The More I Read About This GPU The More I Want One

[flee]

Come on Matrox release the card alreadly. The features alone have me sold.

[Novdid]

Well the same story works with me to.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Buying....

I will get it only if it has HeadCasting lol

[ALBPM]

Oh!! No!!

He wants to Disgrace and Cheapen the Parhelia-512 with Arse Casting

Go stand in the corner with Dan Woods.... ROFLMAO!!!!!!

Paul

[Dr Mordrid]

Wow.....after all the effort I went through to forget that name you had to go and dredge it up

Dr. Mordrid

[xortam]

Speaking of which ... I haven't seen Casey Jones pipe in yet.

[EvilDonnyboy]

Funny, the more i read about Parhelia 512, the less i wanted it. I own an 8500 (and spend a good deal of money on it months ago). If i was to buy another crazy expensive video card, i'd expect it to be a *very* large improvement over my old video card. My 8500 has support for PS1.4, Parhelia won't. My 8500 does 128X (thats the equivilant 512tap!!) anisotrpic filtering with next to no performance decrease.

I expected Parhelia to surpass the card in both those area's. No DX9.0 compliance. It does do 16tap aniso for free (only with double texturing though), but is a ways off the 8500's 512tap equivilant anisotropy.

It's still an appealing card, but I guess I had my expectations too high. I'll wait for a future version of Parhelia with DX9.0 compliance.

[DuRaNgO]

[The_King]

Originally posted by EvilDonnyboy
..... My 8500 has support for PS1.4.....

...and??

[ravalox]

Small blurb from an article on C|Net's news.com today...

Matrox will ship Parhelia-512 cards in early July. Pricing has not been finalized, but 128MB cards are expected to cost approximately $400.

[EvilDonnyboy]

There will in fact be some games that use the 8500's fragment shader (NWO). The Parhelia will not be able to take advantage of those features in those games.

Of course PS 2.0 will replace PS 1.4 quite soon. Though the Parhelia as it is now is only "compliant" with PS 2.0.

[Jammrock]

It is "only compliant" because PS 2.0 isn't "official" until DX9 becomes officially available.

The Parhelia has by far more features than the ATi 8500. And although it is not completely DX9 compatible (even though DX9 isn't out), it has a lot more DX9 features than the 8500

Jammrock

[frankymail]

About Aniso: I have to agree that the Radeon 8500 has the best aniso output of all curretly available cards, but that is because all the other available cards are limited... take the competing high-end card (GeForce 4 Ti): the max aniso is 8x... quality isn'T that bad, but you can still see the "cut-lines"... and enabling Aniso on the G4Ti disable the second texturing unit of each pixel pipeline... so enabling Aniso on a GeForce 4 Ti isn'T worth it like on the Radeon 8k5 as you get only 1/3 of the performance you get without aniso... Also, you all know that nVIDIA cuts corners (quality) to get more speed... so their 8x aniso is somethign like a good 4x.

So, Parhelia will ONLY have 16x aniso... (good quality): so what? man, maybe if you're playing at 1600x1200 with blocky square-patterned textures you'll be able to tell the difference using Photoshop... but while you'll be doing that i'll be enjoying some UT2003 surround gaming with 16x FAA, 16x aniso, 40-bits colors and some nude chicks skins


IMO, Parhelia's Features will be MORE than sufficient for quite a few months... man, the cards will be way to slow to play the games that will use all of its features...

Anyway, GN to you guys; c ya tamara marnin'