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After formatting my hard drive and doing a clean install of win 98, PD 5.13 and Dx 6.1 (so no old drivers conflicts are possible) here´s the situation:
2D
Excelent: Finally I can see my scanner´s preview (it is stored in some *.dib file). I couldn´t with 4.51, but all drivers prior to 4.51 worked fine. It took several months, but finally my main problem is fixed.
2D seems more stable indeed, I have not yet seen the garbled mouse icons I was used to with 4.51. Resolutions and colour depth changes are ok also (some ocasional image garbling with prior drivers).
I find the PD 5.13 monitor customization less user friendly. That´s a personal opinion, of course.
D3D
Very good: I found a speed increase in many D3D games. Forsaken biodome demo 640x480 went up 10 fps, Tomb Raider 3 is now perfectly smooth at 1024x768x16, Toca 2 is running perfectly and even smoother than before at 1024x768x16. Unreal 225f D3d is fixed too: I could´t enable vertex lighting with the previous drivers, some polygons just turned black in some viewing angles, now is just fine. And just a curiosity: that S3 photo realistic level for unreal (DmS3Gallery) now runs fine - before all the textures were corrupted - so I guess these drivers have better texture management.
Oh and maybe I am wrong, but I guess trilinear speed filtering is up too (74% of bilinear now, 70% before, mesured with 3dmark). Still nothing to be proud of, wasn´t G200 suposedly capable of doing trilinear for free?
OpenGL
Poor: Quake2 lost 3 fps in demo1, texture corruption and flashing textures occur randomly. Half-life works but also with this random texture corrution and flasing textures. HL speed now exceeds slightly the D3d mode: 25.5 fps OGl vs 24 fps D3d in 800x600x16 blowout timedemo).
This texture corruption (you can see the discussion about it in Gaming forum - "HL + new drivers. Any problems?") apear to go away if you change the resolution: it is always present when the game starts at whatever resolution, but if you change it and resume the game, it´s fine. It eventually shows up again later, the same procedure fixes it again. Strange, at least...
GlHexen II is not working!! it just displays a black screen and freezes. It works with the wrapper and worked with ICD beta1 and beta2.
Sin demo and Unreal OpenGl now work very good, both didn´t before with previous ICD´s.
Sorry for the long post, but here´s the sum of 2 days lost trying to get this g200 working. Just trying to give some user feedback about the drivers. Any thougths are welcome.
Thanks.
Ps: Sorry, forgot my system specs: Celeron 300a @ 450, abit BX-6, bios JL, 96 Mb Pc100 SDRam, SB awe 32, isa rockwell 33.6 modem, generic isa 8 bit scsi board (scanner), HDD Fujitsu 6.4 Gb, Cdrom Phillips 40x, Matrox Millennium G200 8 Mb Sgram, bios 2.3, PD 5.13. Running Win98, IE 5.0, Dx 6.1.
[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 07-05-99).]
2D
Excelent: Finally I can see my scanner´s preview (it is stored in some *.dib file). I couldn´t with 4.51, but all drivers prior to 4.51 worked fine. It took several months, but finally my main problem is fixed.
2D seems more stable indeed, I have not yet seen the garbled mouse icons I was used to with 4.51. Resolutions and colour depth changes are ok also (some ocasional image garbling with prior drivers).
I find the PD 5.13 monitor customization less user friendly. That´s a personal opinion, of course.
D3D
Very good: I found a speed increase in many D3D games. Forsaken biodome demo 640x480 went up 10 fps, Tomb Raider 3 is now perfectly smooth at 1024x768x16, Toca 2 is running perfectly and even smoother than before at 1024x768x16. Unreal 225f D3d is fixed too: I could´t enable vertex lighting with the previous drivers, some polygons just turned black in some viewing angles, now is just fine. And just a curiosity: that S3 photo realistic level for unreal (DmS3Gallery) now runs fine - before all the textures were corrupted - so I guess these drivers have better texture management.
Oh and maybe I am wrong, but I guess trilinear speed filtering is up too (74% of bilinear now, 70% before, mesured with 3dmark). Still nothing to be proud of, wasn´t G200 suposedly capable of doing trilinear for free?
OpenGL
Poor: Quake2 lost 3 fps in demo1, texture corruption and flashing textures occur randomly. Half-life works but also with this random texture corrution and flasing textures. HL speed now exceeds slightly the D3d mode: 25.5 fps OGl vs 24 fps D3d in 800x600x16 blowout timedemo).
This texture corruption (you can see the discussion about it in Gaming forum - "HL + new drivers. Any problems?") apear to go away if you change the resolution: it is always present when the game starts at whatever resolution, but if you change it and resume the game, it´s fine. It eventually shows up again later, the same procedure fixes it again. Strange, at least...
GlHexen II is not working!! it just displays a black screen and freezes. It works with the wrapper and worked with ICD beta1 and beta2.
Sin demo and Unreal OpenGl now work very good, both didn´t before with previous ICD´s.
Sorry for the long post, but here´s the sum of 2 days lost trying to get this g200 working. Just trying to give some user feedback about the drivers. Any thougths are welcome.
Thanks.
Ps: Sorry, forgot my system specs: Celeron 300a @ 450, abit BX-6, bios JL, 96 Mb Pc100 SDRam, SB awe 32, isa rockwell 33.6 modem, generic isa 8 bit scsi board (scanner), HDD Fujitsu 6.4 Gb, Cdrom Phillips 40x, Matrox Millennium G200 8 Mb Sgram, bios 2.3, PD 5.13. Running Win98, IE 5.0, Dx 6.1.
[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 07-05-99).]
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