Parhelia experiences (lengthy)

[Novdid]

The Geforces only have 350MHz RAMDACS not 400. That Weinand character bugs me... a lot!!! (I know it doesn't matter, however it's not right to missinform people. It happens in all his "reviews")

"How on earth can an ATI card support higher frequencies than an nv card... OH NOOOOO!!!" / Weinand

[Ali]

I also love this:
Memory Optimizations: Not specified (for the SiS)

yet on the next page:

Frictionless Memory Control(tm) (FMC)
An optimized memory management based on memory interleaving (2x64)

Dont they do any checking of their facts?

Ali

[DGhost]

Originally posted by CaineTanathos
DGhost, do you play Counter-strike too, could you check you if there are also fps drops.

It seems that the card has problems with opengl or better the drivers

sorry, do not play Counter Strike, i cannot comment.

i have, however, started playing EQ. the P drivers do have known issues with it, so i am waiting patiently for a new set that will, hopefully, fix it. been pondering starting an EQ-fixed driver countdown thread too... hmmm...

i did have the opportunity to try the tv output features over the weekend, as well as triple head.

DVDMax when hooked up to a TV provides the best DVD watching experience i have seen shy of a set top DVD player. it is better than the 8500 (from what i could tell) and way better than a G400MAX. the overlay controls were quite nice in getting the TV calibrated right. plus, i could do just about anything while it was playing the DVD and it would not skip frames. pretty nice.

using Clone mode with a TV as the second monitor resulted in slightly less than desirable results. standard desktop was fine, but as soon as i tried to do anything related to a game i had problems. Games would run smooth as silk on the monitor, but on the TV it would stutter, frames would be dropped, etc. kinda odd. looked very good except for the fact it looked like my G400 was doing the rendering. again, it looked fine on the monitor, just not on the TV.

using independant dual head with the TV as the second output resulted in the inability to run that uses 3d acceleration on the second head. it would render at most a seconds worth of frames and then just stop rendering, and the app would hang. this probably does not exist while it is in dual-head mode and the second output is a monitor. just when the second output is a TV.

triple head is pretty damn sexy. only tried two games so far (EQ and Q3) and i have to say it was pretty nice. i just need better monitors. i also think that i need higher speed processors for it, as EQ and the reef demo was starting to get choppy even at 2400x600. Q3 was silky smooth though.

some other random things... Max Payne seems to have problems on the P... i get a white line on the poly edges... i get the same problem in Q3 when the map has fog... also been having crashes recently when i use my fav OpenGL screen savers... kinda odd as nothing has changed...

Edit: also, thankfully, the only time it seemed to need a reboot when changing monitor setups is when going between independant display modes and non-independant display modes. i can see going from single->dual independant. i cannot see when enabling hardware motion compensation, or possibly gigacolor (as you can enable it for games without a problem).

[Vijay]

I'm having an aweful experience with the Parhelia 128MB.

It hangs in both Serious Sam and 3DMark2001SE which I wanted to run to verify stability. Quake3 and some others are okay.

I used the drivers on the CD and the latest drivers.
No use.

What I did notice is that the new drivers gave me a much lower score in VulpineGL than the old drivers.. why?

MSI 850Pro, 256MB PC800 RDRAM.
WD HDD and CD-Rom drive.

[lecter]

Serious Sam ran just fine for me...are you running it with the latest patch? Do you have 3DMark build 330? If yes, try running it with FAA disabled. Vulpine isn't a good benchmark if the card isn't a GeForce because it doesn't activate any advanced features, like vertex shaders&stuff, so the results are low whichever drivers you use. Mind that Vulpine didn't patch the benchmark when the 8500 appeared and they don't seem to have any intention of doing so now so I don't think it's a good benchmark for the P.

[Vijay]

Serious Sam with the latest patch? I don't think so.
Is it on their official website?

3DMark2001SE Build 330? Yep.. that's what I'm having.

Yep, I understand the Vulpine's limitations, but at least it works flawlessly. What I don't get it is the drastic drop in performance when I used the newer drivers.

Originally posted by lecter
Serious Sam ran just fine for me...are you running it with the latest patch? Do you have 3DMark build 330? If yes, try running it with FAA disabled. Vulpine isn't a good benchmark if the card isn't a GeForce because it doesn't activate any advanced features, like vertex shaders&stuff, so the results are low whichever drivers you use. Mind that Vulpine didn't patch the benchmark when the 8500 appeared and they don't seem to have any intention of doing so now so I don't think it's a good benchmark for the P.

[leech]

VulpineGL ran like complete and utter crap on mine. My friend's Geforce2MX beat it hands down. http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/For...ML/001408.html

[Vijay]

Okay, thanks for the info. At least that shows I'm not the only one facing that problem. The scores are pretty much liner to what I've obtained using my system compared to his.

Originally posted by leech
VulpineGL ran like complete and utter crap on mine. My friend's Geforce2MX beat it hands down. http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/For...ML/001408.html