Carmack on Parhelia

[Galvin]

He says 4 texture units which is not true the card has 4 pipes 4 texture units per pipe totaling 16 texture units.

Am I missing something?

[isochar]

The most disappointing issue is that he tried to create a scenario where the Parhelia would win, but the GF4 beat it.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Displacement mapping. Sigh. I am disappointed that the industry is still
pursuing any quad based approaches. Haven't we learned from the stellar
success of 3DO, Saturn, and NV1 that quads really suck? In any case, we can't
use any geometry amplification scheme (including ATI's truform) in conjunction
with stencil shadow volumes.

Just curious, what does he mean by "quad based approaches"?

[P5ycho]

Well this Carmack statement was the thing that made me cancel my pre order. I'm sorry Matrox, I'd love to buy one but i'm not going to spend €560 on a card without knowing i can have it in my rig at least 2 years. Guess i'll wait another 3 months and see what's the status of things then.

[Mad Maxtrox]

Don't get me wrong. I know that JC is knowable about his product and the reguirements to make his massive product work work smoothly, but NO ONE knows yet what the shipping product and drivers will be like!!!

Just relax, let the board hit the channel, let the drivers get optimized and you will be pleased.

Matrox WILL return... SOON

[Mumrik]

I concider Carmack to be quite objective in his evaluations and this will really really hurt Matrox. No single person's word carries as much weight as JC's when it comes to 3D graphics.

This truly is sad news for Matrox, lagging performance in UT2003 and lagging performance in Doom3

[thop]

Originally posted by Mad Maxtrox
but NO ONE knows yet what the shipping product and drivers will be like!!!

actually we do both the board and the drivers used in the reviews were final aka shipping.

[isochar]

Considering the Doom3 & UT2k3 engines will be used for a majority of upcoming FPS games, the driver optimizations better be damn good.

[Liquid Snake]

I had a lot of hope for Matrox, but after reading Carmack's comments... Is Matrox ever going to be able to make another card suited for high-end gaming?

[Maniac]

It almost seems like Matrox is not even competing with Nvidia or ATI, they are simply competing with themselves. Alot of users still have G400 based cards, and compared to that this is worlds faster. This card is for those people.

Really disappointing for right now, what with all the hype and speculation over the past several months...

[P5ycho]

Originally posted by isochar
The most disappointing issue is that he tried to create a scenario where the Parhelia would win, but the GF4 beat it.

This is indeed the most concerning part of carmack's statement. the 256bit bus seems to have no use at all then?

[103er-Fan]

I read JCs comment on the Parhelia a few times again, and then I remembered that somewhere he said that the Radeon 8500 *could* be as fast as a GF4 Ti4600 in some situations. In his statement has been written that the P. doesn't get the performance of a Radeon of a GF4. Which would be also a clue that both cards are about the same speed in this game. Now my question would be how much slower is the P.? Maybe it is just 3 or 4 fps or something like that.
So, in the scenario, which he especially built for P, the Matrox card was not able to beat the GF4, that doesn't autmatically mean that it's slow in the game, maybe it is as fast as the GF4 or only slightly slower there!

[Liquid Snake]

JC says "the Parhelia will run Doom, but it is not performance competitive with Nvidia or ATI." Unless his idea of "not performance competitive" is 3 or 4 fps slower, I think you're probably wrong

[God_Devil_Morta]

Originally posted by 103er-Fan
I read JCs comment on the Parhelia a few times again, and then I remembered that somewhere he said that the Radeon 8500 *could* be as fast as a GF4 Ti4600 in some situations. In his statement has been written that the P. doesn't get the performance of a Radeon of a GF4. Which would be also a clue that both cards are about the same speed in this game. Now my question would be how much slower is the P.? Maybe it is just 3 or 4 fps or something like that.
So, in the scenario, which he especially built for P, the Matrox card was not able to beat the GF4, that doesn't autmatically mean that it's slow in the game, maybe it is as fast as the GF4 or only slightly slower there!

Dude, your streching your hope on this one

I hope that they could improve their drivers like as much as ATI did and more, but still....and the R300 is almost out....

[BoD.Led]

This is bad for Matrox!
Why can't Matrox just do a badass card!!!!
I've waited all those months when I didn't even know that the card was going to be called Parhelia!!!! I thought it would BIG!!!

But I guess that I'm still going to buy the 256 RAM version! And then It's good if just a few buys the card! Matrox will set a lower price! right!?

Damn. WHY!?!?!?!