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Thinking about buying a Matrox Parhelia for surround gaming? Well, think again...
(note: I'm posting this...um...everywhere)
I bought a Matrox Parhelia w/3 17" monitors for Surround Gaming purporses. Yes, I know it's overpriced. Yes, I know it performs at Geforce 3 speeds. I could live with both of these aspects of the card. It's 2D quality is beyond great, and having 3 monitors worth of desktop is terrific for net surfing. I really want to be a happy Matrox fanboy. HOWEVER, when I buy a $400 videocard for surround gaming, I expect it to actually work in games. This card does not. Flaming rant mode is now ON!
Here's a list of games I have tried with the card:
1. Half Life: Works fine, does not support surround gaming.
2. Freespace 2: Work fine, does not support surround gaming.
3. America's Army: Works fine, supports surround gaming.
4. Reef Demo (came with card): Works fine, supports surround 3D.
5. IG3 Demo (came with card): Works fine, supports surround gaming.
6. No One Lives Forever2 Ohio Teaser Level: Works fine, does not support surround gaming.
7. 3dMark2001: Works fine, can be run in surround gaming resoulutions, but image is stretched.
8. Codecreatures Benchmark Pro: Works fine, supports surround gaming, with stretched images.
Ok, so far so good. A few games don't support surround gaming, but that was to be expected. But here comes the world of hurt.
9. Unreal Tournament: Works fine, except the menus and in game text get corrupted if you change the resolution or run the game twice without rebooting. Claims to support surround gaming, but I sure as hell can't get it to work correctly (the image only shows up on the leftmost monitor and a little bit of the middle one, rest is blank).
10. Quake 3: Supports surround gaming, but spontaneously reboots during play, and all in-game menus and text are unreadable in surround mode.
11. GTA3: Supports surround gaming, but image is stretched and therefore unusable in that mode. Suffers slowdowns when it is raining. Upon leaving one city and entering another, all textures on buildings and the ground are missing/garbled, although it eventually fixes itself.
12. AVP2: Works fine, and supports surround gaming, but that only works when cheats are on, so unless you are serving the game, you can't use surround gaming in mulitplayer.
13. SOF2: Does not support surround gaming. Lights and explosions are slightly corrupted, otherwise works fine.
14. RTCW: Supports surround gaming, but coronas on lights appear where they would be if you were in single monitor mode (you can shut these off). Sometimes it screws up and doesn't set the FOV correctly, making it unplayable. This happens randomly; it will work fine for one server, and then you leave and the next server is hosed. It also crashes with a "Q293078 - Error Message: STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER" error at random times, as well as whenever the map timelimit is hit.
15. Crimson Skies: Menu text is garbled, and crashes all clients when you attempt to join a LAN game. Software mode works fine, but I did not spend four hundred dollars on a video card to run a game in software mode.
16. Kyodai Mahjongg (yes, a tile game): Won't run at all. Crashes with a "IDirect3DDevice can not be made." error.
Oh, and you know the icing on the cake? They haven't updated the drivers for it since July 26th!!!! What the hell have they been doing the last month and a half?
I'm really ready to run over this piece of crud with my car and buy a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 or a ATI 9700. AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!
I bought a Matrox Parhelia w/3 17" monitors for Surround Gaming purporses. Yes, I know it's overpriced. Yes, I know it performs at Geforce 3 speeds. I could live with both of these aspects of the card. It's 2D quality is beyond great, and having 3 monitors worth of desktop is terrific for net surfing. I really want to be a happy Matrox fanboy. HOWEVER, when I buy a $400 videocard for surround gaming, I expect it to actually work in games. This card does not. Flaming rant mode is now ON!
Here's a list of games I have tried with the card:
1. Half Life: Works fine, does not support surround gaming.
2. Freespace 2: Work fine, does not support surround gaming.
3. America's Army: Works fine, supports surround gaming.
4. Reef Demo (came with card): Works fine, supports surround 3D.
5. IG3 Demo (came with card): Works fine, supports surround gaming.
6. No One Lives Forever2 Ohio Teaser Level: Works fine, does not support surround gaming.
7. 3dMark2001: Works fine, can be run in surround gaming resoulutions, but image is stretched.
8. Codecreatures Benchmark Pro: Works fine, supports surround gaming, with stretched images.
Ok, so far so good. A few games don't support surround gaming, but that was to be expected. But here comes the world of hurt.
9. Unreal Tournament: Works fine, except the menus and in game text get corrupted if you change the resolution or run the game twice without rebooting. Claims to support surround gaming, but I sure as hell can't get it to work correctly (the image only shows up on the leftmost monitor and a little bit of the middle one, rest is blank).
10. Quake 3: Supports surround gaming, but spontaneously reboots during play, and all in-game menus and text are unreadable in surround mode.
11. GTA3: Supports surround gaming, but image is stretched and therefore unusable in that mode. Suffers slowdowns when it is raining. Upon leaving one city and entering another, all textures on buildings and the ground are missing/garbled, although it eventually fixes itself.
12. AVP2: Works fine, and supports surround gaming, but that only works when cheats are on, so unless you are serving the game, you can't use surround gaming in mulitplayer.
13. SOF2: Does not support surround gaming. Lights and explosions are slightly corrupted, otherwise works fine.
14. RTCW: Supports surround gaming, but coronas on lights appear where they would be if you were in single monitor mode (you can shut these off). Sometimes it screws up and doesn't set the FOV correctly, making it unplayable. This happens randomly; it will work fine for one server, and then you leave and the next server is hosed. It also crashes with a "Q293078 - Error Message: STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER" error at random times, as well as whenever the map timelimit is hit.
15. Crimson Skies: Menu text is garbled, and crashes all clients when you attempt to join a LAN game. Software mode works fine, but I did not spend four hundred dollars on a video card to run a game in software mode.
16. Kyodai Mahjongg (yes, a tile game): Won't run at all. Crashes with a "IDirect3DDevice can not be made." error.
Oh, and you know the icing on the cake? They haven't updated the drivers for it since July 26th!!!! What the hell have they been doing the last month and a half?
I'm really ready to run over this piece of crud with my car and buy a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 or a ATI 9700. AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!
If you paid $400 on a video card, and found that it didn't work correctly or crashed in half the games you tried it, wouldn't you be mad too???
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