Matrox's Parahelia wtf

[xxsicknessxxxx]

wtf? new vid ? Card? first time heard about it was yesetday what is it? any good? i read up on it, says its not fast, but it has better quaitly true?

[eXtraktor]

From the reviews i read in the past weeks, they say that visual quality is at its best but the performance isnt quite up to par compared to a GF4. I myself would buy one if the VQ was that high but with a price tag that high, its not worth it. There are multiple reviews on the web, just to a search for Matrox Parhelia and you'll get many hits. Here's (http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/parhelia512/home.cfm) the main page for the Parhelia directly from Matrox.

[Penguin4x4]

Matrox's Parhelia is designed to be a hybrid card, useful for gaming and workstations. But they packed the core with too many transistors, so they screwed themselves on making it a good card to compete against the likes of ATI and nVidia. But it does render games using 4xAA and Aniostrpic filtering faster than nVidia or ATI. Pretty guts and severed heads..........:eek: :eh?:

[Xaeron]

Not bad... if it cost ~200 dollars less....

[MospeadasDark]

Originally posted by Penguin4x4
But they packed the core with too many transistors, so they screwed themselves on making it a good card to compete against the likes of ATI and nVidia

Uhm, no.

That is the reason why it doesn't clock high. It's hard to get high yields at high speeds when you have so much bundled onto one chip.

It's not doing well *now* because games aren't complex enough to use whatever the perhelia has. It also has no bandwidth/hyper-z type of thing to help it with memory bandwidth. Given that it uses 512-bit memory interface to help give it greater bandwidth, but a lot if is still wasted.

[GeckoBanzai]

I like the support for three monitors and the 16x fragment AA is cool and handles aliasing better than the g4s or ati 8500s. The graphics are probably marginally better on older games or games that don't need a high frame rate.

But the core is sitting at 200 to 250mhz and memory speed around 325. In benchmarking with aa turned off it got 7698 in 3dmark 2001se. In fairness that was using a beta board and driver. My numbers are from Max PC (cover article July).

It would be sweet to game with three monitors but the Parhelia will be hard put to compete with the next generation cards from Nvidia or ATI and with a longer research cycle I think it would be hard to find many game developers who will write games to maximize the Perhelias strengths.

[Maxvla]

matrox is trying to do the (currently) impossible. combine a workstation card and a gaming card... right now... that just doesn't work. it doesn't work because both the gaming performance and the workstation performance aren't up to par. plus having a 400.00 price tag means there's going to be a ton of them left on the shelves.

nice try matrox... i like the design with the higher bit components... but it just isn't happening right now.