LunarG wrote:I've tried to get my Parhelia to work with Win9x, and it doesn't seem like there's any chance it will. As Mau1wurf1977 says, the G400 (MAX) is a good choice for EMBM and general image quality, but most newer cards of decent quality will be just fine. A high quality GeForce 4 Ti will probably come close to a Parhelia for IQ, and afaik they support EMBM.
A lack of Win9x support is pretty much a deal-breaker for me. I just thought that Matrox quality + newer features would equal awesome, but I guess that just isn't to be. If the Parhelia is just a sub-par DX8 card that only works on Win2000/XP, where once could easily use a Radeon or GeForce of some kind and get better performance, then what's the point? I guess there's the multi-monitor thing, but the uses for that are kind of limited for the amount of space (and identical monitors 🤣) required.
Anyway, I watched this video someone linked in another thread of a Matrox EMBM demo running on a GeForce 4 series card, I believe a 4600 Ti, and it seemed to run pretty well with a small ini file tweak. I could have a more period-correct setup and run a G400, but I'd be willing to sacrifice that for better overall compatibility and performance.
Mau1wurf1977 wrote:I believe EMBM was supported my many other cards but, in the case of Expendable, was an exclusive feature. Like a "bundle of cash" deal between Rage and Matrox.
My view is that up to the G400 Matrox is quite a decent choice. But beyond that go with Nvidia. For IQ you can just go with DVI.
Who knows if there any driver bugs with Matrox cards. Personally I'd definitely want to check it out but in the end will stick with Nvidia.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were a way to trick Expendable into using EMBM on a later card, unless the developers foolishly hardcoded G400 detection into it. 😜