State of G200 drivers in Win2K Gold

[PaulS]

I really don't get these 2D benchmarks. No doubt you can see a difference on paper, but I can't imagine having an excel spreadsheet perform noticeably better with an updated G200 driver.

The only thing that may make a (very small) difference is if you had an embedded object that used D3D rendering (AFAIK msgraph doesn't).

I use Photoshop with the G200 on W2k, no problems, delays are in waiting for images to load from the HD, and for the CPU to process effects. Certainly no delays that could be attributed to the G200.

Paul

[orangejulius]

State of G200 drivers in Win2K Gold

Winmag wrote a bit about the state of G200 drivers in Win2K Gold:

One thing we did notice, though -- our Excel test score on Windows 2000 lagged slightly behind its Windows NT counterpart. Why? Our Excel test is far more graphics-intense than our Word test because the former creates bar and pie charts and some 3D displays. At this stage of their development, many Win2000 video drivers (including the one for our Matrox Millennium G200 AGP card) might be slightly slower at rendering fonts at different sizes than a freshly updated NT driver. Meanwhile, the raw WinTune video test scores for Win2000 are faster than WinNT (see all our test scores). This doesn't mean that Win2000 is always going to be slower with video in some cases -- just that some cards' drivers may not be as speedy as they can be. (Expect the best results for video to come when you download drivers directly from the manufacturer for Windows 2000 in the coming months.)

Ironically, some different scores from the same report show G200/Win2K beating Win98/NT hands down in 2D, 3D, and just about everything!

<u>WinMag's test system:</u>
450MHz Pentium II processor * 320MB of SDRAM * 12GB Ultra DMA-33 hard drive * Matrox Millennium G200 AGP graphics card Drivers used: Latest publicly available as of December 28, 1999. OS's Tested: Win2K Gold vs NT4 vs Win98SE<HR>

Side note:

With the ubiquity of FPS scores, it's actually kind of refreshing to see the Word/Excel/Debabelizer benchmarked.

Any Win2K users get a chance to test their Matrox card with Adobe apps? For that matter, does anyone know of a site specifically for graphics professionals that regulary tests video cards on NT?

<font size="1">edit: optimized ease of reading</font>

[This message has been edited by orangejulius (edited 01 January 2000).]