As for 3DFX being dead, if they are dead, then Matrox has been dead twice as long.
G800 == Rampage, both vapourware, both sounding cool according to information pulled out of the ass of their respective fans.
Dual head isn't really a retail selling feature, it's about business use. If you want that to be a selling feature it has to exist on all cards, who wants to be locked into one card because of one feature? Dumping on NVIDIA for supporting a dual head feature is self defeating if you want support. If you want to sell more G450's, encourage everyone who is doing a dual head card. If it makes the G450 look better, why complain?
TCL is a fundamental part of the rendering process, it exists in all 3D games, it is supported wherever there is 3D. The hardware acceleration is always available and enabled. It may not be showing much improvement with the amount of polygons in today's games, but then again, when it's used, extreme worst case of large fillrate bandwidths, it only drops performance a max of 10% compared to a 1GHz cpu doing the work. At 500MHz-ish, it helps a lot more.
EMBM isn't supported very much or very well, the list of Matrox supported games generally involve minor use of dual head, much more so than EMBM. When EMBM is used, frame rates drop by huge amounts in all cases, no matter what, it's a fillrate killer. If you want EMBM support, you need more fillrate than a G400 has, and you want it used in all cards.
The whole idea of liking a card because it has some feature that the others doesn't is plain stupid. That's the very reason you shouldn't want it, because it means it won't be supported. What you want is a card that has the same features as the rest but does it better.
My $.02
G800 == Rampage, both vapourware, both sounding cool according to information pulled out of the ass of their respective fans.
Dual head isn't really a retail selling feature, it's about business use. If you want that to be a selling feature it has to exist on all cards, who wants to be locked into one card because of one feature? Dumping on NVIDIA for supporting a dual head feature is self defeating if you want support. If you want to sell more G450's, encourage everyone who is doing a dual head card. If it makes the G450 look better, why complain?
TCL is a fundamental part of the rendering process, it exists in all 3D games, it is supported wherever there is 3D. The hardware acceleration is always available and enabled. It may not be showing much improvement with the amount of polygons in today's games, but then again, when it's used, extreme worst case of large fillrate bandwidths, it only drops performance a max of 10% compared to a 1GHz cpu doing the work. At 500MHz-ish, it helps a lot more.
EMBM isn't supported very much or very well, the list of Matrox supported games generally involve minor use of dual head, much more so than EMBM. When EMBM is used, frame rates drop by huge amounts in all cases, no matter what, it's a fillrate killer. If you want EMBM support, you need more fillrate than a G400 has, and you want it used in all cards.
The whole idea of liking a card because it has some feature that the others doesn't is plain stupid. That's the very reason you shouldn't want it, because it means it won't be supported. What you want is a card that has the same features as the rest but does it better.
My $.02
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