Matrox Parhelia

At the time of its release, it was best known for its ability to drive three monitors ("Surround Gaming") and its Coral Reef tech demo.

The Parhelia series was Matrox's attempt to return to the market after a long hiatus, their first significant effort since the G200 and G400 lines had become uncompetitive.

Their other post-G400 products, G450 and G550, were cost-reduced revisions of G400 technology and were not competitive with ATI's Radeon or NVIDIA's GeForce lines with regards to 3D computer graphics.

For a top-of-the-line, and rather expensive card ($399 USD), the Matrox Parhelia's 3D gaming performance was well behind NVIDIA's similarly priced GeForce 4 Ti 4600 which was announced earlier that year in April.

[5] Parhelia was also hampered by poor bandwidth conserving technologies/techniques as it lacked a comprehensive optimization approach; ATI introduced their 3rd gen HyperZ in Radeon 9700, and NVIDIA touted Lightning Memory Architecture 2 for the GeForce 4 Ti.

While the Parhelia possessed an impressive raw memory bandwidth much of it was wasted on invisible house-keeping tasks because the card lacked the ability to predict overdraw or compress z-buffer data, among other inefficiencies.

Some writers believed Parhelia to have a "crippled" triangle-setup engine that starved the rest of the chip in typical 3D rendering tasks [1].

In these aspects, some reviewers suggested that Parhelia could have been a compelling alternative to the comparably priced GeForce 4 Ti 4600 ($399 USD), which was the performance leader but only DirectX 8.1 compliant.

It remained a niche product, while Nvidia and ATI controlled the majority of the discrete graphics chip market.

However, it was all a bit of a moot point because Parhelia's performance was not adequate to drive most DirectX 9-supporting titles well even without more complex shader code weighing the card down.

In 2006, Matrox re-introduced Surround Gaming with their TripleHead2Go, which utilizing the existing GPU to render 3D graphics, splitting the resulting image over three screens.