256mb Parhelia

[Mehen]

will the extra 128mbs make any significant difference besides for dual/triple head?

[Tempest]

I think it will only affect really heavy 3D scenes like those in professional 3D rendering and some yet-to-be-seen games. Nothing significant for the average user.

[Novdid]

You can run UT2003 with some extremely heavy textures that take up more space than 128MB. I think you have to edit the config filesettings to Ultrahigh. There is a cfg in the benchmark-folder with these settings if I'm not wrong.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

True NOVDID. The file is under "system" in the UT2K3 directory. I play the demo and all my settings are of "UltraHigh". But for some reason I am still getting 20-30fps on my G550 @ 640x480x32bpp. Note that i entered 20fps as "minimal desired frame" so I think somehow the game engine decided to lower the quality somewhere to fit the frames.

@Mehen: no point of getting 256MB for us "average joe" coz we are not really making use of 128MB... unless u are rendering Final Fantasy movie in real time , and other extremely heavy DCC works like making DOOM 4. Also, i don't even think the two parhelia editions differ in Dual/Triple Head config.

IMO it's not worth to get 256MB parhelia. For that price, you can get a Wildcat VP or FireGL X1 (i heard they are making 128MB SOON(TM) ). And also, instead of getting P256, you can get a new graphics card later (possibly an NV30, R350 , and hopeful a parhelia II if Matrox awakes from sleep).