1. You find me the phrase "our card will be faster than the fastest model ATi and Nvidia have to offer at the moment" or equivalent.

2. GF4 = GF3 + 2nd Vertex processor, hence the old technology with architecture very much alike. Have a look at the original drivers shipped with GF3

3. You clear as hell don't work with graph. apps, when you're purely a gamer, go nvidia, if you like to do workstationlike stuff, matrox is the way to go.

Something GamePC had to say about the cardd in their article.

Even after running the benchmarks and seeing the numbers, we still like the Parhelia-128. It's much more of a hybrid gamers / workstation card than we've seen from any other manufacturer, and no doubt holds a lot of appeal for gamers who want the absolute best quality from their display cards. Matrox may not have the fastest car on the drag strip, but their car certainly has the most style. Let's hope this is only the beginning from the Parhelia family, and that it just gets better from here on out.

2. Original drivers shipped with GF3? Stable, fully functional, and pretty good performance right off the bat. "yeah but they could have made some drivers that used it's full potential at the time" -> performance was already good enough for everybody to be convinced right at the start...

3. About image quality: check the part in the firingsquad review (http://firingsquad.gamers.com) where the talk about the 2D part... And be amazed...

About the fact that every matrox lover seems to scream that it wasn't supposed to run on even grounds with the Ti4600: it was clearly Matrox's meaning to compete with the top GF4 cards. That was my understanding of it. That being said, it should at least be able to compete with a Ti4200... But performance wise, it doesn't...
In other words, we get a 400$ card that doesn't compete (performancewise) with a 200€ Ti4200.

Now I'll have to see reviews that cater to other categories than gamers (e.g. people that work with graphical apps) before I can form my opinion about that.