new parhelia drivers!

[TdB]

the lucky few who already has a parhelia(hey! oems are actually selling as we speak, so somebody must have a parhelia, by now), will properbly be pleased to hear they they have already launched new drivers:

http://www.matrox.com/mga/support/drivers/latest/home.cfm

it is version 1.00.01.226.
(reviews used the 1.225 or 1.223 afaik)

are these NEW drivers or the ones on the driver-cd?
if they are new, can anybody tell us if the have fixed the high-tap anisotropic filtering, and are they faster than the ones we saw in the reviews?

[SoRnMaN]

I believe the ones on the cd are .223, and the ones used in most of the benchmarks that are out are .225.. So that would make these newer.

But I am guessing here and haven't gone back to look it up. I know the cd version has '23' in them, and the benchmarks were mostly run with drivers with a '25' in them.

[Jazzz]

maybe we should ask ben or aceshardware if they can use these drivers in their review

[Jon P. Inghram]

Interesting... the card does seem to have some form of geometry culling according to some text I found in the drivers. Not sure if that's a normal part of DX8 though.

[MrGaribaldi]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
Interesting... the card does seem to have some form of geometry culling according to some text I found in the drivers. Not sure if that's a normal part of DX8 though.

Nice... Would you mind pointing us to the correct file, or post the info here? There's bound to be someone who either knows whether it's DX8 specs (or know enough to check), or something special for matrox...

[Jon P. Inghram]

It's in the MTXPARHD.DLL file, here's a screenshot

[MrGaribaldi]

Thanks...

i'd be surprised if we don't have a couple of views of what this is in 12 hours

[thop]

hmmm interesting. i have a desperate hope that there are some hidden settings that weren't enabled in drivers so far (stability or whatever reasons) and will BOOST performance once enabled. but that's just me dreaming

anyone remember the radeon ddr LE? HyperZ was disabled (ati claimed it wasn't even there) and could be enabled with a registry setting and that made the LE a regular radeon. sth. like that

[xortam]

You mean something like this thop (From FiringSquad review)?

Matrox has told us that there are parts of the Parhelia that aren’t even enabled today because of the lack of software and the Parhelia will be ready for tomorrow’s software and games as well.

[TdB]

I thought he was talking about displacement mapping, DAT, vertex shaders 2.0 etc... in that review.

I can´t imagine they would enable the secret additional 16 pixelshaders 2.0, the day before ati launches the r300, or reveal the secret "enable 128 bit color" regestry-hack or something like that.

but perhaps he was refering to the additional stages in the pixelshaders, or maybe some of the TMUs were disabled in the early drivers.

[icemaker]

2kxp10001226.exe

Looks like Matrox uploaded 2kxp10001226.exe at www.matrox.com?

[xortam]

Yeah icemaker ... that was the initial point of this whole thread.