PHA8x128 arrived today!

[az]

Oh man. Had they just released this as Parhelia MAX, and p4x as Parhelia (with lower clocked RAM to cut costs, and disabled FAA to make gamers want p8x and spare the embarassment), I guess they could have sold a bit more and what's more, keep their face and good name before the enthusiast community. They could even have made enough money to afford a bigger driver team, and maybe even... *drumroll* Linux drivers!

It's a shame.

Ah well. It was too expensive for me anyhow

AZ

[leech]

Anyone with a P8X running linux with it yet? Wondering if the hardware change still works with the drivers (for better or worse). Very interesting... This is SO temtping to upgrade to this... though then I'd have to find someone to sell my Parhelia to.....

Leech

[Wombat]

Originally posted by thop
So what caused the delay to see actual cards with the P8x?

They decided to sell out of P4s first.

[magog]

Originally posted by magog
Maybe it's time for a clean install.
I first have to backup my Divx encoding stuff (including Registry) and then I go for a clean install.

Ok, after the reinstall of XP and again with the DX9 final beta driver I'm back at the old result I posted before. Maybe the 1.04 driver is really that much better. I don't think I'll try it because it's not worth the work.

The 8xAGP version really seems to be what you want to have. Maybe I'm lucky and can sell my 4xAGP version with a good price...
but I want to see "Summer" first.

[Che Guevara]

@borat:

If you tell me some scenes in UT2003, operation flashpiont or FS2004 where the origional P faa misses edges ill run mine over the same scenes and see what extra it does and what it misses still.

Now, I don't have FS and UT2003 was one of the games FAA worked always fine for me... for OPF, FAA worked on all edges (except the bitmaps of course), but There were the typical white lines when objects stand in front or in fog, explosions or other particle effects. Not so easy to test, perhaps you have to play some time, but you can try it.

Do you have the Farcry demo? I remember that FAA had problems with the water, but it worked fine on a P-650 off another murcer.
Foggy levels of Enemy Territory and Serious Sam also were a problem.


Perhaps the issues in OPF are driver related? I didn't play it a long time ago, but I will test it with old P and latest drivers asap. Something like the long not ati-aliased border of the hill I didn't ever see with my P, the line between hill and house also should work fine I think, because the hill is in front and it is not a "line of polygon intersection" (uhm, why are all good forums in english ).


Silly question mode on:
Could the problems (not antialiased edges) have something to do with to high clocks when overclocking?

[borat]

No, the non anti aliased edges were screen dumped at reteil clocks. The mysterious white lines are gone in flashpoint, indeed it appears faa has been bug fixed in all of the games i play, but it is picking up on less jaggies than the old P did which is annoying. Ill get a copy of farcry demo and give it a whirl, but if P-650 is fine then this one should be fine too, itts basically the same chip.

[jackzod]

Where are the improvment on RSN ???
This is the real question

[Che Guevara]

@borat:

What do you think about a driver bug (last hope), all I wanted was a card with perfect FAA... will they ever release one
Anyway, testing Farcry would be good idea I think.
Did you see something like the problems in OPF in other games too?

I thought P8x is better than P4x in every way

[DGhost]

FAA will never be perfect. it is an imperfect algorithm. the only "perfect" way of doing AA is doing FSAA and to get everything.

[Che Guevara]

Every algorithm can work perfect, if it is perfect implemented. There is no thing like a general imperfect alorithm.
FAA is just the best antialiasing method today (very fast, very nice)... if it works. Let's hope that the problems of P8x are not that bad.


@borat: After all, which FAA do you think is better (with all it's problems and improvements), the original P FAA or P8x one?

[dZeus]

of course the fact that MSAA doesn't work in certain situations (alpha tested textures) also is due to the implementation of MSAA, not the theoretical functioning...

[DGhost]

no, FAA is not the best antialiasing method. from the end user standpoint, it misses a large number of things that do need to be antialiased. it has a number of technical and algorithm difficulties (such as dealing with stencil shadows, or dealing with bumpmapped surfaces). and the performance hit that you get in order to check for all sorts of unique situations will be relatively enormous - both because of the huge increase in render load caused by having more pixels to render, and also by the fact you have to determine if each polygon has to have special attention paid to it or not, etc etc.

For old apps, for Quake 3 and other games and programs that render data in a traditional fashion, it worked reasonably well - only because those applications generally do not do the sort of things that it has issues with. for the next generation of rendering techniques, it faces far too many problems and is quite simply *not* the best antialiasing method available today.

[Dead2]

Whee... I couldn't resist it, so I went out and bought a Parhelia 8x

I love this thing. This is just that little extra performance I needed.

I made a little benchmark comparison between the old and new parhelia card using otherwise an identical system:

http://mirror.circlestorm.org/parhelia/

-=Dead2=-

[thop]

WTF Parhelia only gets ~1000 3DMarks?
Not that i care much about the virtual penis length indicator, but that's really a low score. My 9600pro scratches 4000 on a good day.

[bsdgeek]

When you can't run the tests because you're DX8 instead of DX9, you tend to score low.