John Carmack speaks out on latest video card from Matrox

Product Mini Profile Matrox Parhelia 128MB in: Professional Graphics links » p/reviews find lowest price

id Software lead programmer John Carmack has updated his .plan earlier today with his comments on the performance of the upcoming Matrox Parhelia, as well as how well it applies to id's upcoming first-person shooter, DOOM III. Here's an excerpt from the .plan:

"The Matrox Parhelia Report:

The executive summary is that the Parhelia will run Doom, but it is not performance competitive with Nvidia or ATI.

Driver issue remain, so it is not perfect yet, but I am confident that Matrox will resolve them.

The performance was really disappointing for the first 256 bit DDR card. I tried to set up a "poster child" case that would stress the memory subsystem above and beyond any driver or triangle level inefficiencies, but I was unable to get it to ever approach the performance of a GF4.

The basic hardware support is good, with fragment flexibility better than GF4 (but not as good as ATI 8500), but it just doesn't keep up in raw performance. With a die shrink, this chip could probably be a contender, but there are probably going to be other chips out by then that will completely eclipse this generation of products."

Blue's News has the full .plan here.