Attack Out Of The Blind Spot: Matrox Parhelia-512

3D Mark 2001 SE Details

The benchmark 3D Mark 2001 SE (Build 330) provides much more in the results than merely a score. The two cards differ from one another in many ways, described in the following.

Fill Rate

The fill rate tells you how many texels per second a graphics card can transmit through the graphic card's memory. To this end, 3D Mark tests both single- and multi-texturing:

• Single-Texturing: There are 64 surfaces with one texture each. This means that the graphics hardware fills each of these objects separately, no matter how many texture layers that card is capable of drawing in a single pass.

• Multi-Texturing: Here, we drew 64 texture layers as fast as possible. This means that we took advantage of the fact that modern cards are usually capable of drawing multiple texture layers on a single object as fast as it would draw one single layer. 64 texture layers are distributed so that each surface in use has as many texture layers as that particular card can draw in a single pass. For example, if your card can draw eight texture layers in a single pass, then there will be eight objects with eight texture layers each. If your card is capable of doing six texture layers in a pass, there will be ten objects with six layers, and an 11th layer with the remaining four layers.

In single-texturing operation, the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 is clearly ahead. In multi-texturing operation, which is used by many of the latest games, the Parhelia moves ahead by a bit. Basically, the modest GPU clock speed of 220 MHz gets in the way of better results.