As usual after the release of a major new graphics chipset, id Software lead programmer John Carmack has updated his .plan with his views on the Matrox Parhelia, commenting on its performance and the applicability of its features to their upcoming first-person shooter, DOOM III. Here is an excerpt from the full .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.