Attack Out Of The Blind Spot: Matrox Parhelia-512

High Polygon Count

In this test, 3D Mark shows the throughput of triangles per second.

• 1 light: For a high throughput, we have only diffuse materials and a single directional light in this run.
• 8 lights: We have the same scene, but the dragons are of a shiny material giving a specular reflection. There are eight lights in all; one directional and seven point lights.

In the simple test, the GF4 Ti can calculate almost double the amount of triangles as the Parhelia. In the more complicated test with eight lights, which involves additional reflections on the objects, both cards are at about the same level, with a slight advantage for the GF4. ATI's Radeon 8500 clearly falls behind.

Pixel Shader Performance

As with the GeForce 4, Parhelia supports pixel shaders based on version 1.3. 3D Mark 2001 SE provides a series of tests to evaluate the speed of the pixel shaders.

Game 4 - Nature

This part of the benchmarks is used by the pixel shader for the rendering of water:

This scene depends heavily on DirectX 8 features. The trees, grass and butterflies are animated, transformed and lit using vertex shaders. The movements of the fisherman are made by morphing, also using a vertex shader. The surface of the lake uses vertex shaders, pixel shaders and cube maps. Due to the pixel shader use, this test cannot be run without DX8 compatible graphics hardware. The scene only has a high detail run and affects the 3DMark score accordingly.

Parhelia only achieves a disappointing 25 fps in this test, clearly beaten by the GF4 and the R8500.