Matrox Parhelia
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Matrox Parhelia 512 is a 512-bit graphics card launched in 2002 with full support for DirectX 8.1 and incorporating several DirectX 9.0 features. This was Matrox's attempt to return to the gaming market after a long hiatus, their first significant effort since the G200 and G400 lines had become uncompetitive. Their other post-G400 products, G450 and G550, were cost-reduced revisions of "G400" technology and were not competitive with ATI's Radeon or NVIDIA's GeForce lines with regards to 3D graphics.
The various innovative features of Parhelia included quad-vertex shader arrays, hardware displacement mapping, and 16x fragment anti-aliasing, all of which were featured prominently in Matrox's Coral Reef technical demo. The "Surround Gaming" support allowed the card to drive three monitors creating a unique level gaming immersion. For example, in a driving simulation, the middle monitor could show the windshield while the left and right monitors could display the side views (offering peripheral vision.) The Parhelia was also the first graphics card to be equipped with a 256-bit memory bus, giving it a advantage over other cards of the time in the area of memory bandwidth.
For a top-of-the-line, and rather expensive card ($399 USD), its 3D gaming performance was well behind NVIDIA's older and similarly priced GeForce 4 Ti series. The Parhelia's large number of transistors was initially believed to have made it difficult to achieve a high GPU clock speed. However, when ATI's Radeon 9700 was released later that year, with a much higher clock speed (250 MHz vs. 325 MHz) and with many more transistors (80 million vs. 108 million), all on the same silicon manufacturing process, this point was shown to be false. More likely was that Matrox did not have engineering talent on par with NVIDIA and ATI and, as a result, their GPU was less efficient and less well designed overall. Matrox Parhelia was only competitive with the older Radeon 8500 and GeForce 3, which typically cost half as much.
In retrospect, Matrox designed the card with the wrong workload in mind, with too many resources reliant on heavy multitexturing instead of pure pixel fillrate. The card's fillrate performance was only formidable if a game used many layers of textures because it was only equipped with 4 pixel pipelines, but each had 4 texture units. Unfortunately this did not turn out to be an optimal approach for games. Parhelia was also crippled by poor bandwidth saving technologies, while ATI had their 3rd generation HyperZ in Radeon 9700 and NVIDIA had their Lightning Memory Architecture in GeForce 4. So, while the Parhelia had formidable memory bandwidth, much of it was wasted because the card didn't have the ability to efficiently prevent overdraw or compress z-buffer data, among other inefficiencies. Parhelia was also believed to have a crippled triangle-setup engine that starved the rest of the chip in typical 3D rendering tasks. [1]
Later in Parhelia's life, when DirectX 9 applications were becoming quite prevalent, Matrox acknowledged that the vertex shaders were not Shader Model 2.0 capable, and as such not DirectX 9-compliant, as was initially advertised. Presumably there were several bugs within the Parhelia core that could not be worked around in the drivers. However, it was all a bit of a moot point because Parhelia's performance was not adequate to drive most DirectX 9-supporting titles well even without more complex shader code weighing the card down.
Within a few months after release, the Parhelia was completely overshadowed by ATI's far faster and fully DirectX 9.0 compliant Radeon 9700. The Radeon 9700 was faster in every way, and produced higher quality images at the same time. Matrox still held on somewhat with their many unique and high quality features, such as "Surround Gaming" and fragment anti-aliasing. But, due to their equivalent pricing against faster cards, the Parhelia never got a significant hold in the market. It remains a niche product today while nVidia and ATI control the majority of the market (as of 2006).
[edit] Parhelia-LX
After the launch of Parhelia-512, Matrox released Parhelia-LX, which supports only 128-bit memory and has only 2 pixel pipelines. The first video cards using it included Matrox Millennium P650 and Millennium P750.
[edit] Future products
Originally, Matrox planned to produced the 'Parhelia 2' successor, codenamed 'Pitou'.[2] However, when Parhelia-512 failed to compete in the gaming market, the project was never again mentioned.
Parhelia processors were later upgraded to support AGP 8x, and PCI Express.
