Matrox Parhelia?

I was just wondering if anyone here has run Guild Wars with a Matrox Parhelia? I normally game with my 6800GT through 2 17" LCD's (2560x1024 res). I'm looking to experiment with a 3 monitor setup and the only option seems to be the Parhelia. It doesn't seem like the Parhelia would have enough power to run GW (would probably be a slide show at 3840x1024), can anyone confirm this?

I'm sure it wouldn't run at that resolution, but it might run on one monitor at a reasonable size.

re: Parhelia

I don't think there's any support for that. I run my system on a dual head ATI x800XL PCI-E 256 MB, with the DVI connector going to a Dell 24" LCD 2450FPW (1920x1200 rez), and the D-Sub connector going to a Samsung 19" LCD 913v (1280x1024 rez), and when I play Guild Wars the highest selectable resolution is 1920x1200, which fits just perfectly as widescreen on the 24" only.

I attempted to play GW in "window" mode so I could click and drag it across both monitors but it appears to stop short at 1920 pixels horizontally no matter what. Let me know if you figure out a way to play it at higher rez than that. =P

rsx77,

Unfortunately there isn't a way to play on dual monitors on an ATI card (as far as I know). I'm using a 6800GT in Horizontal Span mode and it lets me select 2560x1024. The game runs fine for me at this resolution, but my character is split in half (between the monitors). I'm trying to add a third monitor so that my character is on the center screen. In my Nvidia menu there are 2 options for dual monitors, Dual View and Horizontal span. To the best of my knowledge ATI doesn't offer the spanning that Nvidia does (last ATI card was a 9700pro). Basically Windows sees my monitor as 1 2560x1024 screen instead of 2 1280x1024 screens.

I swapped my Parhelia for an ATI X800pro.

If was just causing too many problems with 3D games and wouldn't play Doom3 or Half Life 2. If it did, I would be amazed as Parhelia don't support DX 9 and they have a severe lack of 3D ability when it comes to the new features these games are running.

If however, there is a newer Parhelia that has this perfomance added, then I didn't know about it, as I still check on Matrox from time to time.

Which model do you have?

I really wish they would come out with a new Parhelia, their surround gaming feature looks very appealing. I personally don't own a Parhelia I was just curious about it's performance in Guild Wars. I want to run a triple head setup (with horizontal spanning across all 3 monitors), sadly it seems like the Parhelia is the only card able to pull this off. I have heard rumor of the ATI Crossfire setup being able to span up to 5 screens, but there doesn't seem to be that much info out there on it yet.

Don't get me wrong about the Parhelia, I loved that card. The quality with split screen was simply astounding.
Crystal clear pictures and pin sharp images, and that was across all the screens. It's just they have gone the way of the corporate business and gaming is just not in there blood anymore, as I don't think they can keep up with Nvidia and ATI in the gaming sector.

I would have liked to use my Parhelia for split screen gaming. I was thinking of selling it, but would keep it handy to use on some older games, for split screen. However, if the New ATI Crossfire can go 5 screens wide, that would be very impressive. Even the ability to have 3 screens of a larger size would be great.
The option on the PS3 for 2 HD TV's to be hooked up would be really cool too.
Ok, I know not may people can afford 2 HD Plasma or LCD, but for those that can, what an option.

So, if ATI Crossfire lives up to something really cool, that would be an impressive gaming system.

Indeed, the Parhelia's 2D image quality was impressive. Unfortunately, they fell behind and gave up on 3D performance.

Back from the grave. I did finally end up getting a Parhelia (128MB version), and it does run GW at 3840x1024.

what framerates are you getting with the parhelia? do you mind posting your other specs as well?

i was able to play GW spanned across 2 screens with my x700. the trick is to use the dreaded ati catalyst control center..

there is supposedly an ATI solution for the triple display (surroundview) if you have a board with the integrated ati xpress200 chipset, but i havent heard much about that..

It does exist, I have an Xpress 200 board right now.

It's a driver hack from ATi that uses both ports on your card and the onboard, but the onboard Xpress 200 IGP is ass, just so you know. Frames, resolutions, and effects may suffer.

I KNOW of a way to do all the processing on the GPU, but that's a trick I still can't give out yet. Also know how to get four head that way, once again, NDA'ed.

@Bgnome - I'm getting around 20-30FPS (I'm used to this as I play flight sims alot). The box it's running on is one of my junk boxes it's a POS Dell 400SC, 2.8GHz P4, 1GB RAM (Hey I got it for $100).

@Serafita Kayin - I asked ATI if there was a way to span 3 screens with 2 X800 series cards on an Xpress 200 board but they were less than helpful.