Matrox are doing it all over again...

[sixpac]

Cloudy go back to Hardware Central

[Cloudy]

I have this strange feeling that most of the people here are loggin just into the forums and nowhere else. Check the firingsquad, sharky, arstechnica and the others. You'll see that currently, the G400 is the best allaround card out there BUT you'll also see that industry is currently moving faster than ever. How could you explain then the fact that Dell has decided to abandon ATi and do business with Nvidia instead ?
The rage fury is supposed to be quite adequate for current games - NOT !
Since there are more and more operating systems taking an ever growing number of users away from M$, OpenGL becomes stronger compared with D3D. Matrox have the strongest D3D engine right now but they lack in OpenGL. So now we should say that the G400 is the best allaround windows 9x graphic adapter and Nvidia has the best non 9x adapter. Unless Matrox comes forth with a new design quite soon, they will suffer the same fate ATi are and ATi are way bigger.
About bump mapping, environmental bump mapping (which was invented by the bit boys - Glaze 3D and was licensed to M$) looks the best but it's considered less realistic. T&L on the other hand gives a much more noticable difference in visual quality.
DualHead is more than cool, but how long will it keep the G400 on top ?
The GeForce and Savage 2000 will be superior to the G400 in every aspect, then what ?
G200 was the first card to enter the market, G400 was the last and the G400MAX still didn't arrive to Israel, my bet is that it'll arrive the same time the Savege2000 and GeForce 256 will.
Better late than never ? Not today, not in this industry.

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Cloudy
Asus P2B-DS, 2 x Celeron 400@75Mhz, 128Mb Ram, Xitel Storm Platinum,
2 x IBM 4.3Gb scsi, Pioneer DVD rom scsi, ati rage fury.

[Cloudy]

I'd like to add the fact that I'v never seen a company asking their cutomers to hack into their own registry to delete old drivers or to search for certain DLLs and delete them.
Like I said in the G200 flame a few months ago, a card should come out of the box, get plugged and drivers installed. Seen it with Nvidia and certain ATi cards. Not with matrox:

ALBPM
Member posted 09-06-1999 18:30
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Hey Scout,
Check your Windows/System folder and see if there are any G200 files there and delete them.
This seems to be a problem especially for those who were using 5.15.

Paul

IP: Logged

Kruzin
Member posted 09-06-1999 18:31
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Are your proper OGL files all intact?
In your windows\system folder, you should have:
g400icd.dll
opengl32.dll (737k in size)
glu32.dll (137k)
Sometimes opengl32 and glu32 are the wrong version (especially if you have ever installed GLDirect), or missing. Without those (correct) files, OGL won't work.

There should also be no opengl32.dll in the game directory of whatever game you are trying to play. If there is anything like the old G200 wrapper in the game directory, it will try to override the system's OGL.


and so on....

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Cloudy
Asus P2B-DS, 2 x Celeron 400@75Mhz, 128Mb Ram, Xitel Storm Platinum,
2 x IBM 4.3Gb scsi, Pioneer DVD rom scsi, ati rage fury.

[mr Pither]

Why is it that threads like this give
me a headache ?

Why do I still end up reading these ?

Don't answer.

[Meek]

Sorry, wrong quote. The guys quoted do not work for Matrox.

M.

[SteveC]

...contrary to popular belief.

[Cloudy]

Want Matrox's quote ???
Here ya go:
http://www.matrox.com/mga/tech_supp/..._uninstall.htm

This is what you had to do if you wanted to move from G200 drivers 4.xx to 5.xx when they first came out.

Get serious dude.


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Cloudy
Asus P2B-DS, 2 x Celeron 400@75Mhz, 128Mb Ram, Xitel Storm Platinum,
2 x IBM 4.3Gb scsi, Pioneer DVD rom scsi, ati rage fury.

[This message has been edited by Cloudy (edited 09-07-1999).]

[SteveC]

At least matrox have the decency to asmit that this is what you have to go through. Other companies wouldn't.
Don't start saying that you don't need to do with with other graphics cards, becuase I know full well you do.

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Cheers,
Steve

[Cloudy]

I never had to , nor my friends, but I trust you know what you're talkign about. I can only say that it's wrong people have to do such things, whatever hardware/software it is.

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Cloudy
Asus P2B-DS, 2 x Celeron 400@75Mhz, 128Mb Ram, Xitel Storm Platinum,
2 x IBM 4.3Gb scsi, Pioneer DVD rom scsi, ati rage fury.

[SteveC]

I agree that Joe User should not have to do all this. But it's the world we live in. I've had to do this type of thing on a few other graphics cards (ATi, Nvidia's and 3dfxs).

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Cheers,
Steve

[LAMFDTK]

I want to get into this fight but choose not to!

[Taylorg]

Hey you want to talk about bad drivers I paid £350 for a Diamond Viper PCI P9000 based card back in 1993 and was running Windows 3.1 then when Win95 went into beta Diamond promised drivers but Win95 was release and Doamond never got beyond beat 1.

They ended up giving customers a rebate to replace the Vipers with S3 based Stealth cards.

After that I got a Matrox Milllenium and I've had a Matrox card ever since.

[Himself]

For the record, other companies do sugget this. Creative Labs for instance. William Ball of Creative in the CL TNT newsgoup even took it upon himself to create a TNT FAQ outlining exactly what files to delete with credit given to news group users comments from people like myself.

[cpld005]

Since when was the Rage Fury adequate for anything other then DVD playback?

[Gorf]

About uninstalling drivers.
After going through matrox's step by step routine before installing my G400max drivers.Ithought i would just check to see if my 3dfx drivers and my Ati drivers had all beeen removed when i uninstalled the cards and drivers using the correct procedures.Oh no there was stuff on the hard drive and in the windows registry.So its not a balanced argument to lay all that stuff on matrox about uninstalling drivers.