Parhelia performance under DoomIII per John Carmack.

[DukeP]

I have now read the opeing statement a lot of times. Still cant see how lawyers could be involved?
I mean "freedom of speech", is that just a "word of speech" now?

Just wondering..
~~DukeP~~

[NocturnDragon]

Maybe JC was under NDa and he just said too much about those problems

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Zao
DedicatedFan3D:
I don't think the Parhelia supports Palletized Textures either...

I tried to play Final Fantasy VII the other day and it complained about the hardware not supporting it.

FF7 isn't coded right. It IS just a hastily-coded conversion from the PS version, after all. It complained about the same thing with the G400, but there was a patch to the game for that. You can still play FF7, people have come up with updates to the game to fix most bugs.

[drslump]

If Carmack made Quake run with a software renderer on my 486 he sure can make Doom3 run on my Parhelia.

He's been developing the Doom3 engine for 2+ years, so or he has become very lazy or maybe he gets nice checks from nvidia and ati.
Every graphic card have its strong and weak points. He sticks to OpenGL, which is good because he have better control over what to do with each card (lower level than DirectGraphics). So he better get working on how to improve the performance on the P. or we will not only miss Doom3 but the several awesome games to come on the next years based on that engine!

ciao,
ivan

[DedicatedFan3D]

Carmack made Quake run on a 486 because it had the majority of market potential. If the Amiga were the majority, Quake and Quake2/3 would be optimized for it.

The fact is, there's no money in supporting the Parhelia because hardly anyone bought it for gaming, because it sucks as a gaming GPU. If it had come out as it was planned it would have taken a significant stake in gaming and Carmack would be programming a custom back end for Parhelia in addition to asking his entire team to make some neat modelling changes just so he could support some of the Parhelia exclusive features.

It didn't turn out that way, instead Parhelia came out a year late and performed "like shit" and he didn't have any incentive financially to do anything for it. If he instead optimizes his code to take advantage of each transistor on the 8500/9700/GeForce3/4/FX (I'm talking squeezing every last out of the 100+ million on some of them) he'll sell alot more copies of Doom3 because it is playable. If you were to tap into just the 9700 and GeForce3 owners (and all between) marketshare you are selling millions of additional units. Now consider you spend about 5000 man hours optimizing for Parhelia....that resource might only yield you only 3 or 4 hundred extra buyers AT THE MOST....so to him it's not worth it.

Parhelia owners might get him some extra saltine crackers, while the group of GeForce4 owners will buy him a new Ferarri.

(edit)
On a further note, the only way you are going to see any decent Doom3 performance is if Matrox were to develop the back end for it themselves. Which would be a smart move. nVidia offered tons of services like that to software developers back in the TNT days. It was when developers had the exact same attitude towards nVIdia that Carmack has towards Matrox now, but nVidia went ahead and helped with alot of DirectX coding and some OGL coding to get the Glide only devs to get their games out on TNT and it worked. Little by little, who ended up buying 3dfx?

People use to scoff at that too back in the day. Saying nVidia was a loser -underdog that had to resort to their own programming to get games running decently.

It is a fact that the current form of Unreal Engine, uses a texture management system entirely coded by nVidia. They gave the code to Epic prior to Unreal Tournament's launch. Tim Sweeney said it was ridiculous to manage high res textures in D3D, yet nVidia's driver team implemented the code. After the D3D renderer was released it didn't even run on nVidia hardware reliably, but it did on the G200. nVidia's code submission ended up benefitting Matrox initially. However, once UT came out nVidia did a fairly large portion of the DX7 code. In addition, it was nVidia who gave Tim Sweeney the majority of handbooks for TL implementation. In the offices of Epic, there is even a build of the Unreal Engine that used keyframing animation to utilize the original GeForce's TL engine to render animated characters instead of landscapes.

Matrox needs to do similar programming, not for triplehead but to get Parhelia's performance up.

Once I saw a Parhelia with 16x FAA beat a ti4600 with 4xfsaa in Serious Sam I knew Matrox had the goods, but they seriously blew it.

[Wombat]

And as far as Quake goes, I had a 486/DX4-133, with a Diamond Stealth 3200 VLB card, and at 320x240 I was getting 10-25 fps.

[Novdid]

Good points there, DedicatedFan!

[K6-III]

Some more info I got from talking to him yesterday:

There is no optimised Pahelia rendering path for DoomIII.

SIS Xabre better than Parhelia under DoomIII, but still slow due to software-rendered W-Buffer. Nonetheless, he says that SIS's driver guys are awesome for making it remarkably fast for software rendering.

S3 DeltaChrome nonexistant for all intents and purposes.

Another quote: "Matrox already knows they screwed up."

Per Carmack, it seems like the XabreII will be pretty competitive, as they've learned quite a bit from Xabre.

NVIDIA is far from dead.

[K6-III]

Oh yeah, per Carmack, Matrox Graphics is still profitable and alive and kicking, still working on future cards.

He blames the lack of talented 3D engineers in the industry for Matrox's problems, most of their talent having gravitated towards ATI/NVidia.

As for SIS, he says they have talent, but he doesn't really like working with them due to the fact that none of them speak decent English...

[Novdid]

hehe

[bsdgeek]

I'm quite interested in those future cards, and I hope that Matrox works with the almighty Carmack some more.

[DedicatedFan3D]

It's too bad man...

Matrox is working on future cards, but it's coming at the same relatively slow pace that they have been.

I dunno, right now I am watching Lethal Weapon 4 while typing this, and also editing an image in photoshop.

Hence, Parhelia still has some uses I suppose.

[Greebe]

@K6-III
First you distribute leaked Matrox drivers and repeatedly abuse the forum rules by doing it over and over even after you have been told to stop by myself and other Mods. Then you wanted to be a BB (like that was a real possibility because of above ie you are not trustworthy) and now that you know you can't become a BB think because your boyfriend JC (Son of GOD) gives you some (twisted) form of notoriety by using his name and flawed insight to bash Matrox.

He's a person like you and me and let me tell you he has made so many false statements and conclusions based on those misconceptions has been forced more than once to make retractions.

Solely based on his own ignorance of graphics hardware had concluded that P wouldn't be supported in the last moments before P was released.... This is dispite the fact he had promised to optimize DoomIII fot it when he had an earlier revisions of P for analysis.

What happened in the end who knows whatever for, but it certainly wreaks of payoff's and backroom mafia dealings.

This was all said and done before the first Parhelia was released, so the lack of sales as the reason for lack of support is BS.

John imho is a schmuk... and in this regard birds of a feather flock together.

It was him and the likes of [H]OCP, Anandtech and several other Pro ATI/NV sites crippled P sales with their flawed anaylsis, misconcieved conclusions and down right slanderous rhetoric.

Don't get me wrong, P has it's share of issues, but it also has strong points that greatly outweigh the trivial gamers only issues they incessently whined about.

[albatorsk]

Greebe: Have you ever considered the possibility that John Carmack might be right in his assessment of the Parhelia?

What if the early revision of the Parhelia that he received was higher clocked than the release version? That would certainly account for his change of attitude towards the P.

And yeah, sure, blame the reviewers for the abysmal sales of the Parhelia. How about blaming Matrox for putting out a sub-par graphics card?

[Sasq]

Boys...

There is always more to any given story then meets the eye.
Some people know more then others, some less. All of the necessary information to make a full comment will probably never come out.

Just remember the opposite of a truth is a lie, the opposite of a profound truth, could very well be another profound truth.

Dan