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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.
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HotHardware's Test System |
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A high end Pentium
4 and PC1066 RDRAM |
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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.
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Benchmarks / Comparison - The Parhelia Vrs. ATi
and NVIDIA's Finest |
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It's all about the
numbers |
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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
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