Future Matrox Drivers Questions...???

[SPSUguy]

Hey all,

I just have a couple of questions concerning upcoming driver releases:

1. Overall, (say a year to a year and a half from now) how much better will my G400 perfrom than it does today?

2. Anyone have a clue whether the proto DX7 drivers will *noticably* increase performance?

3. Anyone have a clue whether after the retail release of win2000 and offical win2000 drivers from matrox will there be a *noticable* increase in performance?

Basically, my question is: over the next year or so, will my G400's performance increase by any great margin? Will it's OpenGL performance EVER match it's D3D performance? Can it's D3D performance get any better? Or is what I'm getting from my G400 now is what I'll be getting from it when i buy a new video card 2 years from now?

Ya'll get what I'm asking here? Is there any "juice" left in this thing that I should be hoping for? Is it just waiting for just the right driver for some Matrox engineer to write to unleash it's full power? Or is it already there?

Ok, I think I've asked my question.

Thanks ya'll

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Abit BH6, Celeron 450, Matrox G400 32mb "MAX", 256mb ram, IBM 10GB, DVD 5x, MX300

[SPSUguy]

Hmmmm... nobody? No guesses? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

;D

[Joel]

It is the nature of our NDAs that we can not give out specific numbers but we can say that things are and will get better.

Joel

[IceStorm]

Hope so. The texture tearing and dissappearing in UT is annoying, to say the least. The TurboGL is good, but it now exceeds the performance of the D3D drivers, and since a whole bunch of games are D3D, well... hope the DX7 optimized drivers are out before xmas.

[Jammrock]

Got to love the NDA...love to hate it that is. In theory the G400 will get faster with each new driver version that comes out. Whether that will be the case remains to be seen.

I still say Matrox needs to hire Wicked3D to help write the driver set. They did such an AWESOME job with their 3dfx line of cards. And now that they are an exclusive driver writting company they can probably pump out some seriously fast drivers in no time.

Jamrock

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PIII 450@something higher, 256 MB RAM, 35 GB on 2 WD Expert drives, Abit Hot Rod UDMA 66 controller, CL 6x DVD, G400 32 MB DH, SB Live! w/ Digital I/O, LinkSys Etherfast 10/100, DSI 56k modem, Addtronics 6896A Case w/ a crap load of fans and Dynmat noise dampening in it, MAG DX715T monitor.

Hi, my name is Jammrock. I'm a computer phreak and an EverSmack addict.

[Snake-Eyes]

I've been wondering if that isn't exactly what they did to develop the turboGL drivers, Jammrock. After all, the WickedGL drivers that they're doing for V3's is also basically a miniGL. Shouldn't take a lot to port something similar for a different chipset.

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Ace

[franksch3]

Not to bash on the beta testers, who do very good work for Matrox, but don't count on a big speed increase. The promises of a much faster OpenGL driver are still not fulfilled, if you haven't got a Pentium III.

However, according to Tim Sweeney, texture management in DirectX 7 is much better than in older versions, when the driver is DirectX7 optimized.

So maybe finally I can use the really high detail textures on my G400 without an enormous speed hit. (For some reason in the latest Demo patch the checkbox disappeared But hey, we've got Notepad ). My Voodoo2 does it with a minor speed hit.

[Vic]

I'm still waiting for my G200 to unleash its full potential!!!

Vic

[Maggi]

Ferris is out of town and I cannot comment on your questions, because I'm under NDA ...



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Cheers,
Maggi
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Working Rig:
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
Double Pentium III-450 @ 464 MHz
4 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead
Nokia 445Xi (21")
Nokia 447Xpro (17")

Home Rig:
Asus P2B-S Bios 1010 @ 100MHz FSB
Celeron 333A @ 500MHz
2 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead @ 150/200MHz
CTX VL710T (17")