*** Parhelia vs GF4 Ti4600 benchmarks - Oops huh?

[g__day]

Well looks like THG in Germany let the cat out of the bag earlier - the Parhelia flops on current benchmarks.

Even though the site quickly pulled down the article and barcharts - look at them here:

http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=67909965&m=7260923494

Amazing that they even lost the FSAA vs GF4 FSAA tests in all benchmarks!!!

or

http://www.3dgpu.com/yabb_se/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=716

"Earlier today a well-known German website disclosed their Matrox Parhelia numbers. The pages seem to have been removed at this time. While we cannot legally give you the content, as it is copyright material, we can certainly discuss what we have seen.

Aquanox - Parhelia was beaten by ATI's 128MB 8500 and the Ti4600 nearly doubled the score.

Comanche 4 - Parhelia not breaking the 30FPS barrier at 1024x768 while the Ti4600 broke 40.

Jedi Knight 2 - At 1024x768 the Parhelia was about 30% behind both the 8500 and the Ti4600.

3DMark2002 SE v330 - Just breaking into the 7000s while their test system was breaking 10K with the Ti4600. The 8500 dusted it again as well.

Quake 3 Arena - Parhelia lagging way behind both cards and not even giving deathmatch playable frame rates at 1600x1200 in my opinion.

At this point I am really wondering what Matrox was thinking. I know full well that they have explained that their Parhelia will be the card for tomorrow, but while it is currently not keeping pace with the current generation's GPUs, across the board, you have to wonder. Triple head gaming is not going to save Matrox this time round if what we saw is correct. I can certainly understand their reasons with not wanting to give the [H] a card at this point.

 

[UoMDeacon]

LOL, yeah, I just saw the news over at hardocp.com, looks like a misfire on Matrox's part...too bad, since they've been tooting their own horn for all this time about the card. I didn't realize that the "well-known" German site was our own Tom LOL

 

[eden]

Yes I also read it and was about to post something here.

I simply don't understand why it was beaten so easily. It has plently of bandwidth to spare, provides a new FAA method, has tons of pipeline stages, and 4*4 shaders, as well as a lot of memory AND a high clock+mem speed. How can it flop? I don't know but I just think it could've done MUCH better, something along the lines of 100% better.

And if this is what Matrox has been working on for 2 years now, I think they misscheduled its release by a lot...


--
Intel and AMD sitting under a tree, P-R-O-C-E-S-S-I-N-G! <P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Eden on 06/24/02 11:02 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[UoMDeacon]

It's really quite a shame. I had hoped that this card would be competitive with the next generation of cards expected from nVidia and ATi, but obviously it can't even compete with the older generation. It would have been nice to see some more competition in this market. Let's hope that the 3DLabs' card will fare better.

 

[flamethrower205]

Don't give up just yet. First the drivers may be part of the issue, but secondly, it seems the Parhelia has a lot of optimizations yet to come, maybe it'll be something like the gf3- it was good when it came out, and shined later when games for it came out. We'll see.

My frog asked me for a straw...dunno what happened his ass all over the place

 

[Quetzacoatl]

Better yet, compare it to the original Radeon 8500...give the drivers some time to mature, and we may have a winner in a while

"When there's a will, there's a way."

 

[Rebe7254]

There's just no way with those specs the Parhelia can be getting smacked around by the Ti4600 and R8500 this badly. No, it HAS to be a driver issue. But I'm amazed that Matrox released a card with such crappy drivers. Didn't they learn anything from ATi?

AMD Athlon XP 1900+, Asus A7V333, 512mb DDR RAM
PNY Geforce4 Ti4400, Win2k

 

[cakecake]

Yeah, it's sad. Cause I had such high hopes for this card but you may be right Quetzacoatl.

So now... guess it's back to you, nvidia.

This little cathode light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine!

 

[Quetzacoatl]

*shakes head in disagreement* but wouldn't it be suprising if Matrox recovered and wiped up Nvidia and Ati? On the paper, the Parahelia should wipe the floor, but i'm almost positive it's due to poor drivers. They shouldn't be pressured though, considering they have more than enough time to modify their design or improve drivers. It's a very, very bad time to release the Parahelia now. Gods above, have mercy on them.

"When there's a will, there's a way."

 

[SammyBoy]

Well, it is true that most games have specific card optimizations, especially the newer ones, like Comanche 4, JK2, Unreal Perf. Test, and others, so it could be not only poor drivers, but lack of software support. I remember reading at Anandtech that the latest builds of UPT had ATi and Nvidia optimizations built in. I would love to see Anand's review, since he has access to the UPT. If indeed it is the card of tomorrow, then that engine should make it shine, or prove that it's gonna fall flat on its face.

Too bad really, as we could really use a third company to shake things up. PowerVR managed it for a while, but without a fab to make the KyroIII, or Series4, since STM owns the Kyro name, PowerVR is out of the game until it's sold. 3DLab's PL10 workstation <A HREF="http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,264433,00.asp" target="_new">benches</A> are nothing to be proud about either, so it still looks like ATi and Nvidia are the only games in town. Maybe someone will surprise us.

-SammyBoy

 

[eden]

I was most amazed at the Quad Vertex Shader test by Matrox. THIS my friends is what the Parhelia should be able to do. I think also the drivers are a big issue. It might be a GF3-like with 8500-qualities back when they were released. In the future it might shine above the Ti4600, but those must be the most amazing drivers ever to make it jump nearly 100% faster.

And I don't think it's just game optimizations that'll do, I mean it'd take time, and it will STILL be left in the dust with current games.
The specs show more. Even if GF4 has LMAII, that improves by 30% the performance, and even then, the Parhelia has 110% the amount of bandwidth, so it still has a good 60% lead in overall performance. I may be miscalculating but I feel the Parhelia was supposed to shine. High clock speeds would also help, but this is not the issue here, it has so much to offer that the IPC per clock would've done more, like the Radeon 8500.

You're a good graphics editor man, what do you think of the speccs? Shouldn't they give homage to it?

--
Intel and AMD sitting under a tree, P-R-O-C-E-S-S-I-N-G!

 

[bront]

I was supprised to find that it did as poorly as it did. It's performance was around the level of the 8500, and for double the MSRP, that's not a good position for Matrox.

The 3 monitor setup for gaming seems like it's limited to a low resolution at 2400 x 600 (3 x 800 x 600), so that is a bit of a disapointment as well.

Drivers might help it a bit, maybe even bring it within strinking distance of the 4600, but untill the price goes down, it won't sell to well to the gaming public.

The biggest problem is that there is no compression architecture, so the huge bandwidth is wasted on lots of data.

It can be said that smoking is one of the leading cause of statistics.

It can be said that smoking is one of the leading cause of statistics.

 

[OzzieBloke]

My first response to the article: Ouch! With that amount of bandwidth and power behind it... deary me :/ But, here I am hoping that the Parhelia is a bull whos balls just haven't dropped yet... and I think the proverbial gubernaculum will be in the updating of the drivers and getting some compression of some sort in there.

-

I plugged my ram into my motherboard, but unplugged it when I smelled cooked mutton.

 

[bront]

It doesn't "Have" to be a driver issue. Many predicted it would have problems due to it's lack of data compression at the hardware level, seriously crimping it's memory usage.

Some of it will be customization at the game level too, like the sharkmark test. Or Jedi Knight 2, which likely has some for the 8500 along the lines of how Carmac was praising the 8500.

English is phun.

 

[bront]

ATI and Nvidia have hardware level compression, not driver level compression. Driver level compression would be inefecient and heavily CPU intensive, defeating the purpose of a high end GPU.

English is phun.

 

[FiL]

Well by the time that this hits the shops I think ATi and Nvidia will have released the R250/R300 and NV30's respectively, i doubt the Parhelia will be anywhere near them performance wise, no matter if there is a driver improvement....it's a shame, but Matrox have failed to deliver on the gaming front.

<font color=red>isit alan?</font color=red><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by FiL on 06/25/02 12:58 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Black_Cat]

Like the Kryo II, this card would be a nice alternative to ATI and Nvidia if it was priced reasonably. However, with that price tag, who is going to buy it?

I like the fact that Matrox is stressing visual quality which is sometimes lost in the framerate race. However, when comparing the Parhelia with the Ti4600, I don't see much of an improvement.

I'm glad Matrox is back in the 3d video card market. They have always made good stuff. I was really hoping that this card would bring Nvidia to its knees and above all back to the drawing board. If anything they will keep Nvidia looking over its shoulder. Also, I'm sure you'll see improvements with subsequent driver releases and perhaps in the near future a GPU that runs faster. Until then, it seems like a pretty good mid-range card with a whopper of a pricetag.

To start press any key. Where's the "any" key? --Homer Simpson.

 

[SammyBoy]

Well, the difference is that the KyroII performed beyond it's specs (who'd think that a GPU at 175MHz and <i>SDR</i> RAM could out perform GF2 GTS in high res and 32 bit, especially for half the price?). And it still was able to have playable frame rates in the Unreal Performance Test up to 1024x768x32. The problem is that PowerVR was unable to follow up on the success of the KyroII. The SE version was s'posed to have 200MHz and a hardware/software solution to T&L. It never came to be. STM, with the uncertainty surrounding the future of its graphics division, is offering PowerVR for sale, and until someone buys it, nothing more will be seen from the Kyro/PVR Series. On paper, the Series 4 should have destroyed the Ti4200, and remained in the sub-$200 price range. But alas, now there will probably not be a Series4 until they are sold off. VIA backed off, so no suitors remain. PowerVR remains hopeful that Series 4 will be out by Christmas, and Series 5 will debut next year, but it's all hope. They have no fab, so they need someone with access, like STM.

Oh yeah, Anandtech has their review up. The Parhelia was able to best the Ti4600 twice, but those were is very niche catagories.

-SammyBoy

 

[Phob]

HAH, watching that mediocre performance and anisothropy suckness in matrox, makes me more proud of my gf4 4400

 

[MadMechwarrior]

I'll agree with Phob... feels good to own a ti4400

 

[Loonie]

Anandtech's preview using UT2K3 at least showed some encouraging signs. However in the frames-per-second-drooling-benchmarking world we inhabit, they've got their work cut out...

 

[Matisaro]

Matrox has been weighed.....measured.....and found lacking.

The Cash Left In My Pocket,The BEST Benchmark

 

[Matisaro]

I was most amazed at the Quad Vertex Shader test by Matrox. THIS my friends is what the Parhelia should be able to do. I think also the drivers are a big issue. It might be a GF3-like with 8500-qualities back when they were released. In the future it might shine above the Ti4600, but those must be the most amazing drivers ever to make it jump nearly 100% faster.

If nvidia released a card where the only benchmark it did well in was one nvidia released itself, I would think something was fishy with that benchmark.

The Cash Left In My Pocket,The BEST Benchmark

 

[lhgpoobaa]

I KNEW IT! they have done dual channel DDR ram. most interesting. has to be with the chips in sets of two and the 256bit bandwidth.

hope the card matures well. nvidia needs more competition.

<font color=green>Proud member of THG's</font color=green> <font color=blue>Den Of Thieves</font color=blue> :lol:

 

[eden]

Funny, the key word here is "fishy", I hope that wasn't a pun intended for Matrox' benchmark name!

--
Intel and AMD sitting under a tree, P-R-O-C-E-S-S-I-N-G!