Attack Out Of The Blind Spot: Matrox Parhelia-512

Quality Comparison

The Parhelia is not being positioned on the market as a card for brute performance in standard mode, but rather for maximum display quality. This simply begs for a quality comparison with the competing product from NVIDIA.

The benchmarks show that the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 is absolutely superior to the Parhelia in standard mode. Here, "standard" means that only trilinear texture filtering is involved, without anti-aliasing (FSAA). In order to increase image quality, you can filter the texture anisotropically, which, in conjunction with FSAA, leads to significantly higher image quality.

There are two questions to answer here: which product provides better quality, and at what performance level. Let's tackle them one at a time. First, we'll look at the question of image quality.

Note: all screenshots were made at a resolution of 1024 x 768 at 32 bit color. In order to get an accurate impression of the image quality, you should set your desktop resolution to 1024 x 768 when viewing. All screenshots can also be downloaded uncompressed and in full resolution, so that you can judge for yourselves. Again, you should set your computer to 1024 x 768 when viewing them.

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