Kyle (from [H]ard|OCP) starts the insults...

[Geek]

Posted by Kyle 5:17 PM (CDT)

Shacknews passed along this scoop pertaining to DOOM]|[ and Parhelia. You want to make sure and read the whole Carmack plan file as it might save your $400...


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.

...there are probably going to be other chips out by then that will completely eclipse this generation of products.

Guess Matrox did not take into consideration the games of next year when they were building Parhelia for the "games of tomorrow". Us little hardware guys telling you something sucks is one thing, but when the Carmack brings the smackdown, you don't get back up from it.

Hmmm, "MacSmack". I kinda like the ring of that...

[Afronaut]

Kyle is Polite Compared to Chris Verr over at Active-Hardware

The Matrox Parhelia 512. A monumentalFlop?

John Romero, What does he have to say?

[thop]

Of course, on the Winbench 2D benchmark, the Parhelia does better than all other contenders but we don't think that serious 3D players will realy care about it.

Matrox didn't care to send a reviewing sample of the Parhelia to us for reviewing but let's bet that they probably feared our comparison test methodology that would have too clearly highlited the poor performance of this graphic card to Matrox's tastes...

no further comment needed who are these guys anyway?

[jjn1056]

I'd take these comments from Kyle seriously. He was one of the people that broke the news about how ATI cooked their drivers to benchmark well in Quake (by reducing video quality when it noticed you were running 'quake.exe') so that people might be fooled into thinking the videocard was better than it actually is.

Perhaps all of Matrox's bad karma from screwing their customers over support is finally coming back at them.

[Reverend Maynard]

Originally posted by jjn1056

Perhaps all of Matrox's bad karma from screwing their customers over support is finally coming back at them.

What the bloody hell are you talking about? Matrox has fantastic support. They did worlds for me when I needed help with my G400. They sent bios revisions to me quite a few times to fix minor issues I had, and ended up giving me a new card both times I fired mine.

[jjn1056]

Remember the g450 Marvel?

which was never supported properly in win2000? Or WinXP? For that amount of money I paid for the card I would have expected Matrox to support the card for more than a single OS release. Those of us who bought this card went through an entire year of on/off promises from Matrox, until they finally told us the card would never be properly supported.

Maybe you were not around when that was happening, but a lot of really big Matrox fans felt really bad and used. Before that experience I always raved about matrox, but it seems to me their driver support is substandard.

If companies like Nvidia can support their cards on new OS's in a reasonable time frame, why can't Matrox?

But if you have had a better experience I'm glad for it.

[stmok]

Have you looked at the effort that the Matrox people put into when users of the G400 have trouble with Jedi Knight II?

[Rags]

Re: Remember the g450 Marvel?

Originally posted by jjn1056
which was never supported properly in win2000? Or WinXP? For that amount of money I paid for the card I would have expected Matrox to support the card for more than a single OS release. Those of us who bought this card went through an entire year of on/off promises from Matrox, until they finally told us the card would never be properly supported.

Maybe you were not around when that was happening, but a lot of really big Matrox fans felt really bad and used. Before that experience I always raved about matrox, but it seems to me their driver support is substandard.

If companies like Nvidia can support their cards on new OS's in a reasonable time frame, why can't Matrox?

But if you have had a better experience I'm glad for it.

The consumer video editing card is done by a different driver team all together.

If you compare the actual video drivers, and not the video tools, you would see that the G400 was the FIRST with win2k support, the first with supported 2K drivers, the FIRST with D3D and OpenGL drivers for Win2k, and the FIRST(and only) to offer true dual monitor support in win2k.

Rags

[Seajnky]

that guy that posts at active hardware cant even spell. I mean come on, sure i make spelling mistakes on my posts. But cant he use a spell checker or something? Maybe his 10th grade english teacher forgot to proofread it.


"We must also admit that when Antialiasing is turned on that the Parhelia doesn better than all other cards thanks to Matrox's 16X FAA tehnology"

[Dogbert]

No interntion of reviving my old flame war with Joel - [M]atrox did screw with their customers back at the days of the infamous G200 and it's non-existing "OpenGL" (which was written on the god damn box !).

[The PIT]

Thats old hat. As soon as Haig took over tech support improved tremdously.

[Ant]

I think we should differentiate between support and technical support, Matrox have some of the best technical support in the industry. What lets Matrox down at times is lack of support from above, i.e. Matrox failing to provide the money and resources for the support of the Marvel products for example. A prime example is them diverting away from the G800 development to the G450 eTV, and we all know the outcome of that one.

What we need to give credit to Matrox for here is that they continue to strive to innovate. The innovation they can clearly do, it's translating that innovation to a marketable product where they seem to fall down. That said is Parhelia a bad product? No it's looking to be a damn fine card but not one that currently at least lives up to expectations in some quarters, an issue which is compunded by it's hefty price tag.

[Dogbert]

Actually (and being honest about it) the Parhelia is what the G200 has never been.

Unlike the G200, Parhelia keeps all his promises out of the box.
The G200 was the black sheep of the family. The reason I stayed around is because mistakes happen (even terrible and rude ones). The G400 proved it.

I hope we'll see a/the parhelia with a higher clock speed sometime in the future cause many people here would like to see nVIDIA's ass being kicked all over the benchmark scene once and for all and fankly, we deserve it

[Marshmallowman]

hey I Like my g200

[monkeyboy]

Originally posted by jjn1056
I'd take these comments from Kyle seriously. He was one of the people that broke the news about how ATI cooked their drivers to benchmark well in Quake (by reducing video quality when it noticed you were running 'quake.exe') so that people might be fooled into thinking the videocard was better than it actually is.

Perhaps all of Matrox's bad karma from screwing their customers over support is finally coming back at them.

Hmm, ok. Of course Kyle's little excluse quake/quack hack did happen to be supplied by a certain other competing hardware manufacturer. Also, the whole issue turned out to be a bug that was corrected with NO performace loss on the Radeon 8500.

Funny how Kyle's not so quick to post about Nvidia's 'cooking' of their drivers that has recently been uncovered in relation to 3DMark2002.