How to hurt matrox if your unhappy - suggestions

[sparky001]

Yeah. Over here in Australia we have the DOL (I Think you guys call it 'welfare' - money the gov give you for being unemployed) We also have a policy where by if you have been on the DOL for more than 6 months then you could be sent of to 'Work for the DOL' ie they send you to clean up parks and playgrounds and stuff.

In canada they should have 'Work for Matrox'.
What the unemployment rate in Canada.

Or tap an unused resorce - illegal immigrants.

[bsdgeek]

Err, well Matrox could have a competition or something. Write VS2/DX9 drivers and you get a free Parhelia?

There might be some Parhelia user out there willing to write them. (I would volunteer, but I wouldn't know WTF I'm doing. )

P.S. I still think Parhelia could have a chance in the mainstream market if price was cut to $199 in some sort of limited blowout. Would probably bring in a lot of revenue, even if not profit (not to mention recouping all that R&D) it's better than just sitting on the shelves.

[Tomasz]

Err, well Matrox could have a competition or something. Write VS2/DX9 drivers and you get a free Parhelia?

That would be a very good deal for Matrox
However, it is probably hard to find a programmer in the general public that has access to the Parhelia chip documentation

P.S. I still think Parhelia could have a chance in the mainstream market if price was cut to $199 in some sort of limited blowout. Would probably bring in a lot of revenue, even if not profit (not to mention recouping all that R&D) it's better than just sitting on the shelves.

Yeah, the price of the Parhelia has not dropped a penny at Newegg since its release. It was $354 at Newegg over a year ago and is still $354. Even when cards like the Radeon 9700 Pro dropped in price, the Parhelia did not budge. It is as if Matrox is still living in a dream world.

Right now, if Matrox wants to keep any part of the consumer desktop market they should drop their prices.

They should release a refresh of the Parhelia with AGP 8x, no banding, improved FAA-16x algorithm, slight clockspeed boost (e.g., 250/625), Pixel Shader 2.0 and Vertex Shader 2.0 (with driver support), and at least 8x anisotropic filtering for $249-$299.

As you said the old, version 1 Parhelias should be sold at $199 or maybe even as high as $229.

Then the old oem Parhelia should go down to $169-$189.

Finally, the P650 and P750 should be priced as the mainstream cards that they are:
P650 should cost no more than $89-$109.
P750 should cost about $129-$149.

I think that these are still relatively reasonable prices, moreso than Matrox's prices are now.

[XHotKolaX]

My watercooled P runs at 250MHz core. I think it needs quite a bit more speed than that.

[Tomasz]

Originally posted by XHotKolaX
My watercooled P runs at 250MHz core. I think it needs quite a bit more speed than that.

Yeah, it probably does, but I don't know if it is feasible for Matrox at the moment. From the recent +/- 10% retail clocks fiasco, it seems as if they are having enough problems reaching 220 MHz at the moment.

Another major feature (or problem) of the Parhelia is that they optimized it for multitexturing using an unconventional 4x4 design. Performance would be greatly improved if they increased the number of pixel pipelines to 8. Probably the easiest way to do this would be just to add some more parallelism to the chip and make it an 8x4 architecture. In order to get space on the chip for this, I would remove the, as of now useless, displacement mapping components.

I think that an 8x4 Parhelia running at 250 MHz (maybe 220 MHz would be more realistic) would be a very competitive chip.

Remember that this is all speculation and wishful thinking on my part.

[jeanlucpikachu]

I'm not some raving Linux zealot, but maybe Matrox should consider open sourcing some of their drivers?

What do they have to lose?

[borat]

Originally posted by jeanlucpikachu
I'm not some raving Linux zealot, but maybe Matrox should consider open sourcing some of their drivers?

What do they have to lose?

a bunch of winging customers who keep anoying them saying - "my open source driver doesnt work, please fix it". plus by the static nature of the management in the company they would never endorse such a radical decision.

[albatorsk]

Originally posted by borat
a bunch of winging customers who keep anoying them saying - "my open source driver doesnt work, please fix it".

How is that different from the current situation?

[Indiana]

Originally posted by Greebe

but then again we also had wonderfully optimistic reviews by the likes of the big three industry sellouts

Let me guess: That would be
- Tom's Hardware Crap
- [S]hitOCP
- and AnalTech
?

[Ryu Connor]

Let me guess: That would be
- Tom's Hardware Crap
- [S]hitOCP
- and AnalTech

Well, hell, at this point it seems the negative and "malicious" reviews did the population a favor. As everyone who still has a Parheila is taking it in the rear without the lube: uncompetitive performance, incomplete AF, compatibility plagued FAA, no DirectX 9 compliant drivers despite the features, banding, clock speed variance, slow driver updates, driver compatiblity issues, does this list actually stop somewhere?

The clock speed issue is the most hilarious one to me. With Haig talking about he hopes they never advertise clock speed again. Here's a pointer, build a product that can actually yield at the rated speed and like your competitors you'll actually be able to provide cards at their rated speeds. Not that this is an issue anymore, since the company has returned to hiding clock speed and is aiming at markets that don't care.

I do find it kind of funny that some reviews of the Parhelia are considered a sellout. The card never justified it's price for game playing, which is the criteria it was judged on. Consequently the audience of the said review sites aren't going to pay the sort of money Parhelia cost for a third rate gaming product, because all they're interested in is the frame rates.

The sites catered to their audience and gave them exactly what that audience desired. All the frill on the Parhelia was irrelevant and remains irrelevant. This doesn't even touch on the fact that Carmack bagged on Parhelia for being such a poor performer. That alone probably killed more sales than any review did.

In the end though due to Matrox's inability to support the Parhelia it seems everyone who avoided the card got the last laugh.

Now Matrox is shifting market focus and screwing the last of the gamers they've got, which really won't hurt them. If they release a product that kicks ass instead of blows chunks it will have everyone crawling back no matter how bad they screwed people over with Parhelia.

With the change of market focus though, that's hardly a credible scenario as they'll never try again to win it big in the broader market. Matrox lack the big steel cajones necessary to play in the broader markets; if they had those they wouldn't be whining about clock speed. They'll forever remain a niche player.

[Nicram]

After one yar of Parhelia go out I still didn't write the article about it for my website about Matrox cards. Becouse 1) i can't show ppl the things, that matrox say that are in card, but they don't work (disablede features in drivers) & I can't say anything good about the framereate in many things (Like 3dmax). So i can't write article. I will not lie ppl that this is great card, they should go & buy it, when there are many better cards for them.. even in business, video, 3d

[Che Guevara]

Haig said:
'Not to pour salt on the wound borat but technically speaking, the product spec never said anything about DX9 shaders, only the chip spec did.

We've been thru this with some of you folks before where there is a chip spec and there is a product spec.

Parhelia product spec said DX8.1 hardware. Our chip spec could have said DX10 but so what, the product itself will not get you DX10.'



Now, I'm not happy about the situation, but that's a good argument I think.

In fact we cannot buy a p-512 chip like it is in the white papers, we can just buy a Parhelia 128 card like it is in the product pages...

@Ryu Connor
That's a good one .
the Parhelia performance is good (and becoming better and better with new games), the AF in fact isn't incomplete, the FAA is not always working perfect but normally it does and then nothing could compare, there's banding on all actual gpus too and the Matrox drivers are the best I ever used (nVidias are uncomfortable and ATIs are just catastrophal)