G400 Dual Head & Windows NT4??

[J-kun]

I'm looking to buy my first Matrox product. The Dual Head feature, together with superior picture quality at high resolutions is what made me decide on a G400.

However, the Matrox site says that DH is not completely supported under NT. Only Multi Display, and then even with same resolution & refresh rates. The other features are listed as 'Coming soon'

In the drivers section : no G400 NT drivers.

So how far is Matrox with NT drivers, will they keep their promise on the other features and will they make Multidisplay fully available in a usable format rather than with this silly limitation?

Any information much appreciated, thanks!

J-kun

[Genom]

Hi there. From my own experince with NT and a G400. Dualhead runs nicely, but as Matrox says, both monitors must be the same refresh rates and resolution. Stick to that and it works out fine. one big issue is that the drivers all around have a very unfinished feel to them in NT, particularly more so than Win95. The openGL issue is frankly, a joke. 2D speed is up there as usuall though, so if your doing Photoshop type stuff, it works very well. If we ever see the 5.20 drivers in win9x, we can only HOPE to someday get new NT drivers, so maybe matrox can get some more of that nice little pro workstation market. I love my g400, hope to get a Max sometime, but if you plan to work in NT with some sort of 3D app, I would seriously recomend waiting for a new driver release. This was my experience on a Supermicro P6DLS dual CPU Motherboard with 2 333Mhz P2's and 352MB of RAM, booting off a Micropolis Tom ahawk 9GB UWSCSI drive, and a Intel Etherexpress 100B ethernet baord.

[J-kun]

Thanks for the info! Looks like the G400 is nice enough for what I need it, except for the DH support.

If I understand correctly what you're saying is that the 5.20 drivers are the 'holy grail' for NT users, they solve the DH limitations?

Since these drivers are not out yet, how does one know? Did Matrox announce it somewhere?

J-kun

[Ant]

The DH limitations are down to NT4 and not the Matrox drivers. NT4 has always supported multi-displays but it is more of a driver hack than true support hence you must run both monitors at the same resolution and colour depth.

[Buuri]

Please don't post the same questions to more than one section if you don't get an instant reply.

B

[J-kun]

I see.

However, Matrox has listed the other three features of DH mode as 'coming soon'

The TV mode, where the 2nd output is used as a TV output, is specified as doing just that : seperate resolutions and refresh rates. With a note at the bottom of the page : Windows NT support to come...

I wonder if what they mean is that they will allow the primary display to go down to 60Hz as well. It would mean their product does not have the advantage over the competition they boast on the web page

Maybe the TV output is different and can be controlled seperately. We'll see.

Luckily I have not yet purchased the monitor setup so I can take the limitations of the G400 into account. (i.e. I guess I won't put a 17" beside a 21" :-) )

Thanks all for your help!

Umm.. a question here. Where can I download the NT4 drivers? Matrox's website has only Win95/98 in the driver section.

J-kun

[J-kun]

Reply to Buuri:

my apologies. I assume you're referring to my post in General Hardware.

I had just registered, and selected the forum from the list appearing afterwards. Initially I came from the Forums page on Matroxusers.com. I realised I had chosen the wrong forum when it was already too late.

J-kun

[Ant]

TV Output should work fine under NT4 as it does with the G200s, when they get round to adding support that is. The features we won't see under NT until Windows 2K are multi-monitor support with different resolutions and refresh rates, DualHead Clone, DualHead Zoon etc.

[J-kun]

They did promise some of those under NT, probably some workarounds.

Win2000 looks nice but if it follows the NT tradition, it starts being stable at Service Pack 3 :-)

Linux/Xfree 4 should be done earlier...

J-kun

[Spike!]

Tish,

what games work on Win2K w/ the Matrox OGL drivers? I'm particularly curious about SMP Q3A support in the OGL drivers and whether only the TNT drivers work with it...



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Formerly known as kenyee before this forum got alzheimer's disease. Now I know why no one uses their real name :-P

[Spike!]

Tish,

what games work on Win2K w/ the Matrox OGL drivers? I'm particularly curious about SMP Q3A support in the OGL drivers and whether only the TNT drivers work with it...



------------------
--------
Formerly known as kenyee before this forum got alzheimer's disease. Now I know why no one uses their real name :-P

[Spike!]

Tish,

what games work on Win2K w/ the Matrox OGL drivers? I'm particularly curious about SMP Q3A support in the OGL drivers and whether only the TNT drivers work with it...



------------------
--------
Formerly known as kenyee before this forum got alzheimer's disease. Now I know why no one uses their real name :-P

[armyworm]

Hi All,

you need to remember, as Ant said, that NT does NOT support Dual monitor in it's coding like windows 98... The dual monitor is done with the drivers, hence why you only get a virtual desktop. This is really not matrox fault... NT doesn't even know what happening when dual monitor is used... all system pop ups will go directly in the middle of both monitors... Also notice that you need two Matrox cards, and cannot mix the card such as in windows 98. So if you want to blame something blame NT... I find it real cool that they have this workaround with the drivers! i have no idea to what extend these will be enhanced with teh G400 since we all need to remember that most manufacturer needs to concentrate on W2K rather than an OS that will soon be replaced (i know i know, please don't bitch me... OS2 is old and still supported, but we cannot expect to have top notch drivers for older OS's such as OS2, NT3.5, win95 and soon NT 4...)

Ciao

Ben

[mragsdale]

up.

[tish]

Windows 2000 is currently my primary OS. I hope indeed a beta driver is coming soon...


Cheers,
Fish.