AnandTech ran gaming tests on the new Matrox Parhelia PH-A128R (this is a 128MB graphics card based on Parhelia-512). The card should start shipping in mass quantities on June 30 and should sell for around $399 (see this news story). The test system included Athlon XP 2100+ processor, VIA KT333 based mainboard and 256MB DDR266 CAS 2 SDRAM.

We didn’t have any doubts about Parhelia-512 being a non-gaming chip from the very beginning, so we didn’t expect to see very impressive results. To tell the truth, I sincerely doubt that this chip will ever get very popular in any of the market segments it is actually targeted for (remember: enthusiast and professional users, see this news story).

I would only like to state that Parhelia-512 chip failed even to get more or less close to GeForce4 Ti4200 in any of the gaming tests run: Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter, Unreal Tournament 2003, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake III Arena and Jedi Knight 2. Moreover, in some tests the new Matrox chip even fell behind ATI RADEON 8500LE, not to mention other rivals. And its performance appeared especially poor in OpenGL games (Quake3 Arena and Castle Wolfenstein), which once again proves my supposition about eternal problems with the drivers by Matrox.

The only place where this “revolution” showed its best appeared the test in Unreal Tournament 2003 with enabled Anti-Aliasing. Here at 1024x768 Parhelia-512 managed to beat even GeForce4 Ti4600. Besides, the results in the same Unreal Tournament 2003 with enabled Anti-Aliasing and anisotropic filtering appeared also more or less acceptable. However, this is the only thing new Matrox solution can actually boast, because even in benchmarks with enabled anisotropic filtering and disabled Anti-Aliasing Parhelia-512 fell hopelessly behind RADEON 8500 and GeForce4 Ti4600. Moreover, think: do many of you need all those anti-aliasings and anisotropic filterings? I believe that most users have no idea what this is :)

As for the image quality, I will not even try to discuss it, because the graphics cards built on contemporary performance graphics chip provide such high image quality that only an experienced expert will be able to find some differences after a really thorough analysis.

Now, we look forward to the results of professional tests, however, as I have already pointed out, there is not much to expect from Parhelia-512 here.