Graphics Tech startup from the 90s

[DrMrLordX]

You could be thinking of the Kyro and Kyro II tile-based rendering GPUs, PowerVR/ST. It was supposed to revolutionize how games were rendered.

Review: Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro II graphics card

Yeah, the Matrox Parhelia if I remember the name correctly. Everyone was excited for it, but then it was either a dud or never even released, I don't remember which.

Attack Out Of The Blind Spot: Matrox Parhelia-512

Matrox is back! After long abstinence Matrox wants to shuffle the 3D-Cards again. The long awaited 3D chip Parhelia-512 comes with lots of qualities.

www.tomshardware.com

They both existed, and while the Parhelia was not really good for anything, the Kyro II had a few wins (like Serious Sam, if I recall correctly). Anandtech had a nice Kyro II review back in the day. Sadly it's no longer available. Sadge.

 

[Stoly]

Review: Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro II graphics card

Attack Out Of The Blind Spot: Matrox Parhelia-512

Matrox is back! After long abstinence Matrox wants to shuffle the 3D-Cards again. The long awaited 3D chip Parhelia-512 comes with lots of qualities.

www.tomshardware.com

They both existed, and while the Parhelia was not really good for anything, the Kyro II had a few wins (like Serious Sam, if I recall correctly). Anandtech had a nice Kyro II review back in the day. Sadly it's no longer available. Sadge.

The parhelia had a few things going for it. It had tessellation, Fragment AA and triple monitor support. Drivers sucked bigtime and the AA didn't work in many games, also I don't recall any games using tessellation until years later when nvidia brought its own version, few games supported multimonitor and most had issues. Eventually the drivers matured and performance was much better and stable, but it was too late.

 

[Stoly]

BTW Matrox released a couple of demos to showcase the Parhelia. Reef Demo and SharkMark. I recall trying the Reef demo some years ago, it didn't run on my GTX1070Ti. I never found a Sharkmark download