Pixel-Churners: A round-up of Radeon 9700 PRO cards

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The only area where the NVIDIA chip manages to keep up is in pixel pipelines. While it only has four pixel pipelines, as opposed to the eight on the 9700 PRO, each pipeline can calculate two textures per clock and pipe. The fill rates of both cards are roughly equal for games that use multitexturing, basically translating into all current games. Matrox is another competitor, at least in a price comparison. With its vertex shader, the Matrox Parhelia offers hardware-accelerated DirectX 9 features. That said, the pixel shaders are still designed to conform to the DirectX 8.1 standard. Despite its innovative fragment antialiasing and a 256-bit memory interface, it doesn't perform nearly as well as a GeForce4, let alone a Radeon 9700 PRO. The Parhelia's strengths lie more in the 2D arena, such as in multi-monitor environments. It allows up to three monitors to be connected; if you want, you can spread games out to up to three monitors using the Surround Gaming feature. But the chip seems to hit a brick wall at that point: it's nigh on impossible to play new games like Unreal Tournament 2003 in this mode because of the chip's poor 3D capabilities.