Parhelia?

[Descent]

I was just curious about the Parhelia's performance in Doom 3, UT2004, HL2, etc. It seems that the only benchmarks I can find are 2+ years old, and I'm pretty sure the card would haul ass with new drivers due to it's 512-bit core, and 256-bit memory.

 

[BRiT]

The card sucks ass. It's about on par between an ATI Radeon 7500. It's that dog slow. Every engineer that worked on that product has been gone from the company for nearly 2.5 years. The lone developer who was on the original design team stuck around for a little while longer, but he's been gone from Matrox for close to 2 years now. On top of it, Matrox will not release any new drivers which include 3D (DirectX/OpenGL) improvements for it. They're basically relegated back to a 2D only card. If you want to know more information on it, check out http://www.matroxusers.com/.

Here's what I found, not sure if they were joking or not, in their Doom3 thread:

XP1800+, 512MB PC2100, ECS K7S5A, SBLive 5.1 & GF3 Ti500:
640x480 'timedemo demo1'
Low quality, No advanced effects: 34.6
Med quality, No advanced effects: 32.6
- Plus High Quality Effects: 32.6
- Plus Specular: 32.0
- Plus Bump Mapping: 31.0
- Plus Shadows: 25.4

800x600
Med quality, all effects: 23.1
- Shadows off: 30.4

For scores with Parhelia, simply divide by two.

 

[Descent]

Wow...that's fucked up...

Was it a driver issue, or what? That was a fucking 512-bit card with 256-bit memory! I mean, what the fuck?!

 

[BRiT]

Hardware issue all the way... In some games it performs about on par with the ATI 8500/TI-4400 series. It's designed slightly backwards, plus ATI really hit a grand-slam with their R300-chip series. Matrox silently released a second revision of the chip about 6 months ago, which improved things a bit and fixed a few bugs in FAA, but not enough to be competative.

 

[Descent]

Well, fuck that! Softmodded X800SE here I come!