3DMark 2001 SE
Now for the big dawg of DirectX 8-class performance measurements, 3DMark 2001 SE. We used MadOnion's just-released build 330 of the app for these tests. 3DMark puts pixel and vertex shaders to extensive use, so it's a worthy measurement of a card with Parhelia's capabilities.

Well, the Parhelia didn't exactly knock the cover off the ball. Let's break down 3DMark's results to see what went wrong.

Game tests

The game tests all tell the same story: Parhelia is slower than the other cards. We don't see an inordinate performance drop-off with Parhelia when moving from the low-detail to high-detail versions of the test, so it's not just polygon throughput holding it back. And of course, at 3DMark's default resolution of 1024x768, none of these cards is likely to be strictly fill-rate limited in these game tests.