New Win2000 drivers?

[turbodog2]

Since the last Win2000 vs. Matrox thread died, I thought I'd resurrect it since the magic date of Feb. 17 is rapidly approaching.

So any info about when new Win2000 drivers for the Gxxx cards?

Personally, I can't wait for Feb. 17 to arrive because I'm sick of hearing "it's a beta and you pirated your copy of Win2k, blah, blah, blah". Then people will have to fall back on "when Matrox is good and ready" non-answer.

Sorry if this is really negative, but when people ask about driver delivery they usually get dumped on (you, your hardware and your setup suck) and then told, basically, that they should be happy Matrox gives them drivers at all and that all the other vendors are even worse.

I don't know about the other vendors since I've been a faithful Matrox customer since the original Millennium, but the guy next to me with a Voodoo 3000 and Win 2000 snickers when I have problems with the current drivers.

[paulcs]

Matrox is usually very hush-hush about release dates, and to my knowledge, they haven't said anything about upcoming releases for W2K or Windows 98. We just don't know.

I hope you snickered when your Voodoo3 friend had no W2K drivers.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[PaulS]

My OEM just got his first shipment of Windows 2000 Pro. He was able to get some quite good nVidia drivers from asus, but nothing from Matrox. So undoubtedly his first lot of Windows 2000 computers won't be selling with his (preferred) Matrox cards.

Anyway, it not just developers and pirates that are getting frustrated with Matrox, systems are on sale now with Windows 2000 pre-installed so the end users are being let down also.

Paul

[mj12]

Unfortunately nvidia has been releasing revisions of their detonator drivers like crazy. Matrox started out fine but have gone quiet lately. I'm just hoping that they are waiting until Feb. 17 to iron out any final bugs. As for the 3dfx/w2k situation. I haven't a clue where they stand and really don't care

[Goc]

If I am not mistaken V3 has no official Win2k drivers, only hacks... Then again, I could be mistaken...
And before anyone else starts bitching about remember that Matrox is the one suffering the most, because they don't sell as much boards as they should... People hear stuff and all of the sudden they act as if there aren't any drivers at all...
Matrox always goes for superior quality and performance. If I have to wait a few weeks to get that, it's fine with me
And don't give me, "what about G200 and no-openGL situation", because if I recall correctly, the minute G400 was out in the market, we had a steady delivery of new driver revisions plus cool stuff like TurboGl... So just wait and see, we'll all be very happy when things fall to their place...

No offence, and no flames please... I have a cold

[PaulS]

"Matrox always goes for superior quality and performance?". You obviously haven't had much to do with Matrox and NT. Why shouldn't Matrox have stable drivers by 17th Feb? In fact, why shouldn't they have them now - 17th Feb was the retail release date, not the OEM. People act like MS suddenly popped open a box and said "Here is Windows 2000". Do you know how long MS has been working with hardware vendors to get them to support Windows 2000? Matrox has had many, many months to work on these drivers, they certainly have no excuse for not providing fast, stable and fully featured drivers on the 17th of Feb.

Paul

[Positiv]

Countdown:
9 days and counting..................
Sorry, I know this looks retard!

PS: I'm not really confortable with Beta software on my system.

[APV]

PaulS,

You seems to forget the G200 drivers' history?!

Y should matrox release a fully functionaly W2K driver by FEB 17?

[Randy Simons]

Because they will get a lot of complaints about the G400 not working in Win2k. That's not a good selling-point ;-)

Btw: G200 works great in Win2k.

[Larry]

Well, to the extent of my usage, my G400Max works perfectly in Win2k with the BETA drivers, which I think is pretty stable. I've noticed no graphic glitches, no lockups, and nothing else out of the ordinary. In fact, I'd even go to say that overall, in my windows desktop, the drivers seem to be - for a lack of a better word - perfect. My only complaints being OGL performance, since even D3D works pretty well. FFVIII works much better in Win2k than in Win98 for me. I have no idea why, but I'm not complaining!

Larry

[PaulS]

I remember the G200's driver history perfectly. I was lied to every month for 6 months, "we are just putting the finishing touches on the OpenGL ICD for NT... only a couple of weeks away". The worst part was that that info was coming from the developer relations people.

It left me with a very bad impression. OK, they may have underestimated the work involved in developing an ICD, but to say that it was near completion, for so many months, and then release a slow, buggy alpha NT driver lost them a lot of respect.

In a nut shell, that is why they need to release a good, fast Windows 2000 driver. Once they start to delay on this, who knows how long we will be waiting.

Paul

[LAMFDTK]

I just got a Retail copy (full-version) in the Mail today! I won it on Microsoft.com.
Any one want it ? (300.00 sealed)

[Galvin]

I remember that as well. It wasn't pleasent. I remember some person going by weird names or what not who was correct everytime saying that the ICD won't be out till the next year, and everyone was like how do you know and stuff. In the end this person was right, but it sure anger a lot of people

[PaulS]

LAMFDTK, You dog!

Paul