Article Type: Hardware - Video
Article Date: July 23, 2002
Product Info
Product Name: Matrox Parhelia
Category: Hardware - Video
Manufacturer: Matrox
Release Date: Released
Req. Spec: Click Here
Files & Links: Click Here
* * *
2002 sees the re-entry of Matrox into the gaming accelerator market, abandoned by them after the success of the G400 series. Matrox products tend to lag slightly in speed while emphasizing additional features, like Video-In, Video-Out and improved image quality. The Parhelia 512 is in step with this heritage.
Offering the option of simultaneously driving three displays, and with video quality equal or exceeding GeForce4 (on maximum image quality settings), the Matrox Parhelia offers enhanced DX 8.1 compliance along with some additional features.
The 512-bit Parhelia includes a 256-bit DDR interface, quad texturing per pixel with quad pixel pipes, five pixel shaders per clock, APG 8x support and dual 400 MHz RAMDACs.
For the image quality buffs, 10-bit gigacolor technology has arrived. Not only that, but with twice as many texture units per pixel pipeline, the peak fill rate of 4800 is TWICE that of the GeForce4. Granted there are no simulation products currently available that can utilize so great a texture capacity, it probably won’t be long before we see them. Video hardware designers always push ahead of software designers by twelve months or so.
 |
Quality and Performance Settings  |
Parhelia 512 ups the ante in image quality by moving to 10-bit color technology. While some have questioned the advantages of this move, there is no doubt that this is the wave of the future with NVIDIA talking about similar or improved features on their next release. 10-bit color technology should offer improved images. Combined with 64-bit supersampling, Matrox aims to take the edge off your images.
New hardware features include Hardware Displacement Mapping. As we mentioned in our earlier preview, Hardware Displacement Mapping may be one of the biggest features to impact the simulation market in 2003.
HDM is a process where low resolution 2-D objects (like the terrain in your flight sim) are encoded with high-resolution detail and then through the special processes the high-resolution 2-D displacement map is implemented into a Level of Detail (LOD) 3-D Scene with very high levels of geometry. At the same time, the entire process is designed to maximize quality, efficiency and performance.
Currently all our sims use 2-D environments. But with current hardware, the 2-D has to be translated into 3-D via a “mesh.”
Meshes are sets of connected triangles that represent the surface of an object. To create a "realistic" view, the number of triangles has to be increased by many orders of magnitude. The process to enable this kind of rendering requires many features including dynamic generation of complex geometry while at the same time allowing the data to be stored in a simple and compact method.
 |
| Matrox Parhelia 512 |
In order to accomplish this, Matrox designed two special processes as part of HDM and is licensing the features to Microsoft for inclusion into DirectX 9. HDM can be applied to static environments, such as simulation terrains, as well as to dynamic skinned objects like 3-D characters. Any 2-D bitmap can be converted to a 3-D HDM.
This method will revolutionize the generation of terrain, but it will also increase the object detail (imagine that photo-realistic P-51 Mustang) with no performance penalty.
Matrox was the first to offer dual-head display capability, and I vividly recall seeing the Millennium running dual displays in Flight Simulator 98 (FS2002) back at E3 in 1998. Dual displays are now common, as evidenced by the widespread support for dual display capability on NVIDIA hardware. But that means it’s time to raise the bar again.
 |
| Powerdesk Setup |
No more dual display for Matrox, the Parhelia offers triple display. Obviously, this solution will appeal mostly to CAD engineers, graphics artists and cash flush gamers, since most of us don’t have the resources or the desk real estate for such a solution.
But for those who do, this is one cool ability. This "out of the box" feature is supposed to work on any 3-D title. Matrox has been using FS2002 to show off the new feature, and it’s impressive indeed.
I tested the tripled display feature using two 17” displays and my standard 19” display. Running FS2002 across three monitors with surround sound is quite an experience.
If you have seen other previews or reviews of the new Parhelia, then you already know that Parhelia performance is not quite up to the GeForce4 series. Instead, Matrox focuses on image quality, triple display capability, and enhanced DX 8.1 features. Running FS2002 with 16X edge AA enabled is quite an experience.
 |
| Parhelia at 16x AA |
Matrox looked at current antialiasing solutions and simply decided there was a better way. Honestly, while 4X FSAA looks great on NVIDIA hardware, the problem is that full screen anti-aliasing does nasty things to textures, blurring and dulling them. Matrox reasoned that there were two advantages to edge antialiasing over the full screen method. First, the performance hit would be substantially smaller. Second, texture blurring and the requirement for anisotropic filtering would be reduced. They were right on both counts.
The Parhelia introduces a new method of antialiasing. Instead of processing the full image only the 5-10 percent of the screen that needs anti-aliasing is sampled. Since such a small sample is required, the sample rate can be increased, with up to 16X FSAA method, FOUR TIMES the aliasing of NVIDIA’s standard solution.
How does it work? Simple. You climb into your virtual Bf-109-G2. Instead of processing the entire image, only the edges of your aircraft, the wing lines and frame lines, are processed. The edges of any tanks or weapons you are carrying are processed. The edges of the hills are processed, and so on. There is a huge bandwidth savings, and none of the blurring of textures that we have seen with typical antialiasing. Ground textures in particular seem to benefit by this method.
To further enhance image quality, the Parhelia 512 supports 10-bit color, giving the capability of having 1024 sample bits to cover a given color component. The end result is over 1 billion simultaneously displayed colors, sixty-four times more precise than 24-bit color. The graphic artists out there are going to love this.
But what does it have to do with your current simulation? After all, we are running in 32-bit color, aren’t we?
Not really. It turns out that 32-bit color isn’t really TRUE 32 bits. Instead, 8-bits of the 32-bit color code you are currently running are actually shades of grey. Parhelia raises the bar by offering 30 bits of true color. Every pipeline in the Parhelia-512 is capable of 10-bit output. This means that your images will suddenly acquire increased depth and clarity, and this will affect your 2-D display also.
It’s all been good news so far, and installation under WIN XP was more good news. The drivers for WIN ME weren’t quite ready, and so I was forced to install WIN XP for the first time on my test system.
 |
| WIN XP Properties Tab |
I have installed perhaps a hundred video boards under WIN 98 and WIN ME. If you have ever done this, you know that it can be a bit tricky swapping out video hardware and installing new drivers. Get this part wrong or have a glitch during installation can be a sweaty palm, kick the cat kind of experience. Installing the Parhelia under WIN XP was as easy as it gets.
I removed the GeForce4 MX hardware and replaced it with the Parhelia. The double DVI connectors made it a challenge to get the board properly aligned for insertion into the AGP slot, but some extra elbow grease solved that problem.
On restart XP found the new hardware and asked me for the CD. I inserted the CD, the drivers loaded, and I then had to reboot the system.
On reboot my desktop came up with the same settings I had been using previously, except that the refresh rate had dropped. I restored the refresh to 85Hz and the image was correctly centered. Next stop, “Tweaking Central.”
There is no utility to allow overclocking, so it wasn’t possible to increase the core clock beyond its default 220MHz. The board runs quite warm anyway, so I doubt there is much room for increase in the clock unless you have good case ventilation and a cool office. Since the board is not memory limited there is no benefit in increasing memory clock.
Matrox uses their “Powerdesk” utility to offer users quick access to key features, so some of the settings that are normally accessed via Display Properties are available on the taskbar. My initial tests were run in default settings, and then I increased the settings for image quality.
Test System:
- Mobo: Abit KG-7
- CPU: Athlon XP 2000
- RAM: 512 MB PCI 2400
- Storage: IBM Deskstar 40GB, ATA 100
- Audio: Creative Audigy
- OS: WIN XP
- Video Driver: GeForce4 Ti4600 nVidia Detonator (29.42) driver
- Video Driver: Matrox Parhelia 512 driver 1.0028
 |
| Screen cap from reef demo |
 |
| Screen cap from reef demo |
Matrox offers a “reef demo” download that is specifically designed for the Parhelia. At 100 MB compressed, it is a substantial demonstration of the abilities of this hardware.
It’s always tough to convey the impact of a visual demonstration with still images. Suffice to say that watching the reef demo one is hard pressed to believe that one is not watching a DVD film of underwater action. Texture detail, light sourcing, color richness are all outstanding. This looks like real life. It is not hard to imagine that you are looking through glass at an underwater scene.
For simulation testing, I used primarily FS2002 and IL-2 Sturmovik, since these are the latest and greatest sims available.
FS2002 is one of the best looking flight simulations ever released. I ran a series of image tests on the runway to check texture quality, filtering and antialiasing.
TEST 1
 |
| FS2002 Parhelia no AA |
 |
| FS2002 Parhelia 4x FSAA |
 |
| FS2002 Parhelia 16x edge AA |
 |
| FS2002 GF4 4xS |
The first image shows the scene at 32-bit color depth without antialiasing (AA) on Parhelia.
The second image shows the scene at 32-bit color depth with 4x FSAA and anisotropic filtering.
The third image shows the scene at 32-bit color depth with 16x edge AA and anisotropic filtering.
The fourth image shows the scene at 32-bit color depth with 4x FSAA on GeForce4.
Click to bring up the larger images for figure 3 and 4. The only way to clearly compare is with uncompressed images.
In this first set of test images in FS2002 you can see that the sharpest image is produced by the Parhelia at 16x edge AA settings. The GeForce4 at 4x doesn’t come close. Moving to 4x settings, which introduces improved anisotropic filtering, GeForce4 improves, but still doesn’t give the texture quality of Parhelia. Let’s move to TEST2 to have a closer look.
TEST 2
 |
| GF4 at 4xS |
| |
| Parhelia at 16x AA |
In this set of uncompressed bitmap images let’s compare two features. Look carefully at the yellow lines on the runway which are forward and just above the center of the prop. Notice how GeForce4 has almost completely lost the upper set of lines and how blurred the others have become.
While the quality of Matrox edge antialiasing is extremely good, it is limited in current drivers to operation in a full screen surface. IL-2 Sturmovik runs in D3d mode as a maximized window rather than full screen, so that only the 4x super sampling mode is available when running under DX 8.1. Under OpenGL all modes are available and the resulting image is sweet.
Oddly, while 10-bit color mode works fine in IL-2 and looks fantastic, it wouldn’t work in FS2002. The image was corrupted and looked like a forced 16-bit color mode.
As you can see from these images, however, texture quality appears slightly improved with Parhelia’s anistropic filtering over GeForce 4, and the edges are very clean.
 |
| 3DMark2001 SE |
I ran synthetic tests using 3DMark2001 SE. The Parhelia lagged behind GeForce4 performance, coming close to ATI’s Radeon 8500 and GeForce3. The Parhelia scored just over 7100 in 3DMark, compared to the GeForce4’s 10,240.
The Parhelia cannot compete head to head with NVIDIA’s GeForce4 in normal mode. The GeForce4 with antialiasing OFF runs an average of 50 percent faster than Parhelia with antialiasing off. If you are looking for raw speed GeForce4 is the answer.
But who wants raw speed alone these days? I simply can’t stand to look at jagged images anymore, I’ve been spoiled for too long.
Comparing advanced filtering (anisotropic) on both boards, GeForce4 held its own against Parhelia, with the edge going to Parhelia. Meanwhile, GeForce4 held a strong performance advantage.
 |
| FS2002 Comparison |
With advanced filtering and antialiasing enabled at 1024x768@32, Parhelia lagged behind GeForce4 Ti4600 by 20-25 percent. With image quality at maximum in FS2002, Parhelia achieved a frame rate average of 34 compared to 44 for GeForce4. At higher resolutions the superior memory bandwidth of Parhelia has effect, and Parhelia ran within 15 percent of GeForce4 Ti4600 at 1280x1024.
Is image quality on Parhelia superior? Edges are better rendered and texture filtering is improved slightly. Ground textures in the foreground of an image are equal with either video board, but distant textures are clearer with Parhelia. If you prefer sharper images, Parhelia will grab your attention.
Will we see improvements in Parhelia performance? As games make increasing use of quad textures, the Parhelia will begin to shine. Furthermore, increased use of pixel/vertex shaders will also bring out the best in this new hardware.
 |
| IL-2 Forgotten Battles |
How far away are such features? As near as October of 2002 when IL-2: Forgotten Battles is released. In January, 2003 Ubi Soft’s Lock On: Modern Air Combat, also using pixel shaders, will be released. Combat Flight Simulator 3 will not use pixel shaders since the developer is concerned about compatibility with older video hardware.
It’s great to see Matrox re-enter the 3-D accleration market. They have produced quality products with reasonably good drivers, and their support has been quite good also. The Parhelia is only the first in a new line, and we will likely see a VIVO product, running at improved clock speed, and with enhanced features in the fall. I don’t doubt we will see a fully DX9 compliant product in the new year.
I like the Parhelia. While the polygon throughput of the Parhelia is limited compared to NVIDIA’s GeForce4 series, there is some compensation in the image quality and additional feature set. 128MB of onboard memory Is a bonus, offering not only edge antialiasing at high resolution, but a certain amount of future proofing for those coming simulations that will use even more texture data.
If raw speed is the need, you are best to look to NVIDIA. If, however, you want antialiased images of top quality with solid performance, the Parhelia may be the answer for you. If you need to run more than dual displays, again the Parhelia offers a solution.
Comparing prices, you can invest in a high performance GeForce4 Ti4200 for half the price of the Parhelia, and get greatly superior speed with comparable quality. This is going to limit the appeal of the Parhelia unless Matrox reduces the price.
In the end Matrox’ new arrival will probably fare well with business users and artists, and not so well with gamers. If Matrox cuts the price on their new entry, it could become the hardware of choice for gamers who want high quality imaging on multiple displays.
Graphic Card Resources
Articles:
Companies:
