Matrox's Parhelia - A Performance Paradox

Drivers & Expectations

Matrox supplied us with the final drivers that will be shipping with the Parhelia by the end of this week as well as the latest build that will be available on their website by then (v225 which is what we tested with). The UI front end for their drivers are written using a .NET codebase and thus require the installation of Microsoft's .NET Framework under Windows XP in order for the configuration utility to actually work. Currently that means that you have to run Windows Update and download the appropriate update before installing the drivers. This process is supposed to be automated in the driver install but it definitely does not work at this point.

Our Parhelia testing was by no means flawless. The majority of today's games worked just fine, and Unreal Tournament 2003 actually ran with fewer bugs than the Radeon 8500 with the latest CATALYST drivers.

The biggest problems we had were with enabling Matrox's Fragment Anti-Aliasing (FAA) under Unreal Tournament 2003. Matrox had a special build of the Parhelia drivers made just for Unreal Tournament 2003 that were supposed to fix some image quality issues with FAA but neither the version they gave us nor the final retail drivers fixed the problems we had. Upon exiting the dm-antalus demo at 1024x768 we'd get corrupted screen data on our Windows desktop and the system would eventually crash; we were lucky enough to get scores out of it but crashing on exit like that is not acceptable. What was also very interesting is that it only happened in this one level at one resolution (1024x768); we tried three other levels and even the same level at 640x480 and we couldn't duplicate the problem.

Then we get to the inevitable high expectations for the performance of this card; when we first saw Parhelia we were left with the impression that although it wouldn't always beat the Ti 4600, it would come close enough at default settings and it would clearly outperform it if features like quad-texturing, fragment anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering were taken advantage of. With the Parhelia running a bit slower than expected, the end result is that the benchmark expectations have been lowered as well. As you're about to see, the Parhelia is far from a GeForce4 killer and in a number of cases it's not even a Radeon 8500 killer at that.

In order for the Parhelia to truly shine it requires that one or more of the following situations exist:

• heavy use of pixel/vertex shader programs
• heavy use of quad-texturing
• AA enabled

Unfortunately, even though Unreal Tournament 2003 was a part of our benchmarking suite, you won't see the majority of those requirements met by any game today or in the very near future. Things may change by the end of this year, which is what Matrox is banking on, but for now we can only give you the performance picture that exists today.