Matrox Parhelia 128 review

If you delve back to issue 58 of PC Pro, you'll find a review of the Matrox G400 MAX - 'the fastest graphics card money can buy'. However, look through the reviews of any Matrox graphics card in the three years since then and I challenge you to find this statement repeated anywhere. While Nvidia and ATi currently dominate the 3D market, Matrox has concentrated on the 2D, dual-display sector. Imagine our surprise then, when the Matrox Parhelia 128 landed at our door, boasting the most advanced 3D engine of any current mainstream graphics card.

Clearly, the Parhelia 128 means business from the start. It features the world's first 512-bit GPU, containing 80 million transistors - even more than the GeForce4 Ti. It also has a true 256-bit DDR memory interface, delivering a maximum bandwidth of 20Gbytes/sec - almost twice that of Nvidia's flagship GeForce4 Ti 4600. This should provide advantages for 3D multimedia and multidisplay applications alike. Unfortunately though, Matrox hasn't opted for the new AGP 8x interface, including just AGP 4x. While this shouldn't influence performance now, future applications are likely to benefit from the extra bandwidth of AGP 8x.

Matrox hasn't just thought about 3D though, because the Parhelia 128 also offers some new features in the area it's most famous for - 2D image quality and multimonitor. DualHead-HF (High Fidelity) is the latest evolution of DualHead, using two symmetric display controllers offering equal performance on both displays. Both controllers use 10-bit 400MHz RAMDACs, capable of driving each display's resolution up to 2,048 x 1,536 in 32-bit colour. Both displays will also support hardware video overlays and OpenGL. Taking this a step further is TripleHead, allowing you to span the Desktop across three displays with the supplied adaptor. All three displays support 3D acceleration, and Matrox has taken advantage of this with Surround Gaming, supported by a number of popular games.

As with previous Matrox cards, the 2D output quality is superb. Matrox accredits this to its UltraSharp Display Output Technology, which uses high-quality components to achieve a sharp and stable output. Our subjective tests using DisplayMate and our A-Listed Iiyama Vision Master Pro 454 (see Reviews, issue 90, p131) produced crisp results and vivid colours. A Creative GeForce4 Ti 4400 was comparably duller. Where the Parhelia 128 conclusively outperformed the Creative was in our 2D benchmarks - on the same testbed, 1.05 compared to 0.94. This illustrates that it's not just 3D performance that varies between cards.

There's more on offer too, specifically a new feature called 10-bit GigaColor, referring to its 10-bit pipeline for true 30-bit colour (10-bit RGB). This allows the Parhelia 128 to display over a billion colours, compared to 16.7 million colours from typical 32-bit modes (8-bit RGB plus 8-bit alpha). This could provide benefits to high-end graphics applications and specialist applications like medical imaging. Matrox supplies a Photoshop plug-in to take advantage of this feature. It's also worth noting that the Parhelia 128 supports 10-bit source textures too, meaning that even games can run in 30-bit mode.

That said, it's debatable if standard PC monitors would benefit from 30-bit colour. Nevertheless, with 10-bit precision throughout, the benefits should filter down. However, we found it difficult to clearly see a difference in general use on either TFT or CRT. A more obvious benefit, though, was hardware Glyph (text) anti-aliasing with gamma correction, further emphasising its standing as a professional product.