Matrox Parhelia tested

Now the company hopes to regain the crown with Parhelia, its first totally new graphics chip in years and the subject of much anticipation. And on paper it looks a sure-fire winner.

Pulling together a 512bit graphics processor unit, one billion colours and 128MB of 256-bit DDR memory, it's technically the most advanced video card yet. The Quad Vertex Shader Array provides more outlets for processing graphics than any other card, while the 400MHz RAMDAC guarantees a smooth digital conversion. There are two DVI connectors as standard, and although a converter is provided for analogue users, it's nice to see Matrox trying to persuade users to switch to a digital graphics setup.

Matrox's new take on anti-aliasing, the technique that fills out graphics images and cuts out the jagged lines that afflict many games, is 16x Fragment anti-aliasing. As with previous forms of anti-aliasing, the trick is to make the graphics more attractive while keeping the frame rate as high as possible. Here, the Matrox fares reasonably well, seeing its speed fall by an average of just over 27 per cent on our games tests.

Matrox's DualHead technology, allowing users to double the amount of Windows workspace by spreading it across two monitors, remains an impressive achievement to this day. But as other companies implement similar features in their own products, it's been left to Matrox to raise the bar again. With TripleHead you can now stretch the workspace across three screens. It's debatable whether this will prove a radical step forwards for business users, although affluent games players in possession of three monitors or flat panels will love the ability to partake of ‘Surround Gaming'. Titles such as Quake III, Flight Simulator 2002 and Unreal Tournament 2003 allow you to spread the gameplay across all three screens and experience opponents coming from the left and right as well as in front of you.

So with all of this advanced technology on board, the Matrox clearly has to be the finest card yet. Well, that is until you come to look at the games performance. Parhelia's drivers are still in development and there's clearly a lot of ground to cover if Matrox is to overhaul even the existing graphics leaders.

OpenGL performance in Quake III was particularly disappointing, with the Parhelia struggling to keep up with a budget-priced GeForce4 MX 440 card. At 1,024x768 the Parhelia managed 115fps (frames per second) on Demo 1 compared to 127fps for the MX 440. Cranking up the resolution to 1,600x1,200 shortened the gap, but the MX 440 still came out on top at 73fps to the Parhelia's 70fps.

Our DirectX titles gave the Matrox a little hope, but it was still stuck several frames behind the MX 440, while the top-of-the-range GeForce4 Ti 4600 held a commanding lead. The fact that the Matrox barely competes with the MX 440 is particularly worrying, as its £279 price tag is almost three-times as expensive.

There's no room for error in the ultra competitive £250+ graphics card market. Although we will keep an eye on Parhelia and will be testing it extensively to see if it can bridge the gap, it doesn't look as though this card will have the actual firepower necessary to beat the next wave of nVidia and ATI cards. µ

Matrox Parhelia
Price £279.00 (ex. VAT)
Contact 01753 665 544
Website www.matrox.co.uk

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