Once again Matrox attempts to make gamers think it actually wants to do a high-end 3D product. Unfortunately, Matrox positions itself as "the professional graphics company", and is much more interested in talking about its ROI - return on investment - than on its framerate power and image quality.

The bottom line is that Matrox is a professional graphics company, or more to the point : a company making graphics for professionals, and not for gamers. The thoroughly laughable part is that Matrox positioned this card as a "panoramic" experience. Indeed, you can plug up to three monitors onto it. Imagine that ! The Parhelia already has enough trouble keeping the framerate up for one screen, and they want you to think that you can actually play on THREE ?!?

I'm sure all those hardware freaks out there are just begging for a chance to say something like "yeah, my framerate stutters, but it stutters on THREE SCREENS, you moron !".

Tech Sheet - Parhelia

RAMDAC 350 Mhz Transistor count (millions) 80 Technology 0.15 micron Frequency 220 Mhz Onboard RAM 128 MB DDR Memory bandwidth 18 GB/s RAM bus width 256 bits RAM bus frequency 250 Mhz DDR Pixel fill rate 600 MPixels Texel fill rate 1,6 GTexels Triangle count (millions) 25 Render pipes 4 Pixel per Clock (per pipe) 2 Z-buffer 24 bit

That pretty much nails that coffin for me.

The Millenium G550

Back