TurboGL for PII?

[Kruzin]

"So the TGL could be just a publicity stunt"
Huh? Publicity stunt? I see it as an honest effort to give gamers what they wanted. And the reviews that included it where all raves. The fact that it came for higher-end processors first is just natural. Why would they have put that effort into getting a P2 TGL out first when that is not would the testbed to be used in reviews?

"Did they ever announce TGL support for PII/K6?"
No. There has never been a statement from Matrox about TGL for anything but P3/K7.

"Why don't they announce it then?"
I think they learned their lesson last year with the G200 ICD, and their missed "stay up all night if we have to" deadline. I doubt they will announce anything until they know it will work. No promises, no expectations.

But it never hurts to have a dream....

[Stil]

The amount of misinformation and general cluelessness posted to this thread is astounding. Kruzin has corrected most of the errors other people have made, but allow me to pipe in for a bit:

BC547 writes:
Since the TGL is a game-only stripped version of the full ICD, what's holding matrox to tweak it also for PII's? NVIDEA shows it's possible to get faster performance. And if they have a good TGL, they could use that code also in their full ICD so the work isn't lost.


This is a big assumption. How do you know that the TurboGL is a "stripped down" ICD? Have you looked into the source code? Do you work for Matrox? (obviously not, from your unsubstanciated claims) The idea that you can take code from a specialized hack (TGL) tuned to do one and only one thing, and just stick it into a huge comprehensive driver (ICD), is naive to the point of absurdity. I suspect you have never worked on a 100,000+ line software project before.


Gaming is the biggest and fastest market for PC business.
[...]
A fully functional ICD that works well with professional apps AND games is great. But 90% of the users just don't care for a fully functional ICD.


There goes all your credibility.

As for sasa's post full of FPS scores and other useless numerical masturbation, that's great... I'm happy you can squeeze a few extra FPS out of the TNT2 at low resolutions (1024x768 and under). Try alt-tabbing back to windows to quick check your email during the middle of an OpenGL game, and get back to me after your driver crashes and you have to reboot. Point is, "Quake 3 FPS numbers at 640x480" is an extremely narrow focus for judging the overall quality of an entire driver. There are other resolutions, other games, other apps, and other factors to go by when determining what those Matrox programmers should be focussing on!

[BC547]

unam,
I'm not a professional, but I know several guys who bought other hardware (and more expensive) because G400 didn't do what they wanted it to do. I did actually try the provided benchmark scenes with 3dsmaxR3, and when I selected OpenGL, all tests where 2 to 3 times slower as HEIDI Software Zbuffer. So I believed them. (Note I'm only talking about opengl...NOT 2D performance)
PS. I also tried D3D, and it was a little bit slower as software Zbuffer.

Kruzin,

The fact that it came for higher-end processors first is just natural

Indeed.. I agree.. But the fact that 3 months later there is still no PII TGL shows they are not taking it seriously. And indeed.. with their TGL the G400 really rocks in reviews. But that's it... If you have a PIII/Athlon, it's good for you, but all the gamers with PII/K6 processors don't see any advantage...


No promises, no expectations

Currently, there are A LOT of expectations, but no promisses at all... I think anyone would love an official statement like :"We're working on it. The releasedate is not yet know due to the following problems: -insert problemlist here-" An exact releasedate is not nessecary, but now nobody knows what to expect.

Ok.. Now I'm gonna continue my dream :-)

BC547 aka Dirk

[Kruzin]

Nobody would like to see such a statement more than me. But those of us who have been using Matrox as long as many of us have know better than to expect that. Matrox has always been tight-lipped about things to come, and probably always will be. It's just something we as Matrox users have to deal with.

And I am a professional. I like to game as much as anyone, but my primary use is 2D AutoCAD. And the card kicks all ass for that. No matter how fast any other card may be in some shooter, it still won't let me run my ACAD graphicd view on one monitor, and my text windows, e-mail, browser, etc. on the other, like I have right now.

I think your perception of how many people are into PCs just for games is way off base. While gamers are a big part of the PC community, they are certainly not nearly 90% of it. Most users here will also tell you they have more important uses for their rig than to play Q3.

[BC547]

Stil,

Let me quote kruzin about the 'game-only stripped version ICD'
For the FPS counters, they released TGL, which is optimised for lower res (unlike the full ICD), SSE/3DNow!, and is only for games (cutting out large amounts of bulky coding).
I think this means a 'stripped game-only' version of the full ICD.

I don't mean "copy&paste" code from the TGL to the full ICD, but some of the tricky optimisation research is already done with the TGL and the most critical softwareroutines normally don't change a lot. Even if the code is not usable, all the knowledge collected while writing the TGL will be a big advantage for the full ICD.

There are indeed numerous other factors to take into consideration when judging an entire driver. I'm not complaining about their normal drivers. Only about the TGL. The 640x480 resolution is just an example. I just took the most popular game of the moment and told that Nvidea is faster. If you read all benchmarks taken with a PII, the G400 scores are not so high in 3D gl games. Only on PIII/Athlon systems, a G400 shines in GL stuff.

BC547 aka Dirk

PS. I really like the G400 because it's superiour 2D quality and 2D drivers, dualhead... In fact, I personally never had another videocard (Matrox millenium, millenium II, G200 and now G400max). And I'm really curious what the next matrox card will bring. But this doesn't change the fact that matrox must do something about their responsivenes to customers... Just one official statement is enough (for the moment) :-)

[Kruzin]

"I think this means a 'stripped game-only' version of the full ICD."

No.
Perhaps "cutting out code" was a poor way for me to word it.
How about "negating the need for extra coding".

TGL was written from the ground up, by a different programming team than the full ICD, not hacked down from the full ICD. They started from square one, and wrote it to use every SSE and 3dNow! instruction they could. I suspect that if there is a way for them to include that code in the full ICD in the future, they will. But that would not be an easy thing to do, and would probably result in multiple ICDs for the different processors. I might simply make more sense to keep them separate...

[BC547]

kruzin,

I think your perception of how many people are into PCs just for games is way off base. While gamers are a big part of the PC community, they are certainly not nearly 90% of it. Most users here will also tell you they have more important uses for their rig than to play Q3.

Even if it's 50%, their part is not simply ignorable. Most real gamers don't buy matrox just because the bad driver support for games in comparison with other vendors.

The way I see it, all the hardware is present on a G400 board. Only the drivers aren't matured yet.. even after 6 months. And since most other cards are now also starting to use high quality ramdac's (V3:350Mhz) and architectures (256bit mem bus, AGP4X), drivers (2D AND 3D) are a point that definately needs to be worked on now.

BC547 aka Dirk


[This message has been edited by BC547 (edited 07 December 1999).]

[guste]

As far as I understand it intel's new line of celerons will not only have an FSB of 100 Mhz, but they will also included things like SSE. These are just things intel says may happen, so don't go waiting 3 months for a new celeron just because I said so.

[Stringy]

This blind backwards compatibility is what annoys me...
The G400 is concidered a Highend card by most here, it's not concidered lowend.. So why are you complaining when you pair a Highend product to a lowend machine??

If you machine was made previous to the intro of the G400, ie pre-P3, then why do you expect to get Specialized drivers?? The majority of Matrox's business will be users with P3's and Athlons because their product is highend and so are P3's and Athlons...

If you have a Celeron, which is a Budget CPU, and then you O/C it, another means to get more for less money, usually meaning strict budgetary constraints... Is it normal for those with such budgets to go out and buy one of the more expensive and highend cards?? I think the majority of Celerons sold are not used as HighEnd machines....

If you want the best performance get the best hardware, it would be nice if a new video card ran as fast as it would on a slow CPU as it does on a fast CPU, but then why would you need the faster CPU??


Just some thoughts...
Craig

[Guru]

I'm going to give this a try. So lets see... This thread belongs in the soapbox, so that's where you'll find it...

------------------
PIII450@558, ABIT BX6-2, 256RAM, G400MAX, SBLIVE

[Himself]

This blind backwards compatibility is what annoys me...
The G400 is concidered a Highend card by most here, it's not concidered lowend.. So why are you complaining when you pair a Highend product to a lowend machine??

Why complain? If the drivers are tweaked to work well on low end machines, it will work even faster on a high end one.

If you machine was made previous to the intro of the G400, ie pre-P3, then why do you expect to get Specialized drivers?? The majority of Matrox's business will be users with P3's and Athlons because their product is highend and so are P3's and Athlons...

Why is their product high end? Is it merely price? Does that make the TNT 2 Ultra low end then? It has specialty drivers for AMD's low end cpus, like the K6-3, which isn't exactly a budget item, btw, relative to a Celeron.

If you have a Celeron, which is a Budget CPU, and then you O/C it, another means to get more for less money, usually meaning strict budgetary constraints... Is it normal for those with such budgets to go out and buy one of the more expensive and highend cards?? I think the majority of Celerons sold are not used as HighEnd machines....

I think you are trying to say that nobody with a non P3 cpu or Athlon cpu owns a G400 or that their numbers are small. Is that really true? Seems to me there are quite a few AMD users and PII/Celeron owners here. Whether or not you think it's esthetic to combine the two, it's seems to be done quite often. Basically, you seem to be saying nobody but P3 and Athlon users should buy Matrox video cards because they are not worthy. Perhaps I am putting words in your mouth, but that's how it reads from here.

If you want the best performance get the best hardware, it would be nice if a new video card ran as fast as it would on a slow CPU as it does on a fast CPU, but then why would you need the faster CPU??

The issue is not that, it's whether the drivers should take up so much cpu time that you need at P3 just to compensate and get actual data to the hardware that you bought.
The G400 could very well be a good low end card with the right drivers. Or if that is impossible because of functions normallying implemented in hardware being implemented in software? It should be stated right out if that's the case. With little demands on the video card in low resolutions it should show the maximum that your cpu can dish out with minor or at least known differences between cards due to architecture, if other video cards have much higher performance of the same generation (or previous generation in my case), then it's likely a difference in drivers. Obviously with a AMD K6-2/3 cpu, there is the 3D-Now! factor, but with such a differenc between cards using PIIs it seems to be a valid question, whether or not it's worth discussing here, since nobody here is in charge of the G400 drivers, is another matter.

[Stringy]

Why complain? If the drivers are tweaked to work well on low end machines, it will work even faster on a high end one.

Well that's a pretty big assumption that thenew hardware that Matrox developed in the G400 can operate on lowend systems with ease...

Why is their product high end? Is it merely price? Does that make the TNT 2 Ultra low end then? It has specialty drivers for AMD's low end cpus, like the K6-3, which isn't exactly a budget item, btw, relative to a Celeron.
It's not price, the TNT2U is Highend, for the moment... G400's don't perform well on K6-3's, and there are no extra Optimizations for K6-3's... the K6 series ARE lowend solutions IMO.... they offer great Windows Performance but their FPU is weak and all the resulting consequenses makes it a lowend CPU... like slow disk access, poor Database compiling, Data compiling etc...

I think you are trying to say that nobody with a non P3 cpu or Athlon cpu owns a G400 or that their numbers are small. Is that really true? Seems to me there are quite a few AMD users and PII/Celeron owners here.
Yes this is my point, there are More, on average P3 and athlon uses with G400's than there are K6's and Celeries....
Whether or not you think it's esthetic to combine the two, it's seems to be done quite often. Basically, you seem to be saying nobody but P3 and Athlon users should buy Matrox video cards because they are not worthy.
Sorta, but Users with LESS than a P3 and Athlon shouldn't expect wonders from drivers to compensate for the slower CPU's...

Okies, My point is The Highend systems is where the Money is.. Matrox will not make a great deal of money on optimizing their code for 486's.. exageration but you get my point... They make their money by Optimizing their drivers and hardware for the Latest of the time....
I'm sure performance will improve for lowerend CPU's as the ICD developes further and the code is trimmed and optimized... Oh and wether I get 60 or 100Fps isn't really a concern of mine or many, because a G200 can render Q3 and any of the latest games without much trouble at 640x480 (granted not 100Fps)...
Comparing the G400 is nVidia is very difficult, especially in the way you are.. nVidia's architecture seems to do well with low system CPU clocks, Great... a G400, which we all know requires more CPU Mhz in order to reach efficiency, this maybe hardware or could be drivers... I know I can't tell and since you don't work for Matrox I can say pretty positively you can't say for certain either...

Oh and if the G400 series does things in Software which competitors do in HW doesn't make the Competitors better.. Because as the CPU speed increases it might overtake what a HardWired solution is capable...


My Thoughts
Craig

[Himself]

>>Why complain? If the drivers are tweaked >>to work well on low end machines, it will >>work even faster on a high end one.

Well that's a pretty big assumption that thenew hardware that Matrox developed in the G400 can operate on lowend systems with ease...

Er, no, did you read what you quoted? If low end machines get good performance, you don't think high end machines will also as a consequence? What makes you think that?

It's not price, the TNT2U is Highend, for the moment... G400's don't perform well on K6-3's, and there are no extra Optimizations for K6-3's... the K6 series ARE lowend solutions IMO.... they offer great Windows Performance but their FPU is weak and all the resulting consequenses makes it a lowend CPU... like slow disk access, poor Database compiling, Data compiling etc...

You seem to contradict yourself here, if the TNT 2 is high end and performs well on AMD cpus like the K6-2/3, then what's your point?
That the G400 could be just as good for AMD users with the right drivers?

Slow disk performance? Could you tell me what floating point operations are required to transfer data from a hard drive? Poor database compiling? What does that have to do with the G400 or any video card for that matter?

Yes this is my point, there are More, on average P3 and athlon uses with G400's than there are K6's and Celeries....

How do you know? There are around 3000 general Matrox users here, and obviously more than 3000 G400s have been sold worldwide, where's your data? There are only a million or so Athlon systems made in the world and they don't all own G400 cards.

>>Whether or not you think it's esthetic to >>combine the two, it's seems to be done >>quite often. Basically, you seem to be >>saying nobody but P3 and Athlon users >>should buy Matrox video cards because they >>are not worthy.

Sorta, but Users with LESS than a P3 and Athlon shouldn't expect wonders from drivers to compensate for the slower CPU's...

So everyone who buys a Matrox card should not expect any driver optimization at all? Seems to be what you are saying.

Okies, My point is The Highend systems is where the Money is..

Do you have research to back this up. Seems to me numbers of sales is where the money is and it's oem business that has that, it's not Joe user who upgrades his homebuilt but whatever gets slapped into the latest Compaq QND machine. Seems to me that faster drivers would help all around, make more oem sales for companies who are considering using a TNT 2 option or GeForce option, etc. OEMs like benchmarks as much as any gamer it means more marketing potential. I think Matrox IS trying to optimize their drivers, even for the low end if they can, why wouldn't they?

Matrox will not make a great deal of money on optimizing their code for 486's.. exageration but you get my point...

Actually no, I don't, generic optimization of code is not based on one platform or another, except of course with the special case situations with SIMD instructions. We are talking about x86 cpus here, there is nothing a compiler switch can't take care of when it comes to compiling the code for variations in cpus, it's not like trying to support PPC chips or something, in fact compiling a 486 version would just take a recompile if there was any point to it. SIMD isn't required for PII/Celeron owners to enjoy fast performance on NVIDIA cards, or 3DFX cards for that matter. There is little to be done for relatively minor generic cpu instruction variations that make one driver faster than another, and anything that was done that way for the PII/Celeron line would have immediate positive benefits for the PIII users. If you are talking about motherboard archiecture optimizations then that also would have a positive benefit for PIII users since they use the same motherboard as the PII/Celerons. What exactly are you thinking of?

They make their money by Optimizing their drivers and hardware for the Latest of the time....

They optimize their drivers to try and get more of a market than the ultra high end, that means their cards can go into more oem machines than just the premium lines. Why did MAtrox reduce prices for the Holiday season if they only want to sell to high end users?

I'm sure performance will improve for lowerend CPU's as the ICD developes further and the code is trimmed and optimized... Oh and wether I get 60 or 100Fps isn't really a concern of mine or many, because a G200 can render Q3 and any of the latest games without much trouble at 640x480 (granted not 100Fps)...

You are saying the only reason Matrox works on optimizing drivers is for people who don't need more speed?

Comparing the G400 is nVidia is very difficult, especially in the way you are..

Seems fairly straight forward to me, you compare benchmark results and draw conclusions.

nVidia's architecture seems to do well with low system CPU clocks, Great... a G400, which we all know requires more CPU Mhz in order to reach efficiency, this maybe hardware or could be drivers... I know I can't tell and since you don't work for Matrox I can say pretty positively you can't say for certain either...

Never said I could, but if it is the case that the G400 should only be bought by PIII and Athlon users, and Matrox is fully supporting this and behind your position they should say so on the box. I haven't heard anybody from Matrox come out and say that, so I don't think I will listen to you.

Oh and if the G400 series does things in Software which competitors do in HW doesn't make the Competitors better.. Because as the CPU speed increases it might overtake what a HardWired solution is capable...

If that is the case, there is nothing stopping a design from having both options, if the hardware is too slow then the drivers can take over that step with a flexible enough design, all it has to do is give the data to the video card flagged as already processed. Something ala the S3 idea with their S2000 card.

You attitude isn't unique here for sure, but I do find it rather uncharitable.


[This message has been edited by Himself (edited 08 December 1999).]

[IceStorm]

1) No SSE/Extended 3D Now, no TurboGL for the time being, 'nuff said.

2) No hardcore gamer worth his salt uses a Celeron. Soon as Athlons came out, we went to that. :-)

3) If you don't like the way the hardware works, return it.

It isn't as if this is rocket science. The G400 is a gfx card with known strengths/weaknesses. There is no one end-all, be-all video card, so get off it.

Geez. It's a VIDEO CARD. If you don't like it, return it and BUY another one.

And as for the driver updates, it's no good complaining. You should have done your homework on the G200 debacle before getting a G400. I walked into my MAX fully aware of the hell that was the G200's first year of life.

Just my $0.02

------------------
Primary System: Athlon 550, MSI 6167 mb w/BIOS 1.3, 3x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, G400 MAX (no multi), Millennium II PCI, Two Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 900u monitors, Intel Pro/100+ Management Adapter, SoundBlaster Live!, DeskTop Theater DTT2500 DIGITAL Speaker System (Sweeeeeet!), WDC WD20 5AA 20GB HD, WD AC310100 10GB HD, Toshiba SD-M1212 6x DVD-ROM, HP 8100i CD-RW, Epson Stylus Pro, OptiUPS PowerES 650, MS SideWinder Precision Pro USB joystick, Gravis Xterminator gamepad (no DX7 drivers yet), Logitech 3-button mouse, Mitsumi keyboard, Win98 SE, Belkin OmniCube 4-port KVM, 10/100 5-port Linksys Ethernet switch, Epson 1200u scanner, Epson Stylus Pro printer, Logitech QuickCam Pro with the little stand and the lense kit (cool).

Secondary System: PIII-450, Soyo 6BA+ IV, 1x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, Millennium G200 AGP, V2 SLI rig, Intel Pro/100+ Management Adapter, SoundBlaster 32, WD AC41800 18GB HD, Creative Dxr3 DVD decoder card, Hitachi GD-2500 6x DVD-ROM, Win98 SE

Tertiary System: PII-266, Asus P2B BIOS 1008, 1x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, Millennium II, 3Com 3C905, 3Com 3C509, ADSL Modem 640kbit down/90kbit up, Mylex BT-930 SCSI card, Seagate 2GB Hawk, Seagate 1GB Hawk, Quantum DLT 4000 tape drive, NEC 6x CD-ROM, Linux distro S.u.S.E. 6.1 (IP Masquerade works!)

Quaternary System: Ocean Rhino 9 motherboard w/Intel 430HX chipset, P200MMX, 4x64MB EDO Parity RAM, Millennium II, 3Com 3C590, SoundBlaster 16 MCD, Fujitsu 3.5GB HD, WD 1.2GB HD, Haven't chosen an OS yet.

And a JetDirect EX print server that bootp's its address from the Tertiary System.

All specs subject to change.

-The pessimist says: "The glass is half empty."
The optimist says: "The glass is half full."
The engineer says: "I put half of my water
in a redundant glass."