I'M NOT ANGRY YOU SON OF A !$#@~@)$*(
I was a bit annoyed with that other guy saying/implying that we shouldn't care about Matrox's consumer-level offerings because they have good broadcast equipment or whatever.
Sorry, but I doubt I can afford or use something like that in my PC. Or that it'll be working with an Amiga anytime soon? It just seemed absurd to go off on the broadcast equipment tangent when that is SO not applicable to this thread.
Anyway, I should have mentioned "current employees" more often. No, it wasn't just bitter ex-employees. It was also anonymous current employees. In fact, all of the ex-employees LIKED the company and products but were disheartened by the lack of leadership, the cancelling of future products, and the apparent total power that the marketing department had over product focus, i.e. people don't want performance, they want headcasting!
2D quality the Parhelia is great. However, many of the users of this card got it to do CAD/CAM stuff over multiple monitors and with 3D-accelerated rendering. The banding issues THERE are not inconsequential and the 2D quality or gigabit color don't help those people. Yeah, I guess they could pay for a bunch of DVI-based LCDs or try to get their company to do so, but hard to justify that if you already have 3 24" CRT monitors that you got for this purpose.
I believe the banding also shows up in games. So... even the non-professional users are seeing this in recreational computing. Now if you had this banding issue you would run into it--you don't run 2D only. And if you ran into it I'm fairly certain you'd start to wonder about the quality of this product--especially when you find that Matrox officially denies this as happening (even though current and ex employees said that it was a known issue BEFORE shipping but they decided to ship it anyway) and in some cases refuses an RMA.
You plunk down, what is it, $400 for the card? and then find an extremely noticable image quality flaw and THEN get told that what you're seeing doesn't exist AND you cannot get the card replaced under warranty, well, then you'd likely have a different opinion of the matter. You see, that's what's been happening with several of the Parhelia purchasers. That's why they are beginning to get frustrated with Matrox and feel as though they have been betrayed or deceived. Or cheated, at least. You were lucky and got a good Parhelia, great. But there are many documented instances where the card's been shown to be flawed and Matrox has turned their backs on their own customers.
That's what gets my goat. How can you, as a business, just do that? Matrox used to treat the customers much differently. Then the G400 got rushed, apparently, and the G800 got crippled and turned into the G550 instead. Then the Parhelia came out. All the time Matrox started slowly bleeding employees and no longer investing in R&D.
I mean, the Parhelia doesn't even do bandwidth saving compression of geometry or, what is it, occulsion testing? I forgot the term so that might be the wrong one. Basically, it doesn't test to see if something is visible before sending it to be rendered. Both these performance-enhancing features had been on cards that were released at LEAST a year before the Parhelia was released, probably a year before the Parhelia was even ANNOUNCED. So they spend their time making a buff shader back-end but don't do no-brainer performance enhancements that have been around for a while?
Ah, something I had forgotten to mention, some of the employees interviewed had actually left, not been laid off. They were so frustrated with the environment and lack of direction/morale that they quit without even finding another job first. So they aren't bitter due to being laid off, there's something else that got them to leave.
For the Parhelia performance, sure, in some games it is 100 fps versus 90 fps. In others it is like 40 fps versus 100 fps. I think Tom's Hardware has some extensive card roundups. I hate Tom's with a passion, but it is a necessary evil.
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20021218/index.htmlOh, here's your vaunted Parhelia running on the fastest PC hardware currently available:
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20021218/vgacharts-04.htmlOh, look, it is performing on par with the current BUDGET cards from ATI and nvidia, the GF4MX and the 9000. Even somewhat close to an SIS video card. SIS for God's sake! A GeForce3 that was released, what, over a year before the Parhelia? is kicking the crap out of the Matrox card.
I used the UT2003 benchmarks because Matrox themselves claim that the Parhelia is not designed for high fps in older games at lower resolution, it is designed to better weather more complex/demanding games at higher resolution with minimal performance loss.
Granted this benchmark doesn't show how well the Parhelia weathers different resolutions or features being enabled, but it's being beaten by budget and year-older cards.
How about this one?
http://www17.tomshardware.com/graphic/20021218/vgacharts-06.htmlWhere other cards are basically CPU-bound, not fillrate-bound, the Parhelia is clearly already at the limits of the chip, not the CPU. That's what the flat results of the faster cards imply and the fact that the Parhelia is pretty far back from them shows that the card is the bottleneck, not the system. A GeForce2 solidly beats the Parhelia.
Now look, any way you slice it, the Parhelia's got some issues. You're paying $400 for a card so you can... watch DVDs in gigabit color, have three monitors, and love the 2D quality. You already said that you don't put a high emphasis on games so I guess we can ignore surround gaming (which isn't supported by every game, last I checked, and also drops performance down a bit--which is a shame since the resolution is also limited in what you can choose?) And what happens?
You're paying $400 for a video card that is slower than a GeForce2.
Now you might enjoy your Parhelia, that's fine. Feel free to enjoy it. Until recently I was running a Voodoo3 2000 PCI because, well, it was good enough for me.
To be fair:
http://www17.tomshardware.com/graphic/20021218/vgacharts-02.htmlThere's one benchmark on a very tough engine that shows the Parhelia FINALLY beating all the GeForce 3 cards. There's still at 16% jump in performance from the Parhelia to the slowest non-budge GeForce 4, though, but at least it finally edges out the year-older card.
However, if I recall correctly, the ATI and nvidia cards were either already out when the Parhelia finally shipped (not announced way back in... March? but actually shipped) or shipped soon after.
The shakey image issues and the questionable business practice of Matrox makes buying an expensive, under-performing card for professional work seem iffy. You can get an nvidia Quadro, ATI FireGL, or low-end 3DLabs WildCat III for around the same price.
I suppose I might also be irate because I'm disappointed. To me, Matrox always meant performance and quality. This card has neither and Matrox just blindly PR's on about other things.
Performance is OK compared to other cards released or on the market at the same time. In the same ballpark, at least. Quality is iffy depending on the card you get--the kicker there is that Matrox will ignore you if you try to get the problem resolved.
If the card's great for what you use it for, excellent! I would not buy a Parhelia unless it was guaranteed not to have banding issues or unless I had a need (and ability to get) multiple monitors/LCDs.
I have a TV for watching DVDs. I have a GeForce3 for playing games. I have the option to get a dual-head video card and a separate PCI-based card if I want three screens. About the only thing I lose out on is the surround gaming but since I don't game too much it isn't a big deal.
You wanted to know what was going on with Matrox, this is what is going on with Matrox. You can't look at Matrox's financials because it's a privately-held company that doesn't disclose that information. I don't think that Matrox is listed in any Canadian or US stock markets so you can't find any information that way. I know you're more interested in hard numbers and facts, but Matrox doesn't provide those.
I think the last information on Matrox financials is from the year 2000. Other than that any official inquiry gets ignored and they only thing they talk about is their past products and how excellent they were and how Matrox is the choice for excellence, blah blah blah. Oh, you can now buy a 256 MB version of the Parhelia for $600. Yay.
There's a difference between realism and blind optimism. The Parhelia seems to be a good fit for you and there's nothing wrong with that. However, your responses seem to be somewhat apologetic or dismissive--the issues I'm bringing up are not FUD, they are fact. You can find this information elsewhere on the 'net if you look hard enough.
If you discount all things employees say, then you have NO way of knowing what Matrox is currently like or what they are currently doing. If you give excuses as to why it doesn't matter that a $400 card can be beaten, performance-wise, by a GeForce 2, then I can't cite any benchmark numbers. If you don't care about physical defects in the products shipped to other people and accept a company renowned for its image quality categorically denying that there is an issue, then I cannot call into question their character or business practices.
You can keep your blinders on if you want, it doesn't matter to me. I'm stuck working on a holiday while the rest of my company is off so I have nothing else to do for 8 hours today. Yay for network operations!
Long posts are fun because when researching various points I often learn a bit more about the situation I'm discussing.
I think Matrox's PC product division is in big trouble and being horribly mismanaged. Only time will tell if they are able to regain the trust of their former proponents.
You haven't upset me and I hope I'm not too bothersome to you. It's just that you seem so out of the loop for a Matrox user that I find it hard to believe you haven't seen all these complaints before. It seems like you're only hearing about these for the first time in this thread.
I wish Matrox luck and I'd probably pick up a Parhelia 2 when it gets released... if they hadn't apparently cancelled the project.
I hope these are all just unfounded rumors but seeing Matrox's conduct and the issues with their current hardware has me leaning towards assumption of the worst.
