JavaFox

http://tech-report.com/reviews/2002q...a/index.x?pg=5

Everyone's reaction towards Parhelia's apparent inability to usurp the performance crown from the GF4Ti4600 confuses me, frankly. Give it some time, let the drivers mature, and I'm sure we'll see a good product. Look at what a little driver maturity did for the Radeon 8.5K!

Necrosis

I was thinking about buying this card before I seen the reviews for it. Matrox doesn't have time to mature drivers; ATI & Nvidia have new stuff due out before too long. I think their pretty much screwed.

__________________

RadeonMAXX

Kinda of a striking blow for Matrox, & they also take forever to update drivers too don't they?

http://www.bluesnews.com/plans/1/

John Carmack
id Software | Lead Programmer | Jun 25 2002, 17:32:11 (PT) |

Archived Updates Jun 25 2002, 17:32:11

Name: John Carmack
Email: johnc@idsoftware.com
Description: Programmer
Project:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 25, 2002
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The Matrox Parhelia Report:

The executive summary is that the Parhelia will run Doom, but it is not
performance competitive with Nvidia or ATI.

Driver issue remain, so it is not perfect yet, but I am confident that Matrox
will resolve them.

The performance was really disappointing for the first 256 bit DDR card. I
tried to set up a "poster child" case that would stress the memory subsystem
above and beyond any driver or triangle level inefficiencies, but I was
unable to get it to ever approach the performance of a GF4.

The basic hardware support is good, with fragment flexibility better than GF4
(but not as good as ATI 8500), but it just doesn't keep up in raw performance.
With a die shrink, this chip could probably be a contender, but there are
probably going to be other chips out by then that will completely eclipse
this generation of products.

None of the special features will be really useful for Doom:

The 10 bit color framebuffer is nice, but Doom needs more than 2 bits of
destination alpha when a card only has four texture units, so we can't use it.

Anti aliasing features are nice, but it isn't all that fast in minimum feature
mode, so nobody is going to be turning on AA. The same goes for "surround
gaming". While the framerate wouldn't be 1/3 the base, it would still
probably be cut in half.

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.

__________________
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Download KaZaA now!! http://www.kazaa.com/en/index.php

R300 "Crush the Force!"
-Dave Orton, Ati President

Doomtrooper

Bottom line is the Hype killed this card being the 1st 256 bit bus card, Matrox designed this card for IQ and high quality settings.
The fastest FSAA card you can buy today isn't a Geforce 4 Ti4600 anymore, it is a Parhelia..not only is the FSAA faster but it give SUPERB image quality.
I beleive the card will get faster, maybe 10-15% more which will make it the fastest FSAA card on the market until the R300 launch


A good review is here, look at the FSAA quality shots and compare..no blurring etc and beating a Ti4600 in high resolution. The R300 and Nv30 will outperform this card but you can't buy them yet, this card as before with Matrox delivers great IQ.

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardwa...ia/default.asp

__________________
"It's time to kick A$$ and chew bubble gum....and I'm all out of gum."

Duke Nukem
November 1996

WarGun

Well its kinda like putting out a P5, that cant outperform a P4.
Dumb move.