Visual Quality test

[Electric Amish]

The Tech Report has a breakdown of visual quality testing performed by Tecchannel.de which compares the Parhelia and many ATI and NVidia cards.

Interesting stuff. Actual waveform data to SHOW that Matrox has superior quality. No more subjective BS.

amish

[Edward]

Well physic output is not all there is, there is also rendering quality.
Matrox needs to get to sharpen the picture (LOD) of it's rendering in both openGL and d3d, because it's not even on par with ATI and nVidia right now.

Further, the anisotropic filtering must be fixed as soon as possible, as ansio only works on 2x right now.

So I hope there is a change we could see some improvements there and get rid of the blurry mass, because otherwise the highoutput wil be useless in 3d

( when will aniso work on 8x?!)

[thop]

that was already discussed here: http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=34196

[Electric Amish]

Ahh... I see... No wonder I didn't see it.

Ryu inserted it into the middle of another discussion.

amish

[Tempest]

Here's a "subjective VQ test" for ya...

<img src="http://koti.mbnet.fi/~sampokoo/misc/stest.gif">

[sube]

Yeah, I see:

"nVidia is the biggest shit!"

am I right?

[DukeP]

According to Firingsquad (http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardwa...elia/page5.asp) the Parhelia HAS got the best visuals, but only by a very small margin does it beat the Leadtek Geforce 4.

This time around however, there’s another player on the block who’s also boasting about its 2D quality as well. If you’ve been reading FiringSquad regularly, you would have noticed us talk about Leadtek and its filtering system integrated on its GeForce3 and GeForce4 cards. In a blind test that consisted of text examination we obtained the Sony F500 monitor to be our de-facto standard for image comparison. Arguably the world’s sharpest CRT, the F500 rolls in at a retina cutting 0.22mm pitch. The card we used to test the Parhelia against was Leadtek’s WinFast A250 Ultra – a GeForce4 Ti4600 with high image quality.

So who won the test? Matrox did but not by much. Often times we found ourselves questioning whether our vision was good enough to see the difference because it was very, very difficult. It took a lot of staring and squinting to notice any difference at all. Ironically, this is saying more for Leadtek than it is for Matrox. In terms of 2D quality, you just expect Matrox to beat the competition, but you would never guess that a GeForce4 (out of the many that are out there) to approach Matrox’s quality so closely. The Parhelia possesses serious filtering design and the Leadtek comes very close. Both the Leadtek WinFast and the Parhelia are sharper than Matrox’s previous cards like the G550 and G400.

So, visual quality in 2D isnt the good old Fortress Matrox any longer.
Sigh. I can buy a Leadtek WinFast A250 Ultra TD TV-Out + DVI Retail AGP / 128MB DDR / 2048x1536 / GeForce4 Ti 4600 for 400$ here in Denmark. My preorder for the Parhelia is now: Total: $500.53

Sigh. Its DAMN hard to be a Fanboy thesedays.

~~DukeP~~

[Biggs]

Funny, they didn't mention what exactly they were "staring and squinting" at and most importantly, what resolution they were running. My guess is the MS Start Button at 640 x 480 but I could be wrong you know.

[TdB]

Originally posted by DukeP
According to Firingsquad (http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardwa...elia/page5.asp) the Parhelia HAS got the best visuals, but only by a very small margin does it beat the Leadtek Geforce 4.



So, visual quality in 2D isnt the good old Fortress Matrox any longer.
Sigh. I can buy a Leadtek WinFast A250 Ultra TD TV-Out + DVI Retail AGP / 128MB DDR / 2048x1536 / GeForce4 Ti 4600 for 400$ here in Denmark. My preorder for the Parhelia is now: Total: $500.53

Sigh. Its DAMN hard to be a Fanboy thesedays.

~~DukeP~~

you could always try some cheap danish online stores, acording to www.edbpriser.dk a parhelia retail costs about 3999kr, while a winfast gf4ti4600 costs around 3639kr, the price difference isn´t THAT big, if you buy at the cheapest place.

[sube]

We had some Leadtek GF4Ti4200 in test. 2D visual quality wasn't better than G400 nor V3 3000. I wonder if Ti4600 is better.
Thin lines were slightly smudged on Leadtek. The same as on other Ti4200s, from Abit, MSI and Gainward. Only Asus Ti4600 had better image quality than others nvidias, maybe comparable to Hercules ATI R8500LE, but it did not touched the quality of G400. The lines were like lasercutted on G400. On nVidias they appears like cutted with kitchen knife
You know what i liked to say

[isochar]

My Leadtek A250 Ultra TD should be here this week. I'll be able to do a head-to-head comparison versus the Parhelia. ($300 vs $400)

[bingo13]

The Leadtek did not even come close to the Parhelia on my Sony F520 at 1600x1200 and up. In fact I have never noticed any difference between the Leadtek/Gainward/Abit Ti cards that I have. I will say they were on par in most cases with my ATI 8500 AIW.

[blacklotus]

My tests on my Sony F500 with my own boards and my own eyes (read, this test is subjective to my own eyes. :

2D at 1600x1200 (any smaller text with a 21" CRT and I'll really go blind.)

Best to Worst 2D image:

G400MAX > Hercules R8500 Retail > ATI R8500 Retail

p.s. the Hercules is powering my common family PC with the Sony F500, the ATI is running my own personal entertainment PC with Samsung 240T, and the G400Max is my internet surfing PC with Samsung GLSi 17" CRT with BNC connectors.

Originally posted by bingo13
The Leadtek did not even come close to the Parhelia on my Sony F520 at 1600x1200 and up. In fact I have never noticed any difference between the Leadtek/Gainward/Abit Ti cards that I have. I will say they were on par in most cases with my ATI 8500 AIW.

[DukeP]

Originally posted by sube
We had some Leadtek GF4Ti4200 in test. 2D visual quality wasn't better than G400 nor V3 3000. I wonder if Ti4600 is better.

AFAIK the 4600 series has got better output than the budget versions. I cant remember where i read this, but it was mentioned at two different sites (might have been from the same source tho').



~~DukeP~~

[isochar]

Well, after a few hours of using the Leadtek A250 TD Ultra, it's time to send the Parhelia back... (All my desktop and gaming resolutions run at 1280x1024/960)