Matrox Parhelia Benchmarks.

[uncle_jimbo]

These benchmarks are taken from Maximum PC. Test bed is a 2Ghz Pentium 4 with 512Mb RAM, all test ran at 1024x768x32.

3DMark 2001

Default - 7698
16x FAA - 6089
ANISO - 6526
Both - 5241

To say the least I was expecting much more from this card, hopefully they can get faster drivers for the card.

[grimfandango]

The card costs about 399 us$ fot the 128 MB drr version !!!!
The chipset's 512-bit graphics processing unit (GPU) is loaded with 80 million 0.15-micron transistors, and its 256-bit DDR memory interface allows for up to 20GB/sec bandwidth speeds. Its AGP host interface is designed for up to 8X bandwidths and has a graphics engine that's compliant with OpenGL 1.3 and DirectX 8.

And uncle_jimbo I think the card does a little better.
do you have more on benchmarks??
:t

[InnovaZero]

Matrox already stated taht this was not to be an all out festive FrameRate killer, but a Hi-Fi quality card. However with Driver improvements, we should see performance go up quite a bit. What i'm impressed with is it's ability to take a very small hit in performance when going to 16x AA.

[Kruzin]

If you read the article, you will see that those benchmarks where run on a very early beta (or possibly even alpha) version of the card, and old beta drivers.
You can be assured that the final product with more mature drivers will do much better than that.

I have been beta testing Parhelia for almost 3 weeks now, and gone through no less than 10 versions of beta drivers, and with each build it gets faster. (and no, I don't have any other #s for you, my NDA will not allow me to quote benchmark #s at this time).

And InnovaZero is quite right. The 16xFAA on this card is amazing. Very little performance hit, and beautiful graphics.

[BadBadNeil]

Thats cuz Matrox is smart and their 16X antialias only antialiases the edges of the objects on the screen rather than smooth the whole image. So if you only antialias the edges 16X which counts for only a small portion of the onscreen pixels you get an ettremely fast and efficient antialiasing system :) Bet the other companies are kickin themselves for not thinking of it first.

[Kurylo]

Yes, I think those cards will run at least 1.5-2 times faster in retail version with a new drivers.

[uncle_jimbo]

It seems Toms Hardware has posted a review of the Parhelia (thought in German), and has taken it down, but many sites got the benchmark results for the card, here (http://www.anandtech.com/news/webnews.html?newdate=6%2F24%2F2002&frontid=#16657).

[Kruzin]

I saw Tom's review before it was pulled.
It was horribly one-sided. They chose the benchmarks that made their favorite card look best, as they always do.

Here is a far more comprehensive review, showing how the card performs in high res, high detail situations, which is what Matrox has always said will be Parhelia's strong point. Nobody ever claimed it was going to beat lower quality cards at low res, low detail FPS counters.

Graphs start at page 7 of this review. Notice that once FAA/FSAA is turned on, and the res it turned up, Parhelia leaves the others in the dust. In multitexturing tests it also pound the other cards, which is going to be important for the likes of Doom3 type titles.

http://www.chip.de/produkte_tests/produkte_tests_8737618.html

[Slipknot]

It has been a long time since I've seen such verying views on a card. I do believe Toms review was alittle one sided, but I think Anand's really really hit the mark for the average gamer. These are some of the ideas I have about the 6 reviews I've read about the card.

1) If you consider youself a pure/hardcore gamer, the Parhelia is not for you. Either wait for the R300, get a GF4 TI4600 for max performance now, or get a TI4200 or Radeon 8500 if you are on a buget. Again, that is only from a gamers preceptive

2) Everyone seems to blame (in some part) the performance of the card on the slower memory and GPU speeds. I don't think a faster version of the card will help bridge that gap however. If you look at 64MB and 128MB TI4200 which are very close in memory/GPU speed, they still trash the Parhelia

3) Kruzin makes a good point about turning on FAA/FSAA and other advanced features to get the most out of the Parhelia, but a card with 16GB of bandwidth has to have some other problems if it is benching this low. I remeber that the a double wide 128bit bus, but they had the same problem against the competition at the time too. Take a look at the *final words* from the 1999 G400/G400MAX review on anandtech :

"Final Words
The G400 is finally here, and it is definitely not a Voodoo3 or TNT2 killer. The hard core gamer that simply wants performance will probably want to stay away from the G400, however if you don't mind not having the absolute best in 3D performance then the G400 quickly becomes a viable option.
Owners of slower computers will want to stay away from the G400, instead you'll probably want to explore 3dfx's solutions, or maybe NVIDIA's TNT2 depending on how "slow" your computer happens to be (in terms of CPU speed). Mid range systems should be fine with the G400, however don't expect eyebrow raising performance out of the card, even the MAX version. Higher end systems will prove to close the gap between the G400 and the more performance oriented alternatives, the G400 has some room to grow, so the faster your CPU, the better your G400 will perform, that's a given.
Matrox definitely has a winner on their hands, the G400 is much more than everything the G200 should have been, and it's no surprise that such a combination of features, performance, and outstanding image quality will be making its way into the hands of quite a few anxious users that have renewed faith in Matrox. Myself included ;) Let's just hope that Matrox can iron out the last few bugs with their ICD, and work on improving performance. Although the G400 will probably never reach TNT2 Ultra levels of performance, the closer Matrox gets, the better. The cards are ready and out in the open, you make the decision."

Maybe it is just me, but it seems like Matrox is in the exact same position they were in when they released the G400/G400Max cards.

4) The drivers are still young, but you can only expect about a 10/15% increase in performance over the lifetime of the chip.

5) The Parhelia seems to be loved by all for it's image quality, but how long will it hold that title, before the image quality features it offers become standard?

6) I recently saw benchmarks of 3D labs new GPU the P10. It model was the Wildcat VP760 with 64MB and it seems to be living up to the early hype it gemerated. It even tops the TI4400 based Quadro 4 750XGL
in some test. Almost no one is thrilled with the performance of the Parhelia right now. It is feature rich card, but features aren't everything. At some point, you have to perform, and the Parhelia isn't doing that right now.

7) Carmack speaks. This is an EXACT copy and past job from the from of the front page of murc


Carmack On Parhelia
News item posted at 23:09 GMT by Ant
The great man speaks.

Name: John Carmack
Email:
Description: Programmer
Project:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 25, 2002
-------------
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.

[namrak]

Good summary Slipknot. Over the past few days, I've run rampant throughout the net reading reviews on Parhelia. Heck, I've even looked through some Danish and German reviews as well even though I don't understand the languages. ;)
For me, it all comes down to the cost for performance and features. Frankly speaking, I don't think the Parhelia is worth it right now. Matrox is asking for $399 of my hard earned cash for a retail 128MB card ($50 cheaper for oem version). Does it have some very nice features? Definitely as I do agree that iq (image quality) brings a much more pleasing experience to my eyes which the Parhelia looks to have in spades.
Does surround gaming have potential? You bet, but I don't plan on tacking on the cost of a couple of 21" or 19" monitors to my tab to take advantage of it in addition to the Parhelia. That's just too much of an added cost for me.
Fragment Anti-Aliasing looks great!
I'm not sure what others may think, but I was looking for Parhelia to: compete with Nvidia's and ATI's current flagship video cards (GeForce4Tis and Radeon 8500), not necessarily win any benchmarks, but remain close to the other two. As I'm willing to sacrifice a few frames for iq. Unfortunately, the Parhelia lags behind by rather large differentials in many benchmarks, which doesn't bode well for your average gamer.
I think ultimately, Matrox looks to entice gamers to buy, but in reality, Parhelia looks to target different sectors of the computing public that will make use of its featureset. Guess I'll hold onto my $400...for now. ;)

[cusimar9]

Thank God, my GF4Ti4600 isn't obsolete yet!!

Well, I think everyone's a little dissappointed with the initial reviews and FPS the card achieves. However any advance in technology is a good thing, and Matrox has come on leaps and bounds in the Quality department. ATI and NVidia will undoubtedly do their best to offer similar Quality to the Parhelia in their next cards, in addition to upping their speeds even more.

The outcome? Everybody wins. If you want quality for Studio work, go for the Parhelia. Otherwise hold out and rest assured that ATI and NVidia are gonna be ****tin bricks that there's ANOTHER contender in the market, which will mean better technology at even cheaper prices.

Lovely :r :D :r