The Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP
Hands on testing of Matrox's High End Gaming Card

By -Dave Altavilla
June 25, 2002

When Matrox took the wraps off their next generation GPU, last month, HotHardware brought you a full showcase of the chip's features, new capabilities and estimated performance level.  Clearly Matrox is targeting the Gaming/Enthusiast market with this product and the competition could not be any more intense than at this moment in time.  Rivals, ATi and NVIDIA are both in full ramp with very successful product launches and drivers that have gone through several iterations of maturity.  The bar has been raised by NVIDIA with High Resolution Anti-Aliasing at great frame rates and by ATi recently, with more robust drivers offering better performance and configurability for features like Anisotropic Filtering.  Add to that a few rumblings that next generation products such as the ATi R250 and R300, as well as the NV30, are not too far off on the horizon and you have the proverbial "target rich" battle field.  If Matrox thought things were competitive back in the day of the Voodoo 5, then the current climate ought to get the boys in Marketing all spun up.  Yep... it's downright ugly out there.  Or should we say beautiful?

From a consumer / end user perspective, the 3D Graphics arena is once again alive with competition in virtually all the major markets, desktop and mobile.  Let's face it, besides the actual system processor itself, 3D Graphics cards are sexy.  They are easy to upgrade, offer incremental performance enhancements, and bring new levels of visual impact and detail to the computer screen.  You stare at those images they produce on your monitor, most likely for hours on end during the week.  It's no wonder that folks seem to take in Graphic Card technology with a passion. 

Which brings us to the Matrox perspective on next generation 3D Graphics.  Matrox's new Parhelia GPU has a slogan behind it that is supposed to deliver the mission statement of the product, High Fidelity Graphics.  As next generation game engines are capable of producing more immersive and visually stunning images, the hardware that processes those images, must also scale.  No longer is the game about frame rate alone.  Remember when we were all buzzing about T&L?  Now it's about shaders, mapping, AA and programmability.  Stepping back into this arena is not going to be easy but it seems as though Matrox has the right idea targeting "High Fidelity". 

The following is a HotHardware look at the Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP 3D Graphics Card.  Indeed, Matrox is back in the game.  Let's see how they play...

Specifications and Features of Matrox Parhelia 128MB A quick run down

The above list is an abridged version of the features and benefits proposed by the Parhelia 512 architecture.  We won't go through the architecture again in detail here.  If you would like a refresher course, please see our May '02 article, where we cover the Parhelia in great detail.  For sure, the Parhelia packs in many new features not available on any current generation 3D GPU on the market, including 16A FAA (Fragmentation Anti-Aliasing), 10 bit Gigacolor, and hardware assist for Displacement Mapping, a next generation DirectX 9 rendering technique.

Another strong suite for Matrox, with this product and over the years with legacy product, is their Multi-Display technology which now supports "TripleHead", or a three display desktop, and "Surround Gaming".  The Parhelia 128MB card we were sent for testing, comes equipped with dual independent DVI connectors and all the cabling you would need to set up Surround Gaming on three displays, or drive any combination of up to three displays, TV or VGA using the DB15 connectors.  True DVI output is limited to two displays.

Spartan and elegant, is how we would describe the Parhelia's board design.  The tiny BGA DDR SGRAM memory on the board, is rated at 3.3ns.  Beyond those and the GPU, the rest of the board utilizes very small chip capacitors and low profile chokes.  The  card itself is much lower profile and smaller than a GeForce4 Ti card, about the size of at Radeon 8500 but without all the large "can type" capacitors.  Unfortunately, the retail package for the Parhelia is also fairly spartan with bundles software to speak of beyond the driver CD, which does include one demo of Imperium Galatica III and a Gigacolor plug in for Photoshop.  Since this product is primarily a Gaming / Enthusiast card, it would have been nice to have a few showcase game titles included.

The Setup and Surround Gaming

The Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP
Hands on testing of Matrox's High End Gaming Card

By -Dave Altavilla
June 25, 2002

For the HotHardware Test Team, good drivers are the heart and soul of any new graphics card.  They can either make or break a product in this technology, whether it be performance, features or stability.

Drivers, Installation and Setup A totally different approach and we like it a lot

We've taken a few screenshots of the various driver control panels for the Matrox Parhelia Power Desk Suite.  As you will see, Matrox has taken a very different approach to the interface.

Clearly, the drivers have a very "XP" look and feel to them, with more of a menu driven interface versus the control panels we've seen in the past from NVIDIA and ATi.  The drivers themselves are very easy to navigate and offer a very user friendly interface.  They are a bit to simplistic for our liking however, and don't give the user as much control as other driver interfaces we've seen, for example with various Anisotropic settings or even something fairly standard like gamma adjustments for the desktop or gaming.  Hopefully, Matrox will expand on this great looking interface and also give the end user a few more toys to play with.

Also of note was that stability with this driver release, was decent.  Not exceptional but decent.  We experienced no issues whatsoever during installation.  However, during one of our benchmark sessions with Serious Sam, The Second Encounter, we did experience an occasional lock up.  As with the initial releases of the Radeon 8500 and GeForce4 Ti 4600, we're going to cut Matrox a little slack here, in hopes that future driver releases will clean up many of these anomalies.

Gigacolor Desktop - Advantage Matrox:
 
On the other hand, the drivers do shine with a few new features like the multi-display setup, Dual Head, Glyph AA and Gigacolor.  The user can enable Gigacolor for either Desktop or Gaming environments.  We turned this feature on with the desktop setting and were hard pressed to tell the difference in fidelity on our 22" Mitsubishi tube.  However, we did run the included Gigacolor plug in for Photoshop and viewed various 16 bit sample images that showed the benefits, with much less color banding between gradients.  The professional that works with tools like Photoshop on a regular basis, will welcome the added resolution that the Parhelia's 10 bit DACs can produce.  We'll touch upon the gaming side of Gigacolor, later.

Finally, something really impressed us was the actual 2D image quality of the Parhelia.  It easily produces the best looking 2D desktop image on the market right now.  The images are crisp and the colors are vibrant and true with this new card from Matrox.  Again, even the most demanding desktop publishing professional will appreciate the output quality of the Parhelia.  Although we were unable to get the time to set up the card on a flat panel screen, we are fairly confident that the 2D desktop quality of the Parhelia would only be more obvious with digital accuracy.  We'll also have 2D desktop benchmark numbers later in this review.
 

Surround Gaming Serious Fun

We then set up a ?TripleHead Desktop? to get a feel for the usefulness of a three monitor setup, and to spend a little time ?Surround Gaming?.  Getting the Parhelia setup to use our three monitors was very easy.  Plain and simple, Matrox did an excellent job with the TripleHead Installation Wizard.  Without even taking a look at the user?s manual, we were able to get our TripleHead desktop up and running, literally, within minutes.  We surfed the web for a while, and have to admit, having the immense desktop real-estate afforded by the TripleHead desktop was definitely useful.  We found having hyperlinks, that would normally open in a new browser window, display on a different screen, without obscuring the original content we were viewing, very practical.  We also worked simultaneously within Photoshop and Frontpage, and liked the ability to edit an image, then preview the changes in our editor without having to minimize any program windows. 

If you do the math, three 17? monitors used in a TripleHead configuration, offers the same amount of viewable area as a single 29? monitor.  If you?re a power-user who constantly works with multiple applications, you?ll thoroughly enjoy a TripleHead desktop.

Surround Gaming with the Pathelia was also a very unique experience.  We had seen the Parhelia in action a few months ago, and recently benchmarked the card.  Due to these factors, our opinion on Surround Gaming could have been skewed somewhat.  To eliminate any bias, we invited two gamers, James and Mario, into the H.H. lab for a demo and a little Quake 3 gaming.  Both of these guys are gamers, who don?t care who makes the hardware powering their rigs as long as it works and the perceived performance is good.  The first word out of James? mouth when he saw our test system was, ?Wow?.  James must have watched the Matrox Reef demo for 20 minutes before he would let us close it down.  Mario was much more animated.  He loved the Reef demo, but was eager to start playing some Quake.  Our guinea pig (no pun intended) was floored by the surround gaming demo.  Mario said point blank, that surround gaming on the Parhelia was the most fun he?s had gaming in quite a while.  ?It?s something that has to be experienced?, Mario said, ?Seeing pictures of people playing on this rig do not do it justice?.  We concur.

We're sure some of you are interested to know how Quake 3 performed when set up to run across all three monitors.  The machine we used to test the the Surround Gaming feature was equipped with an Athlon XP 2200+ and 512MB of RAM, populating a Gigabyte KT333 motherboard.  With Quake 3 set to "High Quality", with trilinear filtering and the texture and geometry sliders maxed out, the Parhelia cranked out 81.4 FPS (demo001) at a resolution of 2400x600 (800x600 on all three monitors).   
 

Displacement Map Demos and 16X FAA Testing

The Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP
Hands on testing of Matrox's High End Gaming Card

By -Dave Altavilla
June 25, 2002

We wanted our test system to place as little limitation on overall performance as possible, so we configured an i850E test bed with the fastest PC1066 memory money could buy, from Kingston.  Here are the rest of the detail of our system.

HotHardware's Test System A high end Pentium 4 and PC1066 RDRAM

Pentium 4B  at 2.4GHz - 533MHz System Bus
Abit TH7II-RAID Motherboard
512MB of Kingston PC1066 RDRAM
IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive
Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP
GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB Graphics Card
nVidia Detonator 4 reference drivers version 29.42
ATi Radeon 8500 - 64MB
Catalyst Drivers 2.1
3Com 10/100 NIC
Intel chipset drivers version 4.01
On board AC '97 Sound
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 8.1

In our first series of benchmarks with the Parhelia 128MB card, we're going to focus on current gaming titles with a standard run of time demos for Quake 3, Serious Sam, Jedi Knight II and 3D Mark 2001SE.  We'll then show you some of the number under two specific targeted benchmarks, Matrox "Shark Mark" and NVIDIA's "Chameleon Mark".  Finally, we'll dig into the AA driven scores, to show you how the three top of the line graphics cards from each of the majors, stack up versus one another.

Benchmarks / Comparison - The Parhelia Vrs. ATi and NVIDIA's Finest It's all about the numbers

Although frankly Quake 3 is not a very demanding or all that meaningful benchmark, in terms of current generation of graphics accelerators,  it is definitely a familiar test in terms of relative performance in fill rate and general throughput.  So, we'll include the numbers for you here, for what it is worth.

These series of scores are an example of where the Parhelia definitely will not shine.  With none of it's pixel and vertex shaders being utilized, the Parhelia is dependant on fill rate alone.  As you can see, with it's 220MHz core clock, the Parhelia falls far behind both competing cards from ATi and NVIDIA.  However, it is safe to say that these are more than playable frame rates at any resolution.

Serious Sam's heavy texture detail lends itself a little better to the Parhelia, however, the delta is still significant between Matrox's new flagship and the mature Radeon 8500 and GeForce4 Ti 4600 cards.  We ran the extreme quality script to level the playing field, so that all cards were pushed to the same limit with the Serious Sam engine.

Frankly, we expected better performance by the Parhelia but clearly it is hampered by it's relatively low core clock speed.  On the other hand, again, these older generation game engines are not a strong suite for a graphics card that was design from the ground up with DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 in mind.  Additionally, Matrox is claiming "high fidelity" graphics with the Parhelia and we haven't turned on the AA as of yet.  We'll group all of the AA benchmarks scores together, later in this article.

Jedi Knight II and 3DMark 2001SE

The Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP
Hands on testing of Matrox's High End Gaming Card

By -Dave Altavilla
June 25, 2002

 
Next up, we have Lucas Arts, Jedi Knight II benchmarks and then we kick into gear with DirectX 8.1 testing with MadOnion's 3DMark 2001SE.

Benchmarks / Comparison - The Parhelia Vrs. ATi and NVIDIA's Finest Jedi Knight II Outcast and 3DMark 2001SE

Interestingly enough, the Radeon 8500 and GeForce 4 Ti 4600 cards were more CPU limited than anything else in this test, with scores at 1024X768 and 1280X1024 resolutions coming in almost identical.  The Parhelia still shows its fill rate limitation however, topped by almost by 50% in the higher resolutions.

Here is where things got even more bleak for the Parhelia.  We thoroughly expected that the Parhelia 512, with its Quad Texturing units and 36 stage Shader Array, to really put the hurt on the Radeon 8500 and even give the GeForce4 Ti 4600 a run for its money.  However, even though 3DMark 2001SE (with the latest update patch installed) certainly exercises the DirectX 8 compliant rendering engines of the Parhelia 512, the card comes up short once again.  We can only equate this deficit to the Parhelia's relatively low fill rate and core speed.

Comanche 4, Shark Mark, Chameleon Mark and Winbench

The Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP
Hands on testing of Matrox's High End Gaming Card

By -Dave Altavilla
June 25, 2002

 
Keeping along with the DirectX 8 vein, we have Novalogic's impressive looking Military Copter Sim, Comanche 4.  The visuals this game engine paints are truly stunning and the shoot 'em up action is tons of fun, with an arsenal of weapons that the Comanche attack helicopter carries to its targets.

Comanche 4, Matrox Shark Mark, NVIDIA Chameleon Mark and Winbench Covering all aspects of performance for the Parhelia

For sure this benchmark is much more CPU dependant than it is GPU intensive.  Regardless, the Comanche 4 Benchmark Demo utilizes actual game engine playback footage of heavy combat with lots of explosions and action over water etc.  Once again, we wanted to see the Parhelia really fly but it did not.  The numbers don't lie and a 40 - 45% delta is not a pretty picture.  However, when the Radeon 8500 was first launched, it too suffered under the strain of this test.  We are hopeful that future driver revision for the Parhelia, will allow the game engine to make more efficient use of its architecture.

Matrox Shark Mark:

Shark Mark in Action
Click for viewing

Matrox's very own Shark Mark, is a DirectX based benchmark that stresses a GPU's Vertex Shaders.  Specifically, there are 9 Sharks drawn and animated in this scene and it utilizes 90 Vertex Shader instructions.  This test should obviously favor the Parhelia, since it was coded by Matrox.  However, we'll run an NVIDIA based Direct X test next, to show you things from another angle.

What did you expect?  Of course this test showcases the Parhelia's Vertex Shader Array and is most likely heavily optimized for the Parhelia 512 architecture, keeping the rendering pipelines full.  So, we decided to turn the table on the Parhelia a bit and fire up something coded by NVIDIA.  The results may surprise you.

NVIDIA's Chameleon Mark:

The Parhelia shows serious muscle here in the completely hostile environment of the NVIDIA Chameleon.  This could indeed be a sign of things to come with respect to next generation game engines that utilize pixel and vertex shaders in greater detail.  The Radeon 8500 is simply left in the dust here by both the Parhelia and the GeForce 4 Ti 4600.  With only a single Vertex Shader at its disposal, the Radeon just can't keep up.

2D Desktop Re-Draw and Render Performance - Winbench:

The folks at Matrox boast that they have the fastest 2D desktop accelerator in the business.  Perhaps this is less than important for most folks in the Parhelia's target market, since it is clearly a gaming card.  However, we decided to prove out the theory none the less.

Indeed, when it comes to 2D Desktop Graphics, the Parhelia seems to have a clear advantage over the competition.  However, we were left wondering just how much utility this new found speed would provide for the average end user.

Well, so far for the Matrox Parhelia, it has been a bit of a rough road during our benchmark sessions.  However, as you recall, 16X FAA, from at least a visual perspective, was a real plus for Matrox's new GPU.  Let's see if the numbers pan out that way as well.

Anti-Aliasing Tests Paint A Very Different Picture

The Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP
Hands on testing of Matrox's High End Gaming Card

By -Dave Altavilla
June 25, 2002

 
Well then, you've seen the fruits of 16X FAA in action, so you'll have to make judgments on your own, since visual attributes are subjective.  However, it is our personal opinion that Matrox's 16X FAA image quality is superior to anything out there right now, at equivalent resolutions and even 1280X1024 - 4X Multi-Sample AA versus 1024X768 16X FAA at a lower resolution.

16X FAA Versus 4X Super Sample AA Better image quality and a better showing for the Parhelia

Here we see the obvious benefits of Fragmentation Anti-Aliasing versus traditional Super Sample and Multi-Sample techniques.  Since the Parhelia only samples the edge pixels of a given scene, it also only has to process a fraction (on average about 5 - 10%) of a frame with anti-aliasing at 16X.  As a result, the Parhelia surges past even the GeForce4 Ti 4600 at 1280X1024 with traditional 4X AA.  However, notice we did include one score with the Parhelia running in 4X Super Sample mode at 1024X768.  One word... OUCH.  Obviously, Matrox has focused on their 16X FAA performance and left out optimizations in Super Sample mode.  Frankly, we don't even see a need to enable the feature in the driver control panel, if these are the type of frame rates that are produced.

Here the Parhelia drops back to second place, with the Jedi Knight II taxing the GPUs a bit more in this test.  Now, remember the screen shots we took back on page 3?  Decide for yourself if you think that the Parhelia's 1024X768 16X FAA mode looks better than the NVIDIA 4X AA at 1280X1024.  We think it does but it's up to you to decide.  Then consider the above scores again.  In any event, at 1024X768 with 16X FAA running, Jedi Knight II looks great on the Parhelia and frame rates are solid and playable at nearly 60 fps.

Here things are a little bit more nip and tuck for the GeForce4 Ti 4600 and the Parhelia but GeForce 4 still pulls out in front.  Once again, you'll have to be the judge of which is more important to you, frame rate or image quality.  Again, image quality is superb at 1024X768 with 16X FAA on the Parhelia and it is no slouch on the GeForce4 either, at 54 fps. with 4X AA.

Finally, let's keep turning up the eye candy coefficient and enable sharper more detailed textures with Anisotropic Filtering.

16 Tap Anisotropic Filtering and AA In Motion

The Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP
Hands on testing of Matrox's High End Gaming Card

By -Dave Altavilla
June 25, 2002

 
As we have come to find out, traditional full scene AA methods also blur texture detail somewhat.  The way to clean those textures up and enhance their detail is with Anisotropic Filtering.  Now, the Parhelia, since it doesn't actually anti-alias anything but edge pixels, really doesn't blur textures at all.  So, with 16 tap Aniso Filtering enabled, the extra texture clarity is pretty much an enhancement to the original image.  Here are a few benchmark runs with 16X FAA and 4X AA enabled, as well as 16 tap Anisotropic Filtering.

AA and Anisotropic Filtering Enabled Turning up the heat and burning things in

Here there is barely a dent made in the original AA numbers, when 16 tap anisotropic filtering is enabled.  If you recall from the earlier screen shots we took of the Parhelia's drivers, the card only has two settings for Aniso Filtering, enabled or disabled.  Matrox informed us that the Parhelia does 16 tap Anisotropic Filtering.  The GeForce 4 Ti and Radeon 8500 both offer settings up to 64 tap mode.  We are hopeful here again that Matrox will include more settings for this feature in future driver releases.

Alright, deep breath... This one gets fairly complicated.  The Matrox Parhelia 128MB card,  in our opinion at this point in time, is your basic conundrum.  We were enamored by the beauty of the images it rendered on our displays in both 2D and 3D mode, with 16X FAA and a sharp, clean desktop image.  However, this card needs two things desperately, if Matrox plans to compete head to head with the likes of ATi's R300 or the NV30, significant driver optimizations and a die shrink.  Add a few extra features to the Parhelia's Power Desk Software, crank the core and memory clocks up to 300MHz and 700MHz respectively and you have formidable competition against NVIDIA's and ATi's next generation hardware. Finally price is another obstacle for the Parhelia.  At $399 suggested retail, it will be hard to justify versus the likes of a GeForce4 Ti 4200.  Here's hoping discounting is also on the Parhelia's horizon.

To see surround gaming in action is truly a jaw dropping experience.  A Triple Head 19" Flat Panel Display setup would be absolute nirvana for Web Jockeys like us here at the HotHardware labs.  Our Surround Gaming Gumba Squad, Mario and Marco, were so impressed with their surround gaming experience, we may never see them back in every day civilization, with perhaps the exception of dinner time.  Still, our feeling is that Surround Gaming is a niche' feature that is not necessarily practical or attainable for the mainstream user.  It does however, offer new found capabilities for the professional who needs expanded on screen desktop work area.

Finally, we think that FAA or Fragmentation Anti-Aliasing has possibilities to revolutionize traditional AA techniques, with its obvious advantages in performance and available image quality.  Our hats are off to Matrox once again, for pioneering this feature, much like they have in the past with others like Bump Mapping.

All told our experience with the Parhelia was, on some levels, a real disappointment and on others eye opening and impressive.  We are going to reserve our rating on the Parhelia at this point in time, since we feel the drivers need a bit more maturity, in order to realize their full potential in end user "out of the box" quality and performance.  We hope that Matrox can build upon the Parhelia architecture, enhancing it's performance at the chip and driver level, with future iterations of the platform.  Welcome back Matrox.  It's good to have you with us, but there is still some work to be done.

Rating Update - June 28, 2002

Since our initial testing of the Parhelia 128MB card, Matrox has informed us that their drivers and cards are ready for full retail release.  As such, the product we received for testing and evaluation was indeed representative of what the end user experience will be at this point in time.  Additionally, Matrox has committed to regular driver update releases and in fact have already posted newer drivers on their site,  than what will be on the retail CD.  So, with this in mind, we feel it is only fitting to give our standard Heat Meter rating to the Matrox Parhelia.

Discuss This, Or Any Other HotHardware Article In the PC Hardware Forums!