Matrox's Parhelia - A Performance Paradox

Unreal Tournament 2003

In a matter of weeks the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo will be publicly available and one of the most gorgeous-looking first person shooters will be stressing everyone's systems. For the past several months we've been testing with the Unreal Performance Test 2002, a benchmark based on the latest build of the Unreal Engine. The goal of the UPT2002 was to truly stress graphics cards using tomorrow's games.

With the release of Epic's UT2003 Demo imminent we have put the UPT2002 test on hold and instead have moved to a recent build of the demo. Epic finished the demo for our benchmarking use just yesterday and we've been benchmarking it all night in order to bring you quite possibly the most important benchmarks in this review.

We benchmarked a total of four levels in the demo, the demo scripts were custom made by Epic. The UT2003 Demo is not nearly as stressful as the last build of the UPT we were running so you will see some changes.

We used Unreal Tournament 2003 as our choice benchmark for all Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering tests as well; you will see the results of those tests later on in this review.

The first level we benchmarked is a double domination level called suntemple.

Unreal Tournament 2003 dom-suntemple @ 1024x768 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 8500 Matrox Parhelia ATI Radeon 8500LE 110.6 100.6 84.9 67.9 62.8 61.9 | 0 | 22 | 44 | 66 | 88 | 111 | 133

At 1024x768 you can see that in spite of the Parhelia's hardware superiority (on paper), it is only able to outperform a Radeon 8500LE. The Parhelia is not memory bandwidth limited at all (thanks to its 256-bit DDR memory interface) which means that the lackluster performance here is due to a combination of three things:

1) Low GPU Clock (220MHz vs. 250 - 300MHz)
2) Sub optimized drivers
3) A lack of serious occlusion culling technology

Keep those three things in mind as they will continue to hold back the Parhelia as we explore this and other benchmarks.

Unreal Tournament 2003 dom-suntemple @ 1280x1024 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 8500 Matrox Parhelia ATI Radeon 8500LE 76.6 66.4 55.9 43.9 39.4 39.5 | 0 | 15 | 31 | 46 | 61 | 77 | 92

Moving up the resolution ladder we see that the trend continues at 1280x1024. The Parhelia ties for last place with the Radeon 8500LE.

Unreal Tournament 2003 dom-suntemple @ 1600x1200 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 ATI Radeon 8500 Matrox Parhelia ATI Radeon 8500LE 50.8 43.5 36.2 29.8 28.2 27.0 | 0 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 41 | 51 | 61

Finally at 1600x1200, there's nothing new to report here either. With the initial performance numbers stated, what will it take for the Parhelia to do well? Right off the bat we can point out two things:

1) Use of quad-textured pixels (Parhelia has 4 texture units per pipe)
2) Use of Fragment Anti-Aliasing

Although Unreal Tournament 2003 does use four textures in order to handle some of the terrain, it's not enough to give the Parhelia a significant advantage. And as we mentioned before, we'll be taking a look at FAA towards the end of this review.