Reasons for Parhelia's poor performance

[chhfchhf]

i consider that the not inficient manager is the most Reasons for Parhelia's poor performance.
the nVidia and ATI both have optimized control system

[efty]

Pretty bold talk from a 2 post newbie.

Honestly now, does it make a difference if the post is made by a 2 post user and a 1E99 post user? Everyone is entitled to his opinion. He is just vending out his frustration like many other parhelia users. The truth is, that the parhelia is not what was expected and certaintly not what was advertised to be. And please don't start the usual excuses about image quality etc. It is obvious that Matrox's envious image quality is at stake here.

[3dfx]

I have mixed opinion's about what joonie has said, and I can understand why he is annoyd mainly because he has spent a lot of money on a card that doesn't do what he wants. Though I think he might have put his point accross in a different way. All I can say Joonie is that the ppl on this forum are N1 and are really here to help ONE biG family ..hehe so if you are nice, you'll be treated with respect in return. Remember as Paddy said this is not a Matrox customer service forum ..hehe

Now I know the Parhelia isn't the fastest card in the world but GTA 3 is one of the worst ports I have ever had the pleasure of owning. Ok. it is a classic game but the coding is abysmal and it performs badly on most computers. Though the funny thing is that it seems to perform well on Nvidia cards My friend has a Duron 700 with a Geforce 2 Ti and it performs better on that then it does on my 1.4 gig atlon with a Radeon 9700.
As for the the memory, well I'm not sure if this is such a big issue, I'll use my friends computer as an example again, he has 256 DDR and I have 512 yet it still performs better on his.

So it seems that it was optimised for Nvidia tbh, whether Nvidia has something to do with that or Rockstar just assumed that most ppl have Nvidia cards I dont know.

[dbdg]

Re: Re: Reasons for Parhelia's poor performance

Search for a small util called MouseJail.

Cheers WyWyWyWy. Pain in the arse having to turn of my Matrox Card.

[joonie]

Originally posted by efty
Honestly now, does it make a difference if the post is made by a 2 post user and a 1E99 post user? Everyone is entitled to his opinion

Thanks efty for making my point clear.

Originally posted by 3dfx
All I can say Joonie is that the ppl on this forum are N1 and are really here to help ONE biG family

I'll try hard to be one of the helpful members of that big family

[Drizzt]

Originally posted by Paddy [MU]
This is a support site

Paddy, you've said the same bullshit twice in the same page.

[Paddy]

[Gilead]

Originally posted by joonie
1. Too many pipeline stages. Makes it easy to increase the clock for Matrox, but performance decreases.
2. Very low core clock speed.

These two statements can hardly be combined. If it was so easy for Matrox to increase clock speed, why didn't they do it? I'd even say, a fews stages more would have been better... Long pipelines are a bad idea, when we are talking about a CPU, but a GPU is different, since a GPU does not have to care about branches and loops which can impact performance in long pipelines. A GPU can pump pixels through its pipelines no matter what.

3. No efficient memory manager in Parhelia

Well, the Parhelia does not need to be as efficient as other GPUs, considering its raw bandwidth.

IMHO the only reason for Parhelia falling behind e.g. GeForce4 is the clock speed alone. If Matrox had been able to add some 50 MHz, it would have been a top performer which - in combination with its rendering quality - could have ruled the 3D graphics market for a few months.

The Parhelia still has got its qualities, even if it does not deliver top frame rates. Matrox did quite some work - the leap from the G400 is remarkable. If they can continue that work, the next Matrox GPU should be quite impressive. Think of a Parhelia with the integer pixel pipes replaced by floating point ones and a higher clock rate. This chip would have to be released within the next months, however...

[WyWyWyWy]

Originally posted by Gilead
IMHO the only reason for Parhelia falling behind e.g. GeForce4 is the clock speed alone. If Matrox had been able to add some 50 MHz, it would have been a top performer which - in combination with its rendering quality - could have ruled the 3D graphics market for a few months.

No... Itchi has overclocked the P more than 50Mhz, it still is slower than GeForce (quite a lot). It needs 300MHz core and better (optmised) driver I think.

[mdhome]

Originally posted by WyWyWyWy
No... Itchi has overclocked the P more than 50Mhz, it still is slower than GeForce (quite a lot). It needs 300MHz core and better (optmised) driver I think.

Hello Wayne. I think it also needs some internal optimizing. However, Gilead is right. The Parhelia is a corker of a card for Matrox to comeback to. It a shame its missing those finishing touches.

Regards Michael

[joonie]

Originally posted by Gilead
These two statements can hardly be combined. If it was so easy for Matrox to increase clock speed, why didn't they do it?

Well, they clocked RAM high enough, but as for the core clock, which is harder to overclock, they must've had a problem, with all the features Parhelia has. (ex.1giga color, FAA16x ect).
If they wanted to have higher core clock, they should have made it through 0.13micron. Parhelia has had enough considering the size of the chipset. (it's one of the largest chipsets)

Also, too many PIPELINE STAGES are one of the reasons, because as the tasks get heavier and if there are many of them having to go through the stages, then it becomes slow.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by joonie
Also, too many PIPELINE STAGES are one of the reasons, because as the tasks get heavier and if there are many of them having to go through the stages, then it becomes slow.

Methinks you should hit the books some more. Pipeline stages generally correspond to <I>higher</I> clock speeds. There's a lot more going on here.

[Nuno]

IMHO, I don´t think joonie is trolling in any way. His points are reasonable and valid.

We all know Parhelia is underperforming if we take a look at its specs and price.

Still, I do think Parhelia is an amazing engeneering feat for Matrox if you take on account the amount of resources they have comparing with Nvidia and ATI. But that´s another story.

Why Parhelia performs under par on 3d?
Its clock speeds are only modest, and that´s a big part of it.
They shoud have some bandwidth saving features, as memory will always be the bottleneck of IMR chips. It´s almost nonsense designing a 256bit memory interface (expensive, double pin count - I wonder if this isn´t one of the issues preventing higher clock speeds) and not bothering optimizing it - a 128 bit bus with some well implemented bandwidth savings is almost as effective and much cheaper.
Quad texturing units is just dumb, ATI did that mistake with the original Radeon with 3 texturing units per pipeline, but did fix it with the 8500. Why? It´s a loose/loose situation. Most of the time, the units are just iddle - with a dual-textured game 50% of the units are doing nothing. And if by any chance a game makes heavy use of multitexturing, almost certainly there isn´t enough memory bandwidth to feed all the units. a 8x1 design would be much more effective, or if they really want to have all those texture units, a 8x2. A 4x4 design is waste of die space.

The next card from Matrox? Something based on the Parhelia, because a complete redesign should be out of question.
- 0.13u - shouldn´t be difficult in the next months.
- 300-350 core clock - bare minimum.
- 4x2 architecture - rip off those useless texturing units. Save die space. A R3x0 is a 8x1 design and a NV30 is a 4x2, why all the overkill?
- DX 9 support - the P already has some
- Memory bandwidth savings.
- Maybe some silicon tweaks on texture and fetcher caches

Now that would be nice

[TdB]

with a dual-textured game 50% of the units are doing nothing.

I thought they were doing trilinear filtering for free, whe quadtexturing wasn´t used by the game


hey!!! post #1111

[Drizzt]

Just my two cents:
Parhelia is the fastest and smartest card out there.
Programmers are not.