TurboGL drivers for non-P3's PLEEEEZ!

[[PCXL] Mabelrode]

Matrox gods,

Please, oh please create a tubo-GL driver for those of us not fortunate enough to have bought P3's and the Celeron clones? It really sucks to think I'll have to crowbar a second card into my PII to play my favorite games, when i bought a G400MAX to do so, and trusted that Matrox, who's reviews I've followed for years, would make a board that would kick ass in OGL.

Don't leave us in the dust, with a card that's essentially obsolete for OUR computers......

[Jorden]

Mabelrode, if you have been reading all threads about this TurboGL really good, you would have know that the rest is following... I say this nicely here, not shouting, not trying to strangle all of you for not reading the posts too carefully or for that matter reading Ant's Rant on his News page http://www.murc.ws/news.html ...

But okay... some people are ignorant and others just don't get it...

Okay, go on and whine some more... hey, I want my old C64 and my XT to be able to use these drivers as well, but do you hear me say anything about that???

Jorden.

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Who likes his fries with mayonnaise??
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I GOT a very speedy, working G400 32Mb DH!!! (Delivered in an Asus AGP-V3800 16Mb box)
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Holly, Love and Tiberian Sun Rules !!
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[rickn]

Well, that rant was rather stupid. Nobody is asking for 486 support. I can understand Matrox supporting the new features in cpu's, but just like every other developer they try and take the easy route out. They are ignoring a very large portion of the gaming community. Do you have any clue how many people own P2 and celeron systems compared to K7.

[DuRaNgO]

relax, with the price of cpus dropping the way they are, by xmas, we'll all be running 800mhz systems anyways
jim

[carlmeister]

I think you guys missed the point, these drivers are speedier using the SIMD instructions in the PIII and K-7. These are not present inthe PII or the Celeron, they are though in the K6-3. Im not positive, but I think for the K-7 the have a few more 3dNow instruction sets than K6-2 and K6-3, hence the current incompatability with the K6-3. So K6-2/3 support probably will eventually be added in future driver. You PII and Celeron guys will never get the support, you don't have the instruction set. This is the same thing that I get with the AMD mini GL that I use for Quake II w/ my V2 SLI, a increase from 38 fps to 70 fps @ 1024x768 just by installing that jewel in my QuakeII directory. It also shows how powerful these instruction sets can be. Bye

[rickn]

Carlmeister: I had a tnt2 that still gets a better crusher score without the use of SIMD, why can't matrox do the same?

[WereWolf]

I agree with rickn here, there's one thing that confuses me.
Why is Nvidia able to get to Matrox TurboGL speed with a CeleronA WITHOUT SSE/3DNOW!

And Matrox suddenly needs SSE to get up to TNT2 OGL speeds..

And in Direct3d they match eachother all the way (with Matrox being faster sometimes!) without all this SSE/3DNOW! mumbo jumbo!

I agree that P3/Athlon is the future, but this I find a little strange. What happens when Nvdia releases a P3 TurboGL for their TNT2? Obviously it will be 20% faster then when using a Celeron/P2(thus 20% faster then Matrox TurboGL using SSE!

Weird stuff going on here...
I'm thankful though that Matrox is still committed to getting us the best support ever.
Matrox rules!

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Primary system:
Celeron 366@550, 256Mb 7ns RAM, Asus P2B rev1.10,10,8Gb Maxtor Diamondmax UDMA + 4,3Gb Fujitsu MPC UDMA HDD, SBLive! + Soundworks FPS1000, Iomega ATAPI Zip drive, Pioneer slot-in 36x SCSI CD-ROM drive, Yamaha CDRW4001t 4xWriter, 56k external modem, Etherlink III ISA NIC, G400 DH 32Mb @ 160/201, Philips 107S 17' Secondary monitor, Iiyama Vision Master Pro450 19' Diamondtron NF Primary monitor.

Secondary system:
Celeron 266@448, 128Mb 8ns RAM, Asus P2B, WDCaviar 5,1Gb UDMA HDD, Creative SB32 with 8mb RAM, A-Open 36X UDMA CD-ROM Drive, Winbond 940F NIC, DiamondMM Viper550 16mb @ 115/120, Target generic 17' Monitor.

[Ant]

Well we all know Matrox they don't usually pre announce things, this time they have dipped their toe in the water and done it bowing to user pressure. Who knows if they will do it again, I've already asked for a pre release Athlon supporting version and been told that they doubt they could let me have it

[SCompRacer]

Ant, do you have any statistics on estimated percentages of P II/P III market saturation. For example, "10% of all PC's are P II," etc.

Windows mag used to publish a pie chart from time to time showing this.
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Before I had this I had that, and while I wanted this I accepted that cause it was better than what I had before and beats nothing at all.


[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 09-24-1999).]

[Phlex]

After reading about the TurboGL I finally broke down and placed an order for a G400 Max and Pentium III 500MHz. Ant can you tell me if the TurboGL is only geared for win9x? I really hate to downgrade from NT4 to win98 because of my lust to kill in cyberspace(Qtest3). Any news for TurboGL to be supported under NT4 or Win 2K?

[SCompRacer]

Wouldn't the version of Direct X be an issue in NT 4.0?

NT 4.0 supports Direct X 3 with SP 5, while Win2000 will have Direct X 7.

[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 09-24-1999).]

[Whisper]

As much as the turn around in the way Matrox currently appears to be handling itself, I have to strongly AGREE with Werewolf.

A TNT2 on either a Celeron or a P3 at the same clock speed, will give you similar frame rates, why is this not so for a Matrox G400??

Sorry for the dose of reality, but somebody had to say it, and as Ant said this is a users forum, not the Matrox appreciation society.

Flame away if you think I am wrong to point this out.

[cirrus]

Any information available when Athlon Turbo miniGL will be released? At the same day as P3 driver?

--
Arto

[Phlex]

Scompracer, the use of the mini openGL (turbo icd) icd in conjuction with OGL icd has nothing to do with directx 7. We're talking about using OGL api and not d3d api in NT4.

FYI, NT4 supported directx 3 starting with SP3.

But this is all irrelevant since I decided to buy another motherboard (Asus P3B-F) to run Win98se. I'll be placing the PIII 500 and the G400 Max on this Asus P2B-DS motherboard running NT4 Server and place my G200 and PII 450 on the Win98se.

[Buckaroo99]

In comparison to the TNT2 the G400 is supporting a few more features like true trilinear filtering, per pixel mipmaps and palletized textures. I think the less complex the graphic renderer the less cpu dependent it becomes. The best example of this would be the V3 which has good performance on lower end machines.