Parhelia's gonna be lame (not MY opinion, but Tom's)

[RichL]

/Me dons flame-retardent underpants...

Some of the preveiws I've read have drawn comparisons between the G400 and the Parhelia.
IE : Lots of hype at the launch, 2 month wait for the actual hardware to ship, poor OpenGL drivers and something faster was out in a few weeks. (Or so I'm told. I didnt have an interest at the time)

I suppose its fair to say many of the grizzled old reviewers out there are remembering the above and without samples to benchmark are sticking with the popular thought of the masses : NVidia have been king of the FPS for a long time, while Matrox was king for a few months.

I do fear that NVidia or ATI will bring out a faster card not long after the Parhelia ships, but so what?

I bought my G400Max when they were still speed kings and it's lasted me until now. I'll probably look seriously at a Parhelia as soon as my next upgrade rolls around, and expect that to last me a good few years too.

I had an ATI Radeon 7000VE, and while it was as quick as my G400Max, the drivers were complete crap and caused me no end of problems. Matrox might not be the quickest, but I've never had a Matrox driver that actually crashed my system.

[CaineTanathos]

ehehe

[SoBizarre]

Originally posted by CaineTanathos
this one wrote the parhelia article on Tomshardware.com

Lars Weinand - Contributing Editor
lars@tomshardware.com

Flame him
the conclusion sucked indeed

Lars Weinand, who is believed to be "Tha #1" among web journalists - at the party, celebrating the publishing of his latest masterpiece:

[Evildead666]

I understood that they couldn't make any real conclusions since there is no test silicon to benchmark against the other cards.
He rightly said that most cards look gobsmacking on paper, but when it hits the streets, it usually performs less good...
And he mentioned that due to the fact that there xwas no test cards about yet, then Nv and Ati might just be able to repeat the G400 thingy, and bring out some quick 'Matrox Busters'....

Whether it will be so or not, you can't judge or review a card based only on the specs.

When test cards are available, then Tom's will test it.

I will wait for real world tests to see how it fares aginst the like of the Ge4 (how many times better it is...) and the other cards.

rules!

[Joel]

And he mentioned that due to the fact that there xwas no test cards about yet, then Nv and Ati might just be able to repeat the G400 thingy, and bring out some quick 'Matrox Busters'....

I have no doubt that they will come out with a card that can do faster frame rates than parhelia in Q3. But while all these people are concentrating on that fact I will be playing UT2003 in trihead mode with all the eye candy cranked to the max while maintaining good frame rates. Tim Sweeny (not sure if I spelled that correctly) has already seen the card in action and he says that frames rates were good on the parhelia even with all the eye candy turned on and in trihead mode. And remember he was looking at an aplha board.

Joel

[rugger]

Actually

I find it rather ironic,

Almost everyone spends 95% of the time using about 10-15%(the 2d part) of a graphics core, but reviews always focus almost completely on the other 85-90% (the 3d part) of the graphics core.

And then reviewers dump on a card because the of 3d part (which IMO is the best ever done) while almost totally neglecting that the part we spend 95% of the time using is several times better than the competition have ever produced.

[stevenscott]

I didn't read al the post about Parhelia but am scared (very scared) of going through the G400 fiasco all over again..... I don't need that,,, nope..not at all...
had Matrox only treated us better.... too late now...

[Joel]

What G400 fiasco??? The one about Matrox having a hard time keeping up with the very high demand for the card. If you are going to make that kind of statement you should clarify what you are talking about.

Joel

[{PainCresT}DAn]

Well I've every post on this thread and there are a lot of good points made and I agree with them but I was think about the "if I don't have the free silicon in my hands" stuff and I would like to mention one thing which is;

-Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Matrox a privatly own company that doesn't cater to investors (which also means that they don't have infinite cash like bigger companies), if so and being that they spent 2 years developing this card from the groud up wouldn't it be kinda stupid if they didn't even try to get frame rates at descent level (85 fps +).

-Being that they have been developing this card for the last 2 years wouldn't they try to analyse what the market will bring in the future and doing this analysis wouldn't they get some figures that would allow them to make sure that they are building a chip with some growth capabilities.

-I do have to mention one thing that may piss me off being that I'm a AMD guy, but Intel is the fastest why? they have memory bandwidth (I do have to give credit where it is due ). If memory bandwidth has made a hampered IPC/Hz (P4)proccessor outperform a high IPC/Hz (AMD, and don't start that technical bs that there are better IPC proccessors than the AMD I'm talking about CPU's that "normal" people can afford... P4$$$...well I guess I mean CPU's that can run COTS=Commen off the Shelf software) proccessor only buy adding more memory bandwidth, wouldn't be safe to assume that having almost 2x the bandwidth would equal better performance.

BTW did I mention that ATI may have great hardware but if a product is older than its current product it looses priority in driver development and Nvidia... quoting a previous quote Matrox has problems with drivers... Detornator 23.11 is all I have to say and they were official... that was bs if I coudl ever say anything is BS...
Oh and I have a Matrox Mistique 2MB PCI about 7 years old and I can install XP and it will work... enough said.

[rugger]

Actually,

The K5 and the cyrix 686mx have the best IPC's in the X86 world

Not that that answers any of your questions though

My answer to your question is: The Parhellia will be fast I probably won't come with drivers that are as quick as the Nvidia Detonators, but it will be better at higher resolutions and more graphics effects.

[Ssin]

Just read through the article. I like it when XBitlab mentions that : "The PC enthusiasts are not so numerous in general, and those of them who pay attention not to the fps rate in Quake3, but to the rich additional features and image quality in the first place are very few." .... That's the very reason why websites such as XBit exist. Secondly visual quality and rich features IS why ppl buy 3D gaming cards. Those guys forgot that industry -some time ago- moved from 16bits to 32 bits, EMBM is now a feature boasted by almost every decent 3D cards, DualHead is nowadays must if a card vendor wants to enter the VGA cards arena.

"As for professional application, which I considered the most suitable for parhelia-512 once I saw the specs, everything will depend on the software quality, on the drivers for professional applications (such as ELSA drivers for Quadro, for instance). And Matrox has never been very successful at writing drivers. However, everything may change this time, though I will not believe it until I see the tests results. Of course, there is also a group of professional users requiring excellent 2D quality (such as editors, for instance), but do they really need such a powerful 3D then?" --> Did they shoot themselves in the foot or what?? this doesn't make any sense.. I prefer waiting long time to have decent perfectly stable and working drivers than having to install unofficial betas (meaning the quality is beta but it's simply released as "working") every 2 weeks and having my computer crashes every 30 mins because the its not compatible with the IRQ being used by my soundcard!

Also another website saying that Matrox are making themselves a niche market. If professional is a niche market then I'd gladly be hung! I think those ppl live their live sticked in front of their computer screen and don't get to see the outside world very often. Game market is niche market. Nvidia and ATI do know that, thats why they strive to make deals with OEMs selling alot of GPU's to Compaq, Dells, HP, IBM, Nintendo, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. Matrox also knows that and they do have a really good place in the market, they also sell chips to those very same OEMs but their chips are soldered on mid-level to high-level workstations, not entry level.

Just making sure that those websites are not spreading disinformation too wildly

[jojolimited]

I still think the new Parhelia will be a hit among the Video Editing and composting folks. Even if it only has 2bit alpha in 10bit mode. Triple head will be extemely useful for large editing and compositing projects. The G550 is currently being used in high end systems from Media100 and Boxx technologies. The 3D needs of these groups are very different than the game enthusiasts. HiRes 30fps is considered excellent (real time preview in video speak). Preview ,color accuracy and display quality are of utmost importance.
If Matrox co-ordinates with its video division and 3rd party multimedia companies, it will be a big win where it counts, in quality. Nvidia is considered the worst card to get when doing these tasks. Their 2D color is still a distant third.

BTW, Toms has turned into an Intel wh**e also.

[jojolimited]

Just one more thing.

There are far more people using things like PhotoShop, Premier, Vegas Video, and other Multimedia creation software than there are gamers on the PC.

[Ssin]

That's exactly what I meant. Websites like THG (and I agree with alot of you guys out there, he's a turncoat -well at least his website looks like it-), HardOcp and so on focus on the gaming market and then all of the sudden they go tell their visitors that professional market is a niche market... As computer vendor, I can tell you guys only 1/10 or 1/12 of my customers do buy a PC for gaming purposes... the rest is for professional needs. RL gamers buy PS2, XBox, whatever. You don't want to spend 1000-1200 euros in a box just to have it sit there and play games at your whim... you want it to be profitable till your last cents! (well my opinion)

[stevenscott]

Well, I have looked in Parhelia, and looked at the comparrisons, and well, sorry but I will go with the Radeon 9700 pro, even though the Radeon 9800 is out now. if you look at the comparrisons, the Matrox card has been ran over, big time. It fel very far behing in performance. With al the ype, at the time it was released, andlong befor eit, it sounded like it was the best ever. Now, it's not even close, no where close. MY last 2 cards I bought new were Matrox. So, it hurts, but I wil get over it and move on. Go back to the web sites with the articles and tests. They are not made up. Sometimes loyalties can be a disadvantage. Don't blame the messenger.