Matrox Parhelia

One of the best cards around, the Parhelia offers superb image quality - at a price.

Price: £327.83

Manufacturer: Matrox

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Verdict

Pros:

Fantastic graphics
Incredible potential

Cons:
Occasional stalling
High cost

Mark Walsh, Personal Computer World 16 Aug 2002

Matrox's much-hyped 3D graphics chip is remarkably well specified, although you'd expect nothing less for the price. Amazingly, there are over 80 million transistors inside: more than even a Pentium 4 chip.

Looking further down the spec sheet, you'll see that this card is, on paper, ridiculously ahead of the competition. The Parhelia's 512bit memory bus means it is capable of transferring data at a whopping 20Gbps, whereas Nvidia's Geforce4 Ti4600 can only muster 10.4.

The Parhelia also comes with a 256MB unified frame buffer - again, twice that of its competitors - and supports AGP 8x, though it remains to be seen whether this will have any significant bearing on performance.

But frankly, all these stats equate to nothing unless the graphics it produces look great on screen. Matrox has added numerous unique features to enhance the image produced. The first is 16x fragment anti-aliasing. This detects edges within the image and implements 16x anti-aliasing (AA) on them (four times more than any other card), giving smooth curves and diagonals.

The Parhelia is compliant with all of DirectX 8's features, such as Pixel Shader 1.3, and includes the quad-vertex shader and hardware displacement mapping that will be included in DirectX 9, due for release towards the end of the year.

When tested, the card managed 6,716 in 3Dmark 2001 when running at 1,024 x 768 at 32bit colour depth. We would have hoped for more. Scores in Jedi Knight II and Comanche 4 are equally unimpressive: 58.3 and 24.8 frames per second (fps) respectively at the same settings. These scores are nowhere near those you would get from a similarly priced Geforce4 Ti4600 card (which achieves around 11,000 in 3Dmark).

When running at 16x fragment AA, the scores attained in Jedi Knight and Comanche 4 are similar to those without AA, and this is where the card really shines. Sadly, 3Dmark 2001 will not run in default settings with 16x fragment anti-aliasing. However, when this feature is turned on, games simply look better, certainly enough to accept the slight drop in frame rates.

When subjected to 4x full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA), the card takes a significant drop, but copes just as well as a Ti4600 at the same settings. Oddly, the Parhelia sometimes stalls on a blank screen; hopefully something that can be rectifed with a driver update.

Coming with two DVI inputs, the Parhelia is supplied with a number of cables and digital-to-analogue converters, so it can adapt to almost any monitor setup. Besides high-fidelity dual-head display, one of the advanced features is the ability to use three monitors side by side for surround gaming. Were you to have three equal-size monitors arranged side by side and at a 30 degree angle slant, the Parhelia could create a reasonably accurate wide field of view. The result is superb in games such as Flight Simulator, but the image seems to blur and distort in first-person shooters like Jedi Knight II.

Matrox has always been a leader in 2D technology, and this aspect of the card hasn't been ignored. The Parhelia is capable of a 10bit gigacolour output, so it can display more than one billion colours with 10bit precision.

Matrox has also introduced hardware acceleration for glyph anti-aliasing, which Microsoft introduced with XP, calling it Cleartype. On the whole, the desktop looks sharper, though only slightly. All these features can be accessed via the Powerdesk, Matrox's own display settings menu, which is simple to use.

The Parhelia is one of the best cards around and when the anti-aliasing kicks in, there's nothing like it. But superb image quality has come at the sacrifice of good old-fashioned frame rates, and this may not be to all tastes.

Specifications:

300MHz
256bit DDR GPU
Dual 400MHz integrated Ramdacs
256MB of DDR SD-Ram
20Gbps memory bandwidth
Two DVI outputs
OpenGL 1.3 and DirectX 8.1 compliant
AGP 2x, 4x and 8x compatible
Price: £327.83 (£279 ex VAT) Contact: Matrox 01753 665 544 www.matrox.com/mga

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