Your Parhelia gaming experiences

[theCoobler]

So far I'm not too impressed with the performance of the Parhelia. Maybe I haven't invested enough time in it, but my experience when it comes to games is not positive.

What are your experiences when it comes to gaming. Can you play your games and new demos at high settings on a resonable resolution with a playable FPS?

For me MOHAA at the highest settings resulted in 5 fps. Q3A acts weird when I have dualhead enabled and goes fullbright with 5 fps. Counterstrike seriously lags at a resolution of 1152x864 during heavy firefights. Battlefield 1942 is only playable at the lowest settings possible and UT2003 is suffering from a low framerate that affects the gameplay in the outdoor level.

Am I the only one with experiences like this? How many of you are dreaming of a GeForce 4? I'd really like to know your opinions.

System:
AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz
1 GB RAM
Creative Soundblaster PCI128
Matrox Parhelia-512
Windows XP Professional

Cheers,

Martin

[lecter]

What drivers do you have man? Because everything has been smooth for me in 1280 in UT2003 demo, BF 1942 and so on...also, you might want to disable anisotropic filering, it's not properly made yet....my gaming experience with the Parhelia has been excellent so far, you should start troubleshooting your whole system if you have such terrible speed.

[K6-III]

I would suggest a clean install to get rid of your previous drivers....

[typedef enum]

Best overall (hint...more than just performance) 3D board experience in the 5 years or so since I've been hooked to this gig...

BTW, I'm in the process of writing up an article on the Parhelia

On a sidenote, this thing has the best damn DVD quality I've seen to date.

[Cobos]

Typedef enum: Where will you post that article ? Here on the MURC forums ?

Cobos

[moreau]

My experience with Parhelia has be stellar.

Single monitor performance up to 1280x1024 32bit, High Quality, 16xAA, etc. is excellent in all games.

With the latest drivers, (and the apptimizer), the Surround Gaming experience has been better than ever. I use it in all games where it is available.

If I have a complaint, it is minor, and it is that the recommend Surround Gaming resolution is 2400x600. I've run 3072x768 successfully, though there is a tendency for frame drops.

Now, 2400x600 looks surprisingly good! That is, I think, a function of the 16x anti-aliasing. Still, I think as the hardware matures in future Parhelia offerings, it is logical that the recommended resolution for SG will increase.

Remember, we are early-adopters of new techonology. We have to expect that there will be a phase-in period for the industry. There is evidence that game makers are incorporating SG capabilities in new titles. In fact, moreso that for FPS style games, I'm awaiting the SIM-CITY, AlphaCentauri, etc. style games to give us the capability of seeing many different information types on different monitors. (map/budget/traffic) for instance. Or multiple zoom levels for fast navigation. (hope the appropriate people are listening ! )

Cheers

[P5ycho]

Too bad UT2k3 puts my parhelia pretty much down on his knees... 800*600 and still 30fps or so, i hope those drivers and some OCing get this up a lot...

[Indiana]

P5ycho, what CPU do you have. In real gameplay UT2003 tends to depend a lot more on CPU-power than on the gfx-card.
There are no real differences between a GF4Ti4600 and a Radeon8500 if you have a slower CPU.

[K6-III]

Perhaps the upcoming OC util can make us recommend 3072x768 surround gaming...

[typedef enum]

No...I won't post it here on the MURC. I'm associated with www.nvnews.net, and plan to post it there. This would mark the first non-nVidia hardware that has been reviewed on our site.

BTW, I plonked down the $$ to acquire the card. I didn't know anybody at Matrox, and had previously decided to give the Parhelia a whirl...so this isn't the case of being given a free card, and then raving about it (which is a very difficult thing for many reviewers to overcome).

[theCoobler]

I am currently reviewing the Parhelia and it will have to be returned shortly. At first I was a bit sceptic about the card. With the initial drivers the performence wasn't that good and apart from the 2D quality and the triplehead I didn't have anything good to say about the card.

However, since I have installed the new drivers and optimized a few games with the Apptimizer things run pretty smooth and I'm quite impressed by the performance. I still think the FAA-16x has too big an impact on the framerate when playing UT2003 for instance. All I need to test now is the Battlefield 1942 performance, because even after optimizing I still have a terrible low framerate.

It's good to hear that some of you are very impressed by the Parhelia and I'm also glad I took a lot of time before actually writing the review, since it will be a lot more positive than it otherwise would've been.

Do you think perfomance will keep improving with new driver versions and tools? Considering the boards specs I'd say it probably harnasses more power than it has so far utilized, or is that just me?

Thanks so far,

Martin

[P5ycho]

The cpu backing up my Parhelia is a P4 1.6 Northwood @ 2.13Ghz, with an FSB of 133Mhz, and RDRAM running @ 133Mhz also... That should be sufficient to run the game, you'd say...

Originally posted by Indiana
P5ycho, what CPU do you have. In real gameplay UT2003 tends to depend a lot more on CPU-power than on the gfx-card.
There are no real differences between a GF4Ti4600 and a Radeon8500 if you have a slower CPU.

[Wombat]

Maybe, maybe not. I've got my 1800XP+ running at stock speeds right now, and I'm definitely CPU-limited.

[K6-III]

I believe that Pixel shader and Vertex shader performance has quite a ways to improve as of yet....

Concurrently, bug fixing will eventually transition to optimization and streamlining, where we will defenitely get some performance improvements...

...and then there should also be the OC util...

[Indiana]

But it should be sufficient for fps in the 4x area.