My 10 days experience with the 9700 pro

[DGhost]

Jesus Kruzin... wtf have you been smoking?

Seriously... you are like the only person that says the Parhelia is absolutely flawless and that the drivers are perfect.... i mean... this bullshit that you are spewing as of recent has the smell of something that Matrox's PR department found one day in the bathroom...

i guess when they give you a cards for free it becomes more important to kiss ass than to see any problems that do exist...

[Helevitia]

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Kruzin

As far as BSOD's, I have never had one on public drivers, and only a few on non-public betas. My current up-time is over 2 weeks...the last time I rebooted to install new betas.

Yeah, we settled that already. You have no new information here.

Why are my FPS higher than your's in HL? Because I know how to set up the game properly.

Nice insult - too bad you're wrong. If I can't get it to run, and others can't get it to run, and Matrox can't get it to run, I doubt it's a problem at my end.

And there you go on the 60Hz bug. You blame Parhelia, then admit it's a game/XP issue. So Matrox hasn't made a work-around. Oh well. The game is almost 5 years old. They have bigger fish to fry than a now ancient game.

Really, what bigger fish? Considering how many tens of thousands of people are playing HL mods right now, it's a pretty big market. It's not like Parhelia works incredibly well with everything else.

And yes, Matrox has acknowledged the banding issue in their TS forums. And as bad as many would make this issue sound, it only happens in very specific situations. Most of the time, under normal use, there is no banding.

Okay, to fit into your description, then "normal use" must mean "2D only." My card banded whenever the 3D engine was running.

Their support is awful? What other graphics card company hosts their own TS forums, where you can count on a reply to any post from a TS rep the same day, often within an hour if you post during business hours? None.

You're misdirecting and you know it. Haig & Co. (what little company he has left) do a good, even great job. But they don't have any programmers to fix the problems.

Grow up, and stop trolling. You where once a valued member of these forums, now in my eyes, you are one of the biggest whiners. If you hate the card and company so damn much, go sign up at some nVidiot board, where you can stroke each others egos over your FPS count.

Ahh yes, I love it when somebody resorts to personal attacks, and tells me to "stop trolling." All I did was comment on the card's performance, and back this up with facts and personal experience. I don't think fps is part of some pissing contest, I just want a usable card. You know, I posted yesterday that this is a USER site, not a FAN site - you should keep that in mind. I have no loyalty towards nVidia or ATI, but I worked closely with Matrox and got burned nicely by them.

I'm done with this thread, and your constant bitching.

Cool, if you're gone, we might get back to being constructive discussion. And all this came from your overreaction to my statement (of fact) that a GF2 can outperform a P in a common situation.

[ZokesPro]

[3dfx]

Well I have had every geforce up to 4 and every radeon up to 9700, and pretty much every matrox card. So from this I can say I have a pretty non biased opinion Let me tell you what I think of the Parhelia. Ok it has some great features such as triplehead, and FAA 16x and 10 bit color but the list of features that actually work is small. I mean FAA 16x is nice when it works but 9/10 it is a menace as it creates so much screen coruption, and it doesn't alias everywhere which is annoying. a filtering method of only 2 times is abysmal and it looks horrible after using a Radeon. the performance is between a geforce 1 and a geforce 3 and for a so called next-gen card that is pretty bad. Now the banding, well what can I say but unacceptable. You pay £300 for a card and these are the kind of problems you get. £100 less you get a Radeon 9700 that does everything as well as the Parhlelia and with better perfromance and looks better when it does it. Only thing it doens't have is triple head which isn't very practical anyway, and if you really want triplehead add another PCI card. I have also found that ATI tech is just as good as Matrox now and respond to problem within a couple of weeks rather than months akin to Matrox.

[Ryu Connor]

Frequent driver updates does not equal crappy drives. Not sure where people get that idea from.

Crappy driver are drivers that don't work and require you to wait a month plus for a new driver update that still doesn't fix the problem. Can someone say Matrox?

[chaoliang]

Maybe it's better to ban all the negative comments on Parhelia and the current situation of Matrox in this forum.

[Wombat]

Umm, no. Like I said, this is a user site, not a fan site. Just because the truth is unpopular, doesn't make it any less true.

What we need is for certain people to stop taking this so personally.

[bsdgeek]

Originally posted by Wombat
What we need is for certain people to stop taking this so personally.

No doubt! People have to realize that it is criticism for COMPANY and COMPUTER HARDWARE, not a personal attack.

[thop]

I just got my out as well. I hope it isn't too late

[Tomasz]

This year has been a horrible dissapointment for Matrox. It is a shame too because with the GeForce FX fiasco, they could have really caught up a bit to nVidia had they released a high quality and fairly priced card.

The Parhelia was and is a complete and utter dissapointment and was not worth waiting three years for. The thing still costs more than a Radeon 9700 PRO but perfoms slower than a Radeon 8500, has no Windows 9x support, only supports 2x anisotropic filtering, etc. Why did they even bother with a 256bit bus? So far displacement mapping has proven to be utterly useless and will remain useless until at least the next generation (or two) of cards.

I wonder how many Parhelia cards they actually sold. With no retail presence, a very high price tag, and only niche based name recognition, I'm guessing that the number was not very high.

Frequent driver updates does not equal crappy drives. Not sure where people get that idea from.

Crappy driver are drivers that don't work and require you to wait a month plus for a new driver update that still doesn't fix the problem. Can someone say Matrox?

Yeah, seriously, atleast Ati and nVidia still actually update their drivers. The last Matrox release was two months ago.

[Gohan]

Originally posted by Wombat
[B]
Really, what bigger fish? Considering how many tens of thousands of people are playing HL mods right now, it's a pretty big market. It's not like Parhelia works incredibly well with everything else.

Yes, and only a few of this kids that playing CS have a Parhelia

[DGhost]

Yeah, but considering that the last major lan party i went to was literally giving out GeForce4 Ti4600's to the winning half life team, i wouldn't consider it a minor thing. Acctually, i take that back. Last major lan party i was at they had 9700 Pro's as prizes. it was the event before that that was giving out the GeForce4 Ti's.

of course, a lot of these people already had fairly high end cards/systems as they take the competition very seriously.

[albatorsk]

I have to agree here. I've stopped playing CS, mostly due to the fact that it was almost unplayable when I switched from a GF3 to my Parhelia. Going from a constant 99 FPS to 10-30 FPS is just not acceptable, especially not from a card that was released in 2002.

[3dfx]

In that case go back to your geforce 3 assuming you are not using the triplehead.