Matrox Parhelia review

Parhelia is Matrox's much-vaunted challenger to nVidia's all-conquering GeForce4 Ti4600 graphics card.

The Parhelia comes with 128Mb DDR RAM running at a speedy 550MHz, plus a 220MHz processor. These speeds aren't as quick as those of the GeForce4 Ti4600, but the Parhelia has some unique tricks up its sleeve.

Firing up 3DMark2001 with its default settings, the fight began. By the end of the first round the Parhelia looked a little flustered as it eked out a score of 7424 3D Marks. The GeForce 4 Ti4600 took no prisoners, notching up a huge 10280.

In round two I decided to turn up the heat by insisting on the best graphics possible. This meant asking them to smooth all the jagged edges on screen. The technique is called anti-aliasing, and it drastically reduces 3D performance. The Parhelia is smart, though, as it only applies anti-aliasing to the edges in the picture that actually need smoothing off. This means it's not only more efficient, but also better looking, as it keeps all the textures in the 3D scene wonderfully sharp! With 16x anti-aliasing enabled on the Parhelia and the maximum 4x anti-aliasing for the GeForce 4 Ti4600, the story in 3DMark was very different. The GeForce4 Ti4600 found its score slashed almost in half to 5783 while the Matrox held its nerve to score 5707.

In addition to the high quality of its anti-aliasing, the Matrox is the first card to offer triple display support. You're going to need a wallet as deep as Richard Branson's to afford three monitors, but with music production, video editing or any kind of image manipulation, all that desktop space is going to prove mighty handy. And even games can benefit! Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament will let you see all the usual action on the centre monitor while the left and right screens simulate peripheral vision, making for an incredibly intense gaming experience.

The Parhelia is a top-quality card for people who are interested in more than stratospheric frame rates. But despite its good points, it's just too expensive. The MSI GeForce4 Ti4400 is faster, and even has a TV-in for £100 less.