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

[stevenscott]

sorry, but I did not know it was stil being discussed. I know it was old news, but was like a few others who were probably shocked to hear how it was ran over. Truly sorry I am, for not knowing it was so totally hashed over, I did not keep up wit this card. It is only now I have recently looked so closely and was expecting better from it. it seems like yeserday I was reading about the spying and rumors, and sneak pictures and some Chinese Expo somewhere showing a sneak at the new Matrox card, way ahead of the curve.

.... then I went looking for a card in a next major purchase (very long overdue)...hehehhe...well, this forum being one of my old stomping grounds...... I saw this thread..and well, could not help but show a new benchmark still using Matrox in it, well, it's the best Matrox card, for this purpose, in it's range. It is still filling the slot for Matrox. The price is stil very high for the card. So, it must be very good for maybe other applications I don't use, maybe CAD. Multiple monitors, maybe, but other cards do a couple monitors. But, anyways, these tests were new, the card is a whopping 1 years old. hell, my G400 is 3 years old now... and it stil pops up on some boards and forums. Still shocked 1 year! and so old news that brining it up brings....well, brings cringing...
well, at least it was near the middle of the tests, not at the bottom.... a door prize...

[Chrono_Wanderer]

No... when we say its not timely, we mean this old news. I mean... almost everybody here knows the Parhelia is a failure. Out of the blue this 1 year old thread pops back up to the top is like... eh... no offend or anything... stating the obvious.

When I saw the title of this thread I was like WTF why is this in the crystal ball... shouldn't it be in Matrox Hardware. But when I check the date I discovered that this is 1 year old and when this thread started we were still speculating about Parhelia. Keep in mind this Crystal Ball forum is used to speculate about future Matrox hardware, not to discuss any current Matrox hardware. So if you wanna complain, do it in Matrox Hardware. But then, we already have a bunch of topics repeating the same sh*t over and over again... kinda boring and out of date if you ask me.

@Mods/Ant: You are more than welcome to delete my post if I said anything I am not supposed. But I am just trying to explain...

[stevenscott]

basically, what your saying is no comparrisons are fair, because the Parhelia is 1 year old? It is included in tests, because, well because it is the premiere and latest Matrox card for the category in the comparisons tests, benchmarks...etc.... Should the Matrox Video cards be left out of all tests, just because there is not one less than 1 year old? Lock the thread? Wqaaaaa...waaa..it's not fair....
????


Look .... maybe it was timely, just because the test came one year late ?

maybe you don understand my post timing, but I don't understand why the matrox card should have been excluded from the tests results..??

Is there another Matrox card that should be used instead, kind of an 'affirmative action for video cards that woulda, should, coulda ' ???

all kidding aside, the info given was new, don't blame the messenger...

[Sasq]

as I make a mental note to increase the font size of the post date and make it flashing red...

[EFA11]

wow, I thought it was a mail glitch sending me email from the past. This thread is a year old

[capt. marvel]

well thanx ...that was rather timely ....we'll keep it in mind.

Next up.... a review of the next Matrox card will be posted in May of 2006.

[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.

[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)

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[{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.

[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

[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...