Matrox Parhelia

Scruff

Massive 30 page review of the new Matrox Parhelia at Tom's Hardware .

Looks a bit disappointing really. Matrox said they have gone for quality of images over brute strength but its looks like no match for the G4 or the Raedon 8500 for tht matter.

koneko

Same in all the reviews I've seen. Heavy on the cool features (3 monitor surround type effect), but game-performance wise it's looking pretty dire.

Check our the article on HardOCP. Apparantly they had some probs getting the card in for reviewing. When they rang Matrox they were told it wasn't the type of card "their readers" would want. I told told they got another mail saying the opposite and that the card was on it's way. Sounds a little iffy.
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MzE1

I'd be interested to see the marketing and push for the card. Seems to me like they'll be pushing it at the high-end market, the serious users. The hardware-freaks and gamers. With the performance it's been showing I can't say anyone will be too happy to go out and splurge large amounts of cash on a downgrade, or something that's only equal to what they have already. Features and image quality are great, don't get me wrong. But when push comes to shove, I'd rather have the faster card, to card with a nice extra feature I'll hardly use.

[edit]Don't forget the R300 is on it's way. Looking to be a much better card. Myom.[/edit]

JustHalf

Don't forget that Matrox is traditionally a workstation graphics card manufacturer, and this market demands quality above (yes, ABOVE) performance. The image quality of Matrox cards tends to be fantastic in comparison to other cards of the price (though nVidia are improving).

Some people have a different set of priorities when purchasing a video card.

Matt Simis

If the quality was actually better then that would be fine... but it inst. Look at the pics comparing Parhelia's Anistropic Filtering to the GF4s. The Parhelias quality is about the same as mid level Quality setting on the GF4, at much lower speed. The only situation where the Parhelia "shines" is a couple of isolated instances where the FPS on all cards was so low the games would be almost unplayable.

Dont get me wrong, Im not nVidia fan and had high hopes for this card, but I wouldn't really class Matrox as a "workstation company", that's 3DLabs. Interestingly the 3Dlabs P10 Workstation (Wildcat VP) cards that are appearing now look to be faster than the Parhelia (while delivering same/better quality) but are heavily optimised for 3D Design and OpenGL apps. The forthcoming consumer card can only be faster again (with Direct3D and games orientated drivers).


Matt

Doodee

HeHe, yea, like was said matrox are generally Quality over performance.

the Parhelia looks good on papar but when u put that into action.....

I'd hold off for two more months until ATI unveil their new 10 PCB card, one that VIA were using to show 8xAGP at computex. Its gonna be out ahead of the next quater so that means that N-Vidia wont have anything out to match it until Fall...then again...when the original Radeon 8500's first arrived N-Vidia did suddenly produce the new Detanator drivers on the exact same day as the review models of the Radeon came so...who knows...

as for me...im gonna stick wiv this Radeon 8500LE 128MB that I got for...O so cheap...and will use money I saved on it instead of buying a GF4 Ti4200 on a IBM 120GB (on special at komplett.ie for €169...Gawd...im waffling again

JustHalf

Matt, where these pictures taken from the monitor? I'm not talking about the quality of the picture in the framebuffer, I'm talking about how much quality is lost between the framebuffer and the monitor.

Matrox beats nVidia on this.