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Well I seem to be one of the few who hasn't had much trouble with the install, although it wasn't quite as clean and easy as it could've been. A quick rundown of what happened in my case:
First updated G200 BIOS (I was still at 1.2, believe it or not).
Set NT to 640x480 VGA, rebooted.
Uninstalled old drivers, although I didn't search the registry for entries.
Extracted files, edited the setup.ini as per Haig's instructions, ran setup. Seemed to go OK but install siezed up at the end. Task Manager had 2 instances of 'Matrox...not responding', same as jeepman said. Killed these tasks.
Shut down, powered off. Rebooted into NT. Everything worked. Picked myself up off the floor and started up Maya. No good, on booting Maya still tells me I don't have OGL acceleration. Damn.
Remembered it doesn't work in 24bpp. Change to 32bpp. Start Maya. No OGL warning - at last we have OpenGL. Time to get very drunk...
So how does it perform in a real OGL app? Well, there's good and bad news - speedwise it's a substantial improvement over the MCD, I would say (in the hour or so I tested it) that actual real world performance feels like it's between two and four times as fast as the MCD, depending on what features are enabled. Wireframe views are slightly faster, but textured and shaded views are much better in terms of both speed and texture quality (mapped objects are bright and clear, and update pretty fast). Even heavy duty stuff like X-RAY mode (this uses levels of transparency to let you partially see through objects) performs quite respectably. I tried lots of other bits and pieces with it such as hardware buffered OGL previews, and everything seems noticeably faster while remaining stable throughout.
There are a few problems though. The most obvious is what appears to be a sorting problem, where objects appear in front of others when they shouldn't - I'll look at this more tonight, since it seems to be more than just a z-depth problem, and may be influenced by colour / materials etc. OK, what I really mean is that by that time it was 2 in the morning, I'd had a few beers, and I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on...
So anyway, I was fairly impressed. Not perfect by any means, but a definite improvement over the MCD. The thing is, this would've been far MORE immpressive a year ago, today it doesn't really cut it for OGL apps with the likes of the Oxygen VX1 so cheap. A case of nice try, but no cigar - I'm still going to buy a VX1 or Permedia 3 instead of a G400, since 3DLabs NT drivers are far, far better than this (which I understand is the same ICD as the G400, is this correct?).
Sorry if this post has rambled on, but being one of the much disgruntled ones over the ICD issues, I was more than a little keen to see (at last) how it performs, and to be honest it's better than I expected. So I think we should give a big pat on the back to the coders at Matrox, and a big boot up the arse to the management.
P.S. I also tried it with 3DS Max, which seems to work fine, but not much improvement over the software mode (which is quick anyway). Seemed to cope better than software once the scenes got up to about half a million poly's or so...
P.P.S I had neither the time nor the nerve last night to try it with SoftImage. Given how fussy SI is about OpenGL, I fear that it may just vomit on my keyboard...
First updated G200 BIOS (I was still at 1.2, believe it or not).
Set NT to 640x480 VGA, rebooted.
Uninstalled old drivers, although I didn't search the registry for entries.
Extracted files, edited the setup.ini as per Haig's instructions, ran setup. Seemed to go OK but install siezed up at the end. Task Manager had 2 instances of 'Matrox...not responding', same as jeepman said. Killed these tasks.
Shut down, powered off. Rebooted into NT. Everything worked. Picked myself up off the floor and started up Maya. No good, on booting Maya still tells me I don't have OGL acceleration. Damn.
Remembered it doesn't work in 24bpp. Change to 32bpp. Start Maya. No OGL warning - at last we have OpenGL. Time to get very drunk...
So how does it perform in a real OGL app? Well, there's good and bad news - speedwise it's a substantial improvement over the MCD, I would say (in the hour or so I tested it) that actual real world performance feels like it's between two and four times as fast as the MCD, depending on what features are enabled. Wireframe views are slightly faster, but textured and shaded views are much better in terms of both speed and texture quality (mapped objects are bright and clear, and update pretty fast). Even heavy duty stuff like X-RAY mode (this uses levels of transparency to let you partially see through objects) performs quite respectably. I tried lots of other bits and pieces with it such as hardware buffered OGL previews, and everything seems noticeably faster while remaining stable throughout.
There are a few problems though. The most obvious is what appears to be a sorting problem, where objects appear in front of others when they shouldn't - I'll look at this more tonight, since it seems to be more than just a z-depth problem, and may be influenced by colour / materials etc. OK, what I really mean is that by that time it was 2 in the morning, I'd had a few beers, and I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on...
So anyway, I was fairly impressed. Not perfect by any means, but a definite improvement over the MCD. The thing is, this would've been far MORE immpressive a year ago, today it doesn't really cut it for OGL apps with the likes of the Oxygen VX1 so cheap. A case of nice try, but no cigar - I'm still going to buy a VX1 or Permedia 3 instead of a G400, since 3DLabs NT drivers are far, far better than this (which I understand is the same ICD as the G400, is this correct?).
Sorry if this post has rambled on, but being one of the much disgruntled ones over the ICD issues, I was more than a little keen to see (at last) how it performs, and to be honest it's better than I expected. So I think we should give a big pat on the back to the coders at Matrox, and a big boot up the arse to the management.
P.S. I also tried it with 3DS Max, which seems to work fine, but not much improvement over the software mode (which is quick anyway). Seemed to cope better than software once the scenes got up to about half a million poly's or so...
P.P.S I had neither the time nor the nerve last night to try it with SoftImage. Given how fussy SI is about OpenGL, I fear that it may just vomit on my keyboard...
didn't realize that I had dx3 backed up.
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