How many of you are gonna buy the P8x?

[Unicron]

How many MURCERS are gonna buy the P8X?

[GNEP]

Sorry already have a P128 4x - and this will remain in my 2d workstation but now I am planning on building (a) a separate HTPC (probably use the G450 if I can get it back off my brother...) and (b) a separate gaming PC which will probably involve either an nVidia or ATi GPU along with a meaty processor...

I have, with maturation of income, kind of decided that I may as well have horses for courses - e.g. the working PC will be kept as remote as possible from the web/network but the others I mind less about - although that leaves open the possibility of another purely email/surfing machine

Have too many PCs? Never!

[DentyCracker]

As I mentionefd elsewhere if I can get a suck erm buyer for my P then I'm on it

[UtwigMU]

Considering bulk 4x is 380 Euros new, I got mine for 240, if I could resell it for 250 (same price or slight profit) and pay price difference to get 8X...

[xortam]

I might be tempted if it could run Doom3 properly. No? ... Never mind.

[Nappe1]

yep, as soon as I'll get money together, I'll be (at last) getting Parhelia.


(most likely I am the rare ones moving from 9700 non-pro to Parhelia, but I can't help it... I don't play so much new games anymore and most of games I do play, has Surround Gaming support, so most likely getting few more monitors isn't an option, but more like requirement. Besides, I hyped it soooo much back on those days that I just can't skip it. )

[Che Guevara]

@xortam: The support is another point, but performance of P8x could be enough I think, Doom 3 uses less polygons and more textures, which is good for the P.

I planned to buy one, but since borat mentioned some issues with FAA (works without problems, but not as nice as former in OPF), I'm not sure. If it is just driver related or something like that, I will hunt one down .

Just this Dx9 beta drivers are...

[xortam]

Originally posted by Che Guevara
... The support is another point, but performance of P8x could be enough I think ...

I'm not going to buy my once every five years 3D card and have it just good enough.

[DGhost]

Originally posted by Che Guevara
@xortam: The support is another point, but performance of P8x could be enough I think, Doom 3 uses less polygons and more textures, which is good for the P.

I planned to buy one, but since borat mentioned some issues with FAA (works without problems, but not as nice as former in OPF), I'm not sure. If it is just driver related or something like that, I will hunt one down .

Just this Dx9 beta drivers are...

Last I checked Doom3 was running an reasonably number of polys in the scene, upwards of 120k polys in some scenes. And to boot it has to render the scene to the z-buffer first, and then render it again for the textures and shadows. It is *very* fillrate intensive, a fact that is only made worse by the fact it requires 7-8 textures per polys. the next generation NVidia cards are going to scream on it because of the fact they can render 2 * the number of pipelines to the z-buffer, something that will help the fillrate intensive render process a little by speeding up the non-textured stage where you render the scene to the z-buffer. it should decrease the performance penalty incurred by having to render the shadows greatly.

of course, there is still the fact that the Parhelia OpenGL drivers could not address "virtual" textures like both NVidia and ATI can, and that their Pixel Shaders are lacking any of the newer features that would enable you to do all the texturing and lighting in a single render pass. Those both impact performance a fair amount on the Parhelia, making it in essence the same as a suped up GeForce4.

I have to say I have been interested in laying my hands on the Parhelia to see how the bug fixed core handles the code I used to try to throw at it, and if the problems that used to exist are simply bad drivers as was suspected or were acctually a major core problem. its texturing abilities were what could have given it an edge over the previous generation of graphics cards. However, I think that for the cost it would just be worth it to skip it and buy another manufacturers next gen card instead.

[VJ]

Well, I haven't voted, as I don't agree with the statement... my vote would be 'no', but not because it is too late, but because I have a Parhelia 128MB... And I hardly think it is worth the upgrade...


Jörg

[Ribbit]

I know I'm always saying this, but I want to see some proper open-source support from Matrox first, like back in the Mil1->G400 days. Not that I think it's going to happen any time soon.

Just bought a FireGL 8800 off eBay (hasn't arrived yet), so unless its display quality turns out to be awful I think it will keep me happy until something comes out which I want to get.

[KeiFront]

No, not worth the money atm. There are currently much better/cheaper cards out with proper 3D (directx 9, non-buggy drivers, etc) and linux support.

[The PIT]

If it was around £120 I may consider it.

[WayneHu]

The GeForce 6800 Non-Ultra version's first release price will be $299 with 2 Dual-Link DVI support (if I am not wrong). In addition, the performance and useful features are no worse than current $300 ~ $500 workstation level graphics cards.

Thus I have no idea how come the target price of Parhelia 8x-128 is still more than $300 ? I feel its reasonable price should be around $200~220. For P750, it should be around $150~160, and $90~100 for P650. For G550, it should have been already around $50.

Although Matrox product's quality is good, but it does not worth that much any more against the competitions from ATi and nVidia. Don't tell me the Parhelia chipset is more expensive than ATi R350 or nVidia NV35. Or the passive components on Matrox cards cost $100 dolloars more than Radeon 9800 or GF-FX 5900...

[gpremec]

I already have a Parhelia128 AGP 4x. It is tempting to get my hands on 8X model, but I don't need two Pahelias.

Defenetly too late for me.