Doom 3 and Parhelia 512

[DGhost77]

Been more than 3 years now that I have my G400 max, man I'm in love with that video card. Can't live with dual screens. When the Parhelia was released I was pretty much excited to see the features of the surround gaming (I'm a big Quake 3 fan) and I was blown away when for the first time I played Quake 3 on 3 monitors (17 inches).

I was thinking of course about buying the Parhelia for my computer until I saw the benchmarks fo 3D games. The results are good, but not THAT good. Of course Doom 3 is coming soon now and I know that the Parhelia will have the ability to run the game but the performance should be rather poor compared to the latest nvidia or Radeon. Even tough, the surround gaming feature is a strong "sex appeal" for me. I had recently (today in fact) access to a configuration file of Doom 3 (a beta version please) and checked the config file to find in it the following info:

seta r_useStandardGL "0"
seta r_useParhelia "0"
seta r_useNV20 "1"
seta r_useNV30 "0"
seta r_useGL2 "0"

As you can see in the line, Doom 3 will support the Parhelia (and the surround gaming at the same time, I hope) but what would be the performance, is it worth it to get a Parhelia for Doom 3? What are your toughts on that? If you are eagerly waiting fo Doom 3 that is.

[Tempest]

Um,

Originally posted by K6-III on 27th April 2003
I just talked to John Carmack about Parhelia performance under DoomIII.

His exact words for how it performs: "like shit".

[borat]

i dont know what the hell went on with Mr C and matrox, but he seems to have it in for them, shifting from "parhelia will be amasing" befoer it was released to "shit" now. Personally(and i have no basis for saying this other than gut instinct) i think parhelia will run it as well as it runs anything else. If your happy about how it performs with unreal and other DX8 games then it will probably run Doom 3 at a similar rate. The "shit" part of it is that it will be using a DX8 fallback path, this means parhelia wil not be rendering the nice looking DX9 bits of the game which will probably make it look amasing, it may also be the case that they bodged the fallback path so that its coded like a slow peice of turd in which case there will be nothing that you can do about it. But right now can the developers really ignore the massive base of DX8 users out there who are not upgrading any time soon?We are talking GF4, Radeon 8500 territory here, im convinced there are a lot of these users still knocking around, and the game will lose sales big time if it doesnt factor these ppl in. Like i said, ive got no backing for that, it just makes sense to me.

[SaTaN^666]

parhelia+doom III= unplayable game. Im sorry to say as much as a parhelia fan as I am, Im gonna buy a whole new system for doom 3 primarily because I plan to play the game, not struggle to see whats happeneing. parhelia performs.....horribly with frame rates of below 25 and below 10 under battle. oh and might i say...this was with all settings on LOW and a resolution of 400x300. these are some screenshots of my fps under default settings and under the completely tweaked config. 11 fps under defaults and 23 under my tweaked config, and plz remember that yes these are playable framerates BUT when in battle they decrease to 5 fps and under

[SaTaN^666]

my config

[bsdgeek]

But he made a Parhelia path? That's good news, squeezing out every last fps could make it run OK.

[SaTaN^666]

yes it does run on the parhelia. again I do love this card. but thats why Im getting a whole new system for future games, because I want to keep my parhelia and still play new games . uh I think someone said soemthing about surround gaming on the parhelia and doom 3? well I did it, but it aint pretty, the horizontal fov can be widened but not the vertical so it looks a bit squished. heres my screenshot, if anyone has done something better plz let us know.

[leech]

Originally posted by borat
If your happy about how it performs with unreal and other DX8 games then it will probably run Doom 3 at a similar rate. The "shit" part of it is that it will be using a DX8 fallback path, this means parhelia wil not be rendering the nice looking DX9 bits of the game which will probably make it look amasing, it may also be the case that they bodged the fallback path so that its coded like a slow peice of turd in which case there will be nothing that you can do about it. But right now can the developers really ignore the massive base of DX8 users out there who are not upgrading any time soon?We are talking GF4, Radeon 8500 territory here, im convinced there are a lot of these users still knocking around, and the game will lose sales big time if it doesnt factor these ppl in. Like i said, ive got no backing for that, it just makes sense to me.

Uhm, sorry to bust your bubble, but the game is NOT Direct X. It uses OpenGL as has every Quake/Doom engine since they used 3D acceleration. (Quake 1 being the first, then of course since the source code was opened for Doom 1 and 2 as well, they have now been adapted to run with OpenGL.) Since Doom 3 is still BETA code, I wouldn't necessarily doom (pun intended) any chance for the game to run decently on the Parhelia. My question is, how well does the beta run on other video cards? So no more of this "My parhelia isn't directX 9 compliant so Doom 3 won't run." crap. All of id's games have used OpenGL because Carmack is smart and creates them cross-platform. If they were DX only, then it'd be much harder to port them to Linux and Mac.

Leech

[bsdgeek]

Quite true, in fact the game is based around what a GF256 (DX7) can do, though from what has been said it uses some DX9-equivalent shaders to spice things up.

[K6-III]

John Carmack's exact comments when I asked him about Parhelia performance were that it would perform "like shit" for Doom3.

He said that there would be no optimized rendering path for the Parhelia.

Furthermore, there is a hardware bug in regards to scissor clip on the Parhelia that drops performance further...

[borat]

Originally posted by leech
Uhm, sorry to bust your bubble, but the game is NOT Direct X. It uses OpenGL as has every Quake/Doom engine since they used 3D acceleration. (Quake 1 being the first, then of course since the source code was opened for Doom 1 and 2 as well, they have now been adapted to run with OpenGL.) Since Doom 3 is still BETA code, I wouldn't necessarily doom (pun intended) any chance for the game to run decently on the Parhelia. My question is, how well does the beta run on other video cards? So no more of this "My parhelia isn't directX 9 compliant so Doom 3 won't run." crap. All of id's games have used OpenGL because Carmack is smart and creates them cross-platform. If they were DX only, then it'd be much harder to port them to Linux and Mac.

Leech

stand totally corrected. surely it will be making use of pixel/vetex shader 2.0 though, which would mean parhelia would need to fall back to 1.0?

[DGhost77]

I was expecting the parhelia to not run Doom3 ver well, I was aware of some comments of John Carmak about the Parhelia that it would run it, but not a good performance.

And yes Doom 3 is on OpenGL, DX got nothing to do with that game.

Now seeing the screenshots of Doom 3 on a Parhelia do answer what I tought, the framerate is very bad.

I guess I won't be able to run Doom 3 on surround gaming. But I still want the parhelia just to be able to run Quake 3 for the surround gaming. I'm not gonna buy 2 different video card for these 2 games. What a though choice!

[DGhost77]

Originally posted by K6-III
John Carmack's exact comments when I asked him about Parhelia performance were that it would perform "like shit" for Doom3.

He said that there would be no optimized rendering path for the Parhelia.

Furthermore, there is a hardware bug in regards to scissor clip on the Parhelia that drops performance further...

These comments from Carmak was said almost a year ago, would he say the same thing today?
Would a firmware update on the Parhelia correct the bug of scissor clip?
Since the version is in beta, yes the framerate could be improved, but how much can it be optimized?

[SaTaN^666]

u know what dghost? I might actually get 2 video cards for this lol thats a good idea. I cud get a really good agp card to run doom 3 and then a pci version of the parhelia for my good ol q3 on sg, and then switch from card to card as my primary display in settings depending on what game i want to play ....only drawback is that the pci version of parhelia lacks speed a bit, but meh. better then buying a whole new comp.

n/e thoughts about that?

[DGhost]

Uhhmmm...

yes, no, and no.

last i saw the OpenGL ICD for the Parhelia was still not good enough to make something like Doom3 worth putting the time or effort into working. hell, last time i saw the Parhelia GL stack, it had serious problems handling even a generic render path that did the same thing as Doom3.

Last I saw, the Parhelia was a no-go for Doom3.