one. Impressions from "previews" were promising, but I found it strange that the P, so obviously closer to release than ATI's R300, was not chosen to power the Doom3 demo. Could it be that the R300 in it's much earlier and immature form was faster then the P? Hmmmmm.
And then the P was released, and actual benchmarks were published. Gasp! It was SLOW. And another shock - it was only clocked at 220mhz!
Something is clearly wrong here. I think that test cards must have been running at 300mhz, gave good performance and might have been worth $399. Production and stability problems made it necessary to ship the card at 220mhz where it is clearly inferior to the current generation products across a wide range of applications. The sort of application that Joe Public, Joe Businessman and Jow Gamer use. So we have a $200 card (I am being generous here when the Radeon 8500 can be had for MUCH less) being priced at $400. Didn't anyone tell the marketing people that the 300mhz card was being shipped at 220mhz? Did they forget to adjust the price to reflect this?
Don't flame me, I feel bitter and cheated. I was so looking forward to this card, I run part of a large-ish network (~500 machines) and most of the machines still have Matrox cards in them - I've been a Matrox fan since my first Millenium.
I think the P is a good card, but it's not a $400 card. Charging $400 for it is obscene.

[Cobos]

But the point Huntley is you as well as lots of other people are comparing apples to oranges. The fact that 400$ for the Parhelia is expensive is pretty much a given, wether or not it's worth it is another issue. But do you actually remember what the ATI Radeon had as a RRP at launch ? What do you know, it was actually 399$ Who in his right mind would have bought the 8500 at that price with drivers which even turned off half the features of the card.
Source: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1517&p=18
Though if you look at pricewatch you can see you can get a Parhelia bulk for 335$ and a retail one for 339$. Oh and if you wait for the 64MB that would most probably fall below the 300$ mark in street price.

Cobos

[CaineTanathos]

AZ, that is what I am trying to tell
except for the nascar benchmarks