The web is slowly filling with Parheila reviews and commentary, and now even id Software’s John Carmack has thrown his opinions into the mix. How will Parhelia fare in the new Doom game? Check Carmack’s .plan file over at Shacknews.
The executive summary is that the Parhelia will run Doom, but it is not
performance competitive with Nvidia or ATI.Driver issue remain, so it is not perfect yet, but I am confident that Matrox
will resolve them.The performance was really disappointing for the first 256 bit DDR card. I
tried to set up a “poster child” case that would stress the memory subsystem
above and beyond any driver or triangle level inefficiencies, but I was
unable to get it to ever approach the performance of a GF4.
This echoes what the rest of the web seems to be concluding about Parhelia: it’s just not a competitive high-end gaming card. What’s even more interesting, however, is a little nugget at the end of the .plan file that reveals what could be a major shortcoming of higher-order surfaces:
In any case, we can’t use any geometry amplification scheme (including ATI’s truform) in conjunction with stencil shadow volumes.
The Carmack has spoken; you may rise.
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