Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP

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