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I've heard a couple of different stories (read them actually) about the state of anisotropic filtering in the current Parhelia drivers.
Story # 1: Matrox has disabled anisotropic beyond 2x (16 tap) in the current drivers because of performance reasons. This was reported by Tech Report in its Parhelia PREview recently (the site wants to do a good review so they simply rushed out a preview on the 25th and says they'll do an in-depth later.) They said they were told this by Matrox when they asked about the fact that AF didn't work beyond 16 tap.
Story #2: I've read (in various places) that Matrox has said a driver bug is responsible for the state of AF in the current drivers and that it will be corrected to, presumably, allow up to 64-tap (8x) like everyone else.
I hate to say it but Matrox disabling or crippling certain features in the name of "performance" is nothing new. They've done that ever since their first 3D card (which I owned at the time but the name of which I have forgotten--it's on the tip of my tongue.) I believe in that instance they disabled bilinear filtering because of what they claimed at the time were "performance reasons" and substituted point sampling instead--which produced a pretty bad 3D image quality (and even with that was still quite a bit slower than what 3dfx was pushing at the time which did use bilinear filtering.) Ah, ha--"Matrox Mystique," that was it...
I sincerely hope this is not the case, however, and this is a small bug they can and will fix and that the Parhelia will still perform reasonably well at 64-tap AF (even without FAA, would be fine with me.)
Actually, I was fairly upset with Anandtech because they did not test the GF4 with 64-tap AF against the Parhelia, which is my standard operational setting in both D3d and OpenGL with my own GF4 4600. (I don't use FSAA at all because it is way too blurry on the GF4 and does a terrible job on the near verticals and horizontals which--if you'll take a good look at any given 3D frame--make up most of the lines you see there. I haven't seen great AA'ing of the near - and | since my V5 5500, although from screen shots it looks as if Matrox's FAA does a better job of them than any product I've seen since the V5. Still difficult to tell how Parhelia deals with them, though, and I've heard nothing from Matrox PR about them.)
At any rate, Anandtech said that running the GF4 with anything greater than 16-tap was too hard on performance--something I disagree with completely. Personally, I much prefer the far better visuals to some incredible frame rate that I won't even notice outside a benchmark, and what the GF4 gives me with 64-tap in performance is just fine for me. Anyway, I think he should have given us some tests of the GF4 with 64-tap AF enabled so that we could see how Parahelia stacked up against it that way (although not strictly fair to the GF4, the review was, after all, ostensibly about the Parhelia and not the GF4.)
In any event, does anyone have any definitive information about the state of AF and the Parahelia? (See?...I can't help putting an extra "a" in Parhelia for "Parahelia"--happens to me a lot...
).
Story # 1: Matrox has disabled anisotropic beyond 2x (16 tap) in the current drivers because of performance reasons. This was reported by Tech Report in its Parhelia PREview recently (the site wants to do a good review so they simply rushed out a preview on the 25th and says they'll do an in-depth later.) They said they were told this by Matrox when they asked about the fact that AF didn't work beyond 16 tap.
Story #2: I've read (in various places) that Matrox has said a driver bug is responsible for the state of AF in the current drivers and that it will be corrected to, presumably, allow up to 64-tap (8x) like everyone else.
I hate to say it but Matrox disabling or crippling certain features in the name of "performance" is nothing new. They've done that ever since their first 3D card (which I owned at the time but the name of which I have forgotten--it's on the tip of my tongue.) I believe in that instance they disabled bilinear filtering because of what they claimed at the time were "performance reasons" and substituted point sampling instead--which produced a pretty bad 3D image quality (and even with that was still quite a bit slower than what 3dfx was pushing at the time which did use bilinear filtering.) Ah, ha--"Matrox Mystique," that was it...
I sincerely hope this is not the case, however, and this is a small bug they can and will fix and that the Parhelia will still perform reasonably well at 64-tap AF (even without FAA, would be fine with me.)
Actually, I was fairly upset with Anandtech because they did not test the GF4 with 64-tap AF against the Parhelia, which is my standard operational setting in both D3d and OpenGL with my own GF4 4600. (I don't use FSAA at all because it is way too blurry on the GF4 and does a terrible job on the near verticals and horizontals which--if you'll take a good look at any given 3D frame--make up most of the lines you see there. I haven't seen great AA'ing of the near - and | since my V5 5500, although from screen shots it looks as if Matrox's FAA does a better job of them than any product I've seen since the V5. Still difficult to tell how Parhelia deals with them, though, and I've heard nothing from Matrox PR about them.)
At any rate, Anandtech said that running the GF4 with anything greater than 16-tap was too hard on performance--something I disagree with completely. Personally, I much prefer the far better visuals to some incredible frame rate that I won't even notice outside a benchmark, and what the GF4 gives me with 64-tap in performance is just fine for me. Anyway, I think he should have given us some tests of the GF4 with 64-tap AF enabled so that we could see how Parahelia stacked up against it that way (although not strictly fair to the GF4, the review was, after all, ostensibly about the Parhelia and not the GF4.)
In any event, does anyone have any definitive information about the state of AF and the Parahelia? (See?...I can't help putting an extra "a" in Parhelia for "Parahelia"--happens to me a lot...
).
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