Parhelia experience

[Randell]

Sounds to me like Ryu and Typedef are Matrox's perfect customer niche. Where quality 2D across 2 monitors at 1600x1200 is more important than 3d framerate but the Parhelia can handle most games perfectly well in single monitor and a lot of games well enough in SG. I'm yet to be convinced it can play UT2003K well enough for serious online gaming. But for LAN gaming with friends.

Surely 800x600 x3 with AA is an acceptable gaming resolution as its really 2400x600?

 

[Nite_Hawk]

Alathorn:

That's not quite exactly right, but it is the right idea. with a 25ms pixel response time (which afaik is still the best native lcd response time out there), 40Hz is actually the best case scenario without any bluring. The reason is that going from white to black to white is easy. You just either throw the voltage up, or drop it to the floor for to get either color. The problem is the intermediate shades. You (with current technology) have to wait for the pixel to stabalize at the right voltage and that ends up taking time. You could easily end up with something more like a 25Hz picture if your moving between two intermediate colors. Mitsubishi has a really neat tech coming out though, that should be usable with current displays. The way it works, is that instead of waiting to stabalize on a certain color, it either caps or bottoms the voltage and at the precise moment when the color is right, levels it at the right voltage.

Here's the paper on it:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,10085,00.asp

Basically, after using mitsubishi's tech, a panel which previously had a best case scenario of 25ms now has a worstcase scenario of 25ms. (as white to black now takes the longest to switch between). This means that most of the time you should be getting around 60Hz, with a worst case of 40Hz. *Much* better than current LCDs.

Nite_Hawk

 

[jb]

FYI

http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/S&V/parhelia128mbtest(2).shtml

The machine we used to test the the Surround Gaming feature was equipped with an Athlon XP 2200+ and 512MB of RAM, populating a Gigabyte KT333 motherboard. With Quake 3 set to "High Quality", with trilinear filtering and the texture and geometry sliders maxed out, the Parhelia cranked out 81.4 FPS (demo001) at a resolution of 2400x600 (800x600 on all three monitors).

Another review with some FPS numbers
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/parheliasurround/


There was a good review that had lots of numbers for SG mode but I forgot it...oh well

 

[jb]

Found another:

http://www.wargamer.com/reviews/parhelia_review/page5.asp

Not too bad at all for 3 monitors.

 

[jupiterdreadnaught]

Hey

What about this feature they just put up on Matrox site.

If this adding enviromental bump mapping to older titles, or were those effects always available.

I don't remember KA-52 look THAT good, especilly the water.

http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/embm.cfm

 

[Althornin]

Alathorn:

That's not quite exactly right, but it is the right idea. with a 25ms pixel response time (which afaik is still the best native lcd response time out there), 40Hz is actually the best case scenario without any bluring. The reason is that going from white to black to white is easy. You just either throw the voltage up, or drop it to the floor for to get either color. The problem is the intermediate shades. You (with current technology) have to wait for the pixel to stabalize at the right voltage and that ends up taking time. You could easily end up with something more like a 25Hz picture if your moving between two intermediate colors. Mitsubishi has a really neat tech coming out though, that should be usable with current displays. The way it works, is that instead of waiting to stabalize on a certain color, it either caps or bottoms the voltage and at the precise moment when the color is right, levels it at the right voltage.

Here's the paper on it:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,10085,00.asp

Basically, after using mitsubishi's tech, a panel which previously had a best case scenario of 25ms now has a worstcase scenario of 25ms. (as white to black now takes the longest to switch between). This means that most of the time you should be getting around 60Hz, with a worst case of 40Hz. *Much* better than current LCDs.

Nite_Hawk

Yeah, you are right.
I really did mean to say "best case", this has been discussed on here before.
BTW:
Its "Althornin", not "Alathorn"

 

[Typedef Enum]

Sorry guys,

I got home late last night, and had to watch the Rams get destroyed by the Bucs. I've got to jet to work early this morning, so I'll try when I get home tonight.

I have the beginnings of something resembling a review, and have been in touch with Matrox. I'm going to hold off until the next driver is released, as there are some things in there that will definitely make a difference (in many respects).

There was another review that was pretty well done, and I cannot recall the website. It might have been the Tech Report? Anyhow, it was a pretty good read. AthlonXP also did a review as well (pretty good one).

The one thing that you have to "unlearn" (IMHO) is that running in 800x600x3 (2400x600) is not nearly as bad as you would think. Honestly, you really don't sit there complaining about the low resolution. The FAA implementation really does help in this area quite a bit.

Also, I hacked the Quake2 source code to add Surround Gaming, and it's yet another one of those deals that was a Godsend for me. I had mentioned, over the last couple of months, that the game I still play (and @ various times, played more than any other game in recent months) is Quake2. I can play that game, online, @ the max resolution without any problems (3840x1024). It really does make the online deathmatch quite a bit more fun.

I think it took me all of about 10 minutes to make the necessary changes to the source to build the necessary files, so it's very easy to see why the support for this feature has been so good thus far.

 

[jupiterdreadnaught]

So

Two replies later and I'm ignored

 

[Nite_Hawk]

Althornin:

Sorry about that! I had be programming for about 8 hours and it was roughly 5 in the morning by the time I finished. I just got on b3d for a bit after I was done, and happened to post a couple of messages.

Yeah, it's been discussed here before, but I figured some people might not have read the threads so I'd repost some of the info...

Nite_Hawk

 

[T2k]

(I don't understand why we use q3 for testing... it's simply old and totally CPU-dependant...)

For everybody who thinks UT2003 can run w/ SGaming...

Bottom config... Parhelia w/ latest driver, UT2k3 Demo, 2400x600/32 (3 CRTs SGaming):

Flyby

dm-antalus
13.434042 / 43.125038 / 151.349915 fps
Score = 43.161854

dm-asbestos
18.607077 / 86.359085 / 241.155563 fps
Score = 86.419258

ctf-citadel
23.122593 / 65.498085 / 215.620087 fps
Score = 65.564713

br-anubis
11.523264 / 44.469604 / 135.413727 fps
Score = 44.489384

Botmatch

dm-antalus
7.949740 / 28.484032 / 70.937080 fps
Score = 28.505754

dm-asbestos
11.883897 / 50.535885 / 119.276642 fps
Score = 50.562862

ctf-citadel
5.176339 / 25.437651 / 74.944901 fps
Score = 25.462551

Believe me: when more than 3 players met it's unplayable. That's it.

Forget it.


Just for comparison - 1280x960:

Flyby

dm-antalus
17.403296 / 50.673946 / 153.060135 fps
Score = 50.716854

dm-asbestos
22.768097 / 89.743973 / 237.837006 fps
Score = 89.789116

ctf-citadel
24.837816 / 64.597321 / 167.104858 fps
Score = 64.699127

Botmatch

br-anubis
12.292050 / 49.655296 / 126.650177 fps
Score = 49.667252

dm-antalus
10.506709 / 33.493187 / 73.583679 fps
Score = 33.534752

dm-asbestos
9.689601 / 42.826797 / 127.364052 fps
Score = 42.847374

ctf-citadel
6.925019 / 34.385933 / 95.308830 fps
Score = 34.418102

All the test ran with Vsync off, 16xFFA + Aniso!

 

[T2k]

What game(s) do you want to use S.G. for that would be too slow for the current Parhelia version?

UT2003, JKII, BF1942 - if all the settings are maxed, when a lot of player on the screen.

 

[3dcgi]

This might be of interest to the surround gaming fans. The Matrox developer site has Curvilinear Rendering Demo. The idea is to figure out ways to avoid stretching when using surround gaming. I don't have a Parhelia so I don't know how it actually works.
http://developer.matrox.com/details.cfm?s=dwnl&i=121

 

[T2k]

This might be of interest to the surround gaming fans. The Matrox developer site has Curvilinear Rendering Demo. The idea is to figure out ways to avoid stretching when using surround gaming. I don't have a Parhelia so I don't know how it actually works.
http://developer.matrox.com/details.cfm?s=dwnl&i=121

Thanks, I'll take care of it tonight...

 

[antlers]

From T2k's numbers, it seems like Surround Gaming puts quite a load on the CPU, so that combined with CPU-bound UT botmatch, the game becomes unplayable.

What kind of CPU were you testing with?

Perhaps SG will really come into its own with those 3 and 4 GHz CPUs...

 

[KnightBreed]

Re: So

Two replies later and I'm ignored

Environmental bump mapping was introduced to DirectX by BitBoys some 4+ years ago, and the first mass market card to support it was the G400 series from Matrox. This feature has been available for many years, and, as always, its up to the game developers to incorporate the feature into their game. That list you linked to has been up for a long time. EMBM is supported by:

R100 (original Radeon)
R200 (Radeon 8500)
R300 (Radeon 9700)

Geforce3 (Ti200, Vanilla, Ti500)
Geforce4 (Ti4x00)

G400
G450
G550
Parhelia

Kyro1, 2

Xabre

P10

etc, etc (I'm sure there are others)