Conclusion

As we can see, while the general gaming performance of Parhelia is respectable it's simply not up there with the likes of the high end Radeon 9700 PRO. Yet it does have a reasonable performance overall.

It would seem that the development of Parhelia's drivers is a slightly hit and miss affair. They appear to have made some gains with their DirectX drivers, but the later OpenGL drivers appear to have degraded performance in many cases.

Parhelia does bring a number of interesting concepts to the table. It's unquestionable that FAA's performance is exceptionally good given, and that it has sixteen sample points for edges. Even the compressed Multi-sampling scheme's on newer boards do not show as small a performance hit in many situations. However, FAA is not without its problems. While you may not be able to notice some edges that are not AA'ed when playing games, if the artifacts displayed in Fablemark are indicative of normal stencil operations with FAA enabled then it would seem to be an untenable combination -- you would notice the lack of AA. While there are not many titles at the moment that use Stencil buffers there is one very important engine coming up that makes extensive use of Stencils, being, of course, Doom III.

Surround Gaming is another interesting case. Unquestionably, it brings a greater level of involvement to the game, but do you have the desktop real-estate for 3 CRT's or are you able to afford a number of TFT's?

Naturally, where Matrox scores big is their usual haunt, which is of their display output. The 2D quality is very good on Parhelia, among the best I've personally seen. Also, if multi-monitor support is something that's important for you then Matrox has both the most flexibility in the display output options and exceptionally good multi-monitor configurations and software tools.

Matrox say they are refocusing Parhelia on the workstation market, which will probably make good use of the multi-monitor options; however, does this rule it out for the consumer market? If you are a high end gamer then it's unquestionable that you'd be looking at either the Radeon 9700 PRO or the upcoming GeForce FX for pure performance and future features. But if you are looking for reasonably good performance in current games, with all the features necessary to run them, Parhelia is certainly worth considering if you can afford it. If 2D and/or multi-monitor support are also a high priority then Parhelia requires some attention.