The Matrox Parhelia 128MB AGP
Hands on testing of Matrox's High End Gaming Card

By -Dave Altavilla
June 25, 2002

 
Anti-Aliasing has only recently become a true reality with 3rd generation graphics technologies from NVIDIA.  For much of its infancy, AA rendered scenes were often moving at unacceptable and unplayable frame rates.  However recently, real time full scene AA has matured into an impressive improvement in over all image quality, with a manageable sacrifice in performance.

16X FAA - Fragmentation AA Makes Its Debut! Arguably the best looking AA yet

The Matrox Parhelia has the ability to drive both traditional 4X Super Sample AA as well as Matrox's own brand of FAA.  Fragmentation Anti-Aliasing is a method of smoothing out the jagged lines of only edge pixels in a scene.  Since the edge pixels of any given image are the only ones a user sees as causing the aliasing artifacts, there is really no need to anti-alias the entire scene.  As such, huge performance efficiencies can be gained, by only sampling the edge pixels with this method.  For more detail on FFA, please refer to this section of our Parhelia launch article.

We've taken various in game shots with 16X FAA as well as 4X AA on a Radeon 8500 and an NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  You be the judge.

Comanche 4 Anti-Aliased Screenshots - Click for full view
(SET YOUR DESKTOP TO 32-BIT COLOR TO REDUCE BANDING WHEN LOOKING AT THESE SCREEN SHOTS)

There are just a few images here for you to digest, right?  How about some analysis?  First look at the reference non AA shots, so you can see just how jagged even the scenes of an impressive 3D Chopper Sim, like Comanche 4, can be.  Notice the flagpole, the edges of the Copter, tents, and mountain tops. Now compare the 4X AA shots on the Radeon and GeForce4 at 1024X768 and 1280X1024 resolutions.  The 4X AA shots look very nice with most all edges smooth on the copter and tents.  However, notice the flagpole.  It's not quite straight, is it?  Then look at the 16X FAA shots with the Parhelia.  As you can see, the flagpole is perfect, the edges on the tent and copter are also crisp.  On the other hand, notice the blades on the copter?  For some reason 16X FAA did not smooth those out so well.  Also, in "image 2 shots" there is a small artifact on top of the mountain range to the right. Occasionally with certain game engines 16X FAA will show small artifacts like this.  However, in all the games we tested and benchmarked here in this review, it was a very minimal issue, if even noticeable at all.

A more noticeable advantage:
Here is where the rubber met the road for us with this new type of AA.  Next, we fired up the enhanced Quake 3 engine based, Jedi Knight II.  The differences between 4X Super Sample AA and 16X FAA here, were much more prominent.

Now then, what to look for.  Obviously check out the reference shot first.  When you look at the AA images, you'll wonder how you can play without it.  The non AA shot looks just plain nasty.  Now look at both the 1024 res and 1280 res GF4 4X AA shots.  Look at the stairs, the base of the monument and the bottom edges of the crosswalks.  Now, look at the Parhelia driven 16X FAA shot at 1024.  In our humble opinion, the 16X FAA shot at 1024 looks cleaner than even the 1280 res 4X AA GeForce4 shot.  There were also no noticeable artifacts in Jedi Knight with 16X FAA.  Frankly, the 1024 res 4X AA shot doesn't even look anti-aliased in some areas, when compared to the 16X FAA image.

So here is our take on 16X FAA.  It is a natural.  Frankly, wasting valuable bandwidth and fill rate on full scene AA doesn't make a lot of sense, when you think about it.  Why anti-alias the edges of surface textures when you don't need to?  You are only blurring the images more and will have to sharpen them back up with aniso filtering.  It makes more sense to us, to only AA the edge pixels of a given scene.  As a result of this efficient AA method, you can also employ a higher resolution AA method to those edge pixels, as did Matrox with the Parhelia's 16X edge sampling method.  For now, we're tipping our hat to Matrox in the AA department.  They have a clear winner here.  There is a setting in the Parhelia drivers to run in 4X Super Sample mode but why do that?  There is simply not real advantage for doing so.

Displacement Mapping quick take:
We were very disappointed that we could not get a screen shot of Matrox's fabulous looking "Under Water Reef" demo.  We do have a running AVI file of the demo here (bottom of the page), hosted courtesy of our friends at BP6.com.  However, on the Parhelia install CD, Matrox did include a number of tech demos, one of which was Displacement Mapping.

Simply put, this technology was developed by Matrox and will be part of the standard feature set for Microsoft's Direct X 9 API.  Think of Displacement Maps similarly to Texture Maps, only instead of holding object Texture data, they hold object Displacement or "volume" data.  So, as you can see significantly more detailed surface areas can be defined and processed with the on board Displacement Mapping engine of the Parhelia.  The real question here is, how will Displacement Mapping catch on in the development community?  Only time will tell.

Enough with the screen shots.  How about a few benchmarks?  Just a few... ;-)
 

Benchmarks - The Parhelia Vrs. The Radeon 8500 and GeForce4 Ti 4600!