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Surprisingly against all expectations the new matrox parhelia has been outshined quite considerably by the gf4ti4600. In fact in a large number of tests it comes equals only to the radeon 8500(less than half the price).
check out :-
<a href="http://www17.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020625/index.html" target="_blank">http://www17.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020625/index.html</a>
for the benchmarks and review
I'm assuming the "Surprisingly against all expectations" is meant sarcasticly.
The first Matrox card I ever picked up was a G400 (shortly after they came out) and while image quality was always top-notch, the gaming performance didn't pick up until several driver revisions later. The G400 worked its way up to nearly the top of the heap; then nVidia took notice and blasted it out of the running with the quick successive releases of TNT Ultra/TNT2/TNT2 Ultra. The G450 and G550 were watered-down overclocked versions of the G400 (meant for "business" use) with lackluster 3D acceleration.
My personal experience with the G400 was that, with every BIOS/driver update, the card kept getting twitchier. Tech support offers a litany of canned responses and, when those don't help, tell you "oh well, don't know what to do, guess that card just don't work in your system".
In my (admittedly rather jaded) view, the Parhelia is a product that will once again showcase Matrox image quality while addressing hardware/software compatability problems just in time to put the card squarely one year behind its technological contemporaries. Early adopters will gain dubious bragging rights to the interesting (if possibly gimmicky) "surround gaming"; certainly a higher honor than those stuck with the G550's "head modelling".
Selling "business market" video cards can't sustain a company forever (another case in point being 3DLabs). Just as racing technology makes its way into street cars, gaming technology makes its way into mainstream cards. Matrox needs a product to leap ahead of the competition, not one that blazes across the finish line of the last race while everyone else is lining up at the starting line of the next.
//rant off
That's my $0.80 worth; guess I can sit back and save more pennies for the next rabid, foaming blast.
I wasn't actually be sarcastic. I truely thought that matrox might be onto a winner. Don't get me wrong i have no brand loyalty to matrox and was only interested in the possibility of a graphics card that leapt not merely stepped (and a little backward at that)to the future... .
On the subject of image quality 3d wise, with antiostropic filtering and antialiasing enabled it actually looks a lot worse,apparently than the gf4's.
The 3 way monitor support is a nice touch but for most home users not really something that will be utilised..and anyway i've had jedi knight 2 running on 2 monitors with my gf4400 and it looks sweet i have no room for 3 monitors on my desk nice as it would be. 2 is enough..
When all is said and done though I'm sure the parhalia will find its home.. but not here, not for that price not with the pefromance that it delivers.
Sorry to let a bad personal experience taint my post. :o
I jumped onto the Matrox bandwagon wholeheartedly with the purchase of the G400 and things just kind of deteriorated over time.
An excellent article highlighting the pros and cons of the Parhelia is featured in the July 2002 issue of Maximum PC.
The Parhelia looks to be a fine piece of technology. Unfortunately, Matrox seems to release the product with less-than-full-featured drivers to begin with and then debugs and refines features over time. Usually the product reaches its full potential after it has been surpassed by competitor's products months before.
I'll stop before I go off on a rant again. I want to like Matrox, but they let themselves get too far behind the pack too often to put a lot of faith in them.