Parhelia drivers are Win 2k/XP and up only.

appiah4 wrote:

Does it have OpenGL and D3D driers?

Of course it has.

Can't speak for the PCI version, but the AGP P650 and P750 cards are essentially cut down versions of the original Parhelia, they have half the pipelines and half the bus width. Memory bandwidth is fine at 8GBps and the card performs on par with an original GeForce 256 DDR, perhaps even a little bit faster in D3D. It's certainly faster than a GeForce2 MX400 that I pit it against and that's GF256 SDR territory.

As Serpent Rider already said, the value of these cards for retro systems is somewhat limited because no drivers exist for Win9X.

Thanks, I have PCI only Win2K systems, I may find use for it there. Let me see if I can get the seller to agree to a lowball offer then 😎

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Parhelia drivers are Win 2k/XP and up only.

And no Linux support either apart from an ancient proprietary driver unusable with any modern install. I'm still trying to figure a way to sensibly use my Parhelia 512 (as my only 2k/XP system doesn't have an AGP slot).

appiah4 wrote:

Thanks, I have PCI only Win2K systems, I may find use for it there. Let me see if I can get the seller to agree to a lowball offer then 😎

Tbh I can't think of any clear advantages over a G450 PCI; as soon as you need any performance above what the G450 can offer, a castrated P650 won't do much better, the G450 is much better-supported in different OSs (including Win98/ME and Linux open-source drivers) and already gives excellent 2D image.

dionb wrote:

And no Linux support either apart from an ancient proprietary driver unusable with any modern install. I'm still trying to figur […]
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The Serpent Rider wrote:

Parhelia drivers are Win 2k/XP and up only.

And no Linux support either apart from an ancient proprietary driver unusable with any modern install. I'm still trying to figure a way to sensibly use my Parhelia 512 (as my only 2k/XP system doesn't have an AGP slot).

appiah4 wrote:

Thanks, I have PCI only Win2K systems, I may find use for it there. Let me see if I can get the seller to agree to a lowball offer then 😎

Tbh I can't think of any clear advantages over a G450 PCI; as soon as you need any performance above what the G450 can offer, a castrated P650 won't do much better, the G450 is much better-supported in different OSs (including Win98/ME and Linux open-source drivers) and already gives excellent 2D image.

I also have the G450 PCI but that gives about the same performance as a pbase TNT2. A GF256 is a huge step above that, and I know that performance is possible on the PCI Bus because I have a GF2 MX400 PCI that performs about on par with a GF256 SDR.. So it's not a terrible card AFAIC? I did not get it for the offer I made though. 😢

appiah4 wrote:

I also have the G450 PCI but that gives about the same performance as a pbase TNT2. A GF256 is a huge step above that, and I know that performance is possible on the PCI Bus because I have a GF2 MX400 PCI that performs about on par with a GF256 SDR.. So it's not a terrible card AFAIC? I did not get it for the offer I made though. 😢

A Gf256 is exactly one step above the TNT2 - that's not so huge. There certainly exist corner cases that don't work on a TNT2 but run well enough on a Gf256, so there will be others that can't run well (enough) on a G450 but do do so on a P650, but that's pretty marginal. As far as I'm concerned they are both excellent 2D cards with minimal 3D features. If I want lots of 3D power, I'll be looking elsewhere anyway.

It's not a terrible card, but the very limited driver/OS support combined with very few other stand-out features make it not something I would actively pursue.

Personally, I don't really feel that the Parhelia P650 is that interesting. The "full-fat" Parhelia is interesting because it was the final attempt at a high performance card for the consumer (or should we say prosumer?) market from Matrox. But aside from the historical significance (arguably) they aren't really that fantastic for retro builds.

I also have the G450 PCI but that gives about the same performance as a pbase TNT2

G450 PCI is overclocking beast, you can achieve G400 MAX performance level with passive cooling.

G450 is a slow card, though it has PCI support, but it has no power for gaming. Even 550 is not much better.
Though both have excellent image quality, but my MX4000 has this too and MX4000 also has support
for D3D,OGL supports TnL! and S3TC. MX4000 is an excellent retro-card.!
The P650 should support S3TC and TnL too...but I have not tested this. EMBM also.
From the feature site the Radeon7000-PCI is also an interesting card. It lacks TnL but beside that it has OGL,D3D, S3TC, EMBM.

HL1-Engine Games do not like Matrox G450/550. The renderer (ogl) has a bad performance and v-sync does not work.

I will make some tests of my P650 cards in a shuttleXP-machine.

I've tried to run Matrox P650 PCIe with Linux. I've thought there's a propper open source linux driver but I've mistaken. It works in linux just as a vesa card. No acceleration. The proprietary driver was stopped updating at far 2009. Matrox is just a shame. BTW, in Windows 7 the P650 driver even doesn't support Aero

Roman555 wrote on 2022-08-14, 20:30:

. The proprietary driver was stopped updating at far 2009.
Matrox is just a shame.
BTW, in Windows 7 the P650 driver even doesn't support Aero

That’s putting it mildly
My college LAN party thought about group ordering 40 Parhelias because they were cheaper than a GeForce 2 and good enough

We found most were running 9x boxes so the deal fell through, I ended up buying one to sell a Duron Win 2000 box but would have bought half a dozen if it supported 9x

Matrox was falling apart by that time