je suis tombé sur cela sur [H]ocp: qui m'a fait mourir de rire
 
This review of the Parhelia shows higher benchmarks than literally every other website out there today. It has the Parhelia running neck in neck with the Radeon 8500 and just barely losing out to the GF4 Ti4600. They must?ve got the ?TURBO? Edition Parhelia.  
 
traduction :
 
cette review de la Parhelia,  donne des benchs literalement a des année lumiere de tout les autre site qui ont tester la carte aujourd'hui: la matrox est au coude a coude avec la radeon 8500 ou juste un chouilla en dessous de la TI4600.
Il doivent avoir recue la version "turbo" de la parhelia
 
 
 
=> bon mis à part le ton tres ironique (et limite de mauvaise fois) de steve
 
une lecture du dit test: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/ [...] /parhelia/
 
montre que les drivers ont une influence sur les perfs
dans certain cas les .23 sont mieux dans d'autre les .25 sont mieux..
 


bon c'est pas non plus la revolution totale Mais on note le gain de performance de 10 a 20%  
 
sur ce voila la conclusion du site qui comme on le voie n'est pas partisane
 
Matrox?s Parhelia-512 is a professional graphics card that every graphic designer, digital animator or casual gamer must have. The 10bit Gigacolour technology combined with a 512bit GPU has produced a product unlike any other in the market. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this card to high-end users and professionals. I would like to warn the hardcore gamer that this is a high-end graphics card catered to the needs of Design Artists, Animators and stock analysts as a gaming card it falls short in the raw performance category. If you are a hardcore gamer who likes raw performance, I would recommend that you look at the GeForce 4 Ti4600 Series.

 
 
Sur ce, Malgres cela meme les plus fervants utilisateur de Matrox ont perdue leur euthousiasme apres avoir recu ce mail de John Carmack....
 
 
Name: John Carmack
Email:
Description: Programmer
Project:
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June 25, 2002
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The Matrox Parhelia Report:
 
The executive summary is that the Parhelia will run Doom, but it is not performance competitive with Nvidia or ATI.
 
Driver issue remain, so it is not perfect yet, but I am confident that Matrox will resolve them.
 
The performance was really disappointing for the first 256 bit DDR card. I tried to set up a "poster child" case that would stress the memory subsystem above and beyond any driver or triangle level inefficiencies, but I was unable to get it to ever approach the performance of a GF4.
 
The basic hardware support is good, with fragment flexibility better than GF4 (but not as good as ATI 8500), but it just doesn't keep up in raw performance. With a die shrink, this chip could probably be a contender, but there are probably going to be other chips out by then that will completely eclipse this generation of products.
 
None of the special features will be really useful for Doom:
 
The 10 bit color framebuffer is nice, but Doom needs more than 2 bits of destination alpha when a card only has four texture units, so we can't use it.
 
Anti aliasing features are nice, but it isn't all that fast in minimum feature mode, so nobody is going to be turning on AA. The same goes for "surround gaming". While the framerate wouldn't be 1/3 the base, it would still probably be cut in half.
 
Displacement mapping. Sigh. I am disappointed that the industry is still pursuing any quad based approaches. Haven't we learned from the stellar success of 3DO, Saturn, and NV1 that quads really suck? In any case, we can't use any geometry amplification scheme (including ATI's truform) in conjunction with stencil shadow volumes.