Talk:Matrox Parhelia

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This article contains an awful lot of POV; also, it's very games centric, and fails to mention Matrox's excellent 2D performance and openGL drivers. Parhelia was and remains a small workstation card, never really intended for games, and it's used in productivity and particularly creative arenas all the time exactly because of this. This article should be heavily reworked to reflect these issues.

The Parhelia was never ahead in any area other than with its unique Surround Gaming and FAA, and perhaps multi-display capabilities (in 2002). It's OpenGL drivers certainly have never been high quality, especially in comparison with NVIDIA. This is true in any app, even pro apps. The Parhelia is competitive with the generation before it, and that only after driver updates. [1] [2] [3]

With regards to 2D performance, the maximum theoretical 2D speed was reached with G400, believe it or not. They used to compare the cards with a "null driver" test. All cards today are compare generally equally with any difference being basically imperceptible. And while the card's analog output quality is excellent, so is the quality of competing ATI and NVIDIA cards. Long past are the days of the GeForce 3 and down, with their blurry output. ATI's output since the first Radeon has actually always been competitive with Matrox.

I wouldn't say the article misses much, other than more Matrox myth debunking perhaps. I don't personally own a Parhelia, but do own almost a dozen of their older cards (up to G400 MAX). They used to build great stuff, but Parhelia was riddled with software and hardware bugs. Just peruse the Matrox Users forum history for evidence of that. One of the worst was a serious banding issue in hardware. [4]

One can not help but feel that the original Parhelia was a seriously unfinished product, after looking over its performance compared to its peers and its overall complexity (while being so uncompetitive). With things like the banding issue, and the later decision to "disappear" the vertex shader 2.0 support, it becomes fairly apparent IMO. The company basically went downhill post-G400, losing many of their engineers for a variety of reasons. The G450 and G550 were downgraded G400s, and Parhelia looks like it was a last ditch effort. Their newer cards are even basically downgraded and overpriced Parhelias. --Swaaye 22:48, 16 July 2006 (UTC)