Digital Trends

Matrox Parhelia 128mb March 6th, 2003 | by Brian Clark

Benchmarking and Performance
Using AutoCAD 2002  we found a (65%) increase in rendering times over the Matrox G550 card. This is due in part to the Parhelia's PrecisionCAD driver which according to Matrox provides increased stability and compatibility in the following programs: Autodesk Building Mechanical 2, Autodesk Map 5, Autodesk Architectural Desktop 3.3, Autodesk Mechanical Desktop 6, Autodesk Land Desktop 3 and Autodesk Architectural Studio 2 as well as AutoCAD 2002. During all of our AutoCAD 2002 tests, AutoCAD worked seamlessly and the display stayed sharp and crisp. A designer may not find the performance increase as important as the increase in stability and desktop space.

For those buying the card for workstation graphics the Parhelia's 2D capabilities, the Matrox card boasted a Winmark 99 2.0 score of 496 which is the highest we have seen in a video card thus far. Matrox always have had the best 2D capabilities on the market and the Parhelia is no exception.

For our 3DMark benchmarks, we ran all tests with 16X fragment antialiasing enabled which increases image quality but hurts most video cards due to the lack of memory bandwidth. We also used the latest drivers from Matrox as of September 16th 2002. We found the Parhelia 3DMark scores to be in between the Geforce4 MX 440 and the Geforce 4 4600 cards. At 32-bit color and 1,024x768 resolution settings we clocked in a score of 3764, about 1500 points more than our Leadtek Geforce 4 MX 440 (64mb) and 2000 points lower than our Leadtek Geforce 4 4600 (128mb).