Geforce 2 VS G400

[Kosh Naranek]

TECHNOID
Have you tried to play Giants on your G400 Max and then on a GF2........
Have you tried to play UT on a G400 and on a GF2.......
Have you tried to play SOF on a G400 and on a GF2............
If you have tired the above, as i have, you would know, that the GF2 looks very very good compared to a G400 and in giants it looks soooooooooooo much better.
Just for the record : i have owned a millennium, G200 and a G400 Max card from Matrox and i have been pleased with them all.
I now have a GF2 and i am very pleased with that 2.....it runs everything without any problems and it looks good and it's fast.The G400 max looks good and it have some nice features, however it's not as comaptible as a GF2 and it's not as fast and compared to a GF2 the G400 has no OpenGL support whatsoever
, sorry matrox.
Does this mean that i will never go back to matrox ? no, not at all. If the G800 checks out ok then i will be back with matrox.
Regarding ATI and the Radeon.......driver support sucks, don't wanna own one....ever.
It have lots of nice features....but......driver support sucks BIG time.

[This message has been edited by Kosh Naranek (edited 28 January 2001).]

[DuRaNgO]

[Himself]

Nice ass!

[DuRaNgO]

Thank you

[Helevitia]

Hey Denty,

I use Win2k all of the time with my Radeon and have no problems at all. AS far as trinitron monitors are concerned, I have a Mitsubishi 2040u(22") and I believe it is a trinitron(or equivalent ) monitor. Is there something I should be worried about?

Dave

[Jon P. Inghram]

When I tried a GF2MX board (Hercules 3D Prophet 2 MX), the picture quality seemed to be as good as my G400MAX, at least as well as my PoS KDS-195TF could show. But when playing Counter-Strike I noticed that the dithering pattern the GF2MX used stood out like a sore thumb in dark areas, the G400 looked FAR better then. But then again, the G400's OpenGL driver otherwise STINK! Try using X-Plane, Mind Rover, or quite a few other OpenGL based games and you never know what kind of results you'll get. X-Plane doesn't work right with any version, and Mind Rover has missing polygons on the 6.xx drivers. If Matrox would toss the lame OpenGL drivers they keep on trying to patch and just write new ones I really belive they'd fix a lot of the problems. I don't really want to get a GF2MX just to get a better OpenGL ICD (for FS2K and other D3D stuff the G400MAX wasn't that much slower, at least not enough to justify buying a new card) and a full blown GF2 is too expensive when you consider that it's probably gonna be out of date soon when the new DX8 cards come out. And I don't even want to think about ATi... if their drivers are half as bad as some people claim I don't want to put up with the hassle. (Not to say that the current batch of Matrox "If the new ones are buggy for you, be glad we still keep the old ones available" drivers are doing much better).

[SCompRacer]

Hi Kosh Naranek, or any of you Gforce experts. Have a friend that is upgrading, buying some of my used pieces which keeps me upgrading.... I was building a house from June to November of last year so I have a stack of MaximumPC's I haven't even touched, have no idea whats out there.

Anyway, all he wants the PC for is gaming, so which GForce card is good, gets driver updates, and up to $200 for price, preferably lower, but.... He will have a P II 400 with 256MB PC100 RAM, ASUS P3B-F MB.

His present system, a Compaq with a ? card gets 650 3DMarks and won't play some of the newer games.

Thanks

[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 30 January 2001).]

[Kosh Naranek]

I would wait until NV20 is out, because then the other cards will become cheaper.
Then maybe he can get a real GF2 GTS / PRO / ULTRA and not "just" a MX version.
Personally, i don't think it matters which brand he's getting because the best drivers to use is nVIDIA reference drivers, which dosen't care about which brand they are installed on.
If he's going to use his compaq i would check with compaq to find out which cards is compatible with his compaq PC.
On the other hand....none of the GF2 cards supports the programmable rendering pipeline feature found in DX8 so maybe he would be best of by waiting until the G800/NV20 is available. Only problem with these two cards is that they will most likely cost WAY above 200$.

[DuRaNgO]

the waiting is almost over .......*

[DentyCracker]

Dave, thank your lucky stars that you are free from the shimmering problem, that is well documented with the Radeon and some Trinitron monitors.
As for me, I'll try to be as ATi free as possible, not after what I'm still going through with my TV Wonder.

[SCompRacer]

Thanks, Kosh. Appreciate the info.

No, he is not going to use it in his Compaq, I suggested he sell it as there is not much worth salvaging out of it.

So what is undesireable with the MX version?

[Kosh Naranek]

It's slower than GF2 models ( Doh !)
It has a lower core/mem clock.
It has a different memory interface other than that it's a GF2 but cheaper than a GF2 GTS / PRO / ULTRA.
However it to can be changed to a Quadro card ... if i remember correctly.

[SCompRacer]

Well, Doh, thats why I ask. Until a few days ago had no idea what how many their were...so many it's confusing.

[Kosh Naranek]

Don't worry...i was confused to in the beginning.
One of the strong and also weak things about nVIDIA drivers is the many many different registry tweaks you can apply.
Which card to buy is hard to decide... depends on how much money you are willing to spend.Otherwise you could always check out anandtech etc. and search for Geforce 2 to get benchmarks of the different models and judge for yourself.......

[Greebe]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">anandtech</font>

ACK!