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