TwinView (NVIDIA) vs. DualHead (Matrox)

[qball]

"Tell that to his agent (the same agent that TOM has and Sharky) that helped him clear over 6 million last year..."

Yeah, well it isn't that surprising seeing as that when you load his front page, you load... *goes and counts them* 7 advertizements. Hannibal's term "banner loading bitches" comes to mind.

-Q

[CrazyBee]

MATROX IS NOT THE FIRST CARD to have dual monitor support.

There are the E&S series of cards which have dual monitor capability, I believe VooDoo has a dual monitor PCI card (that sucks ass) from awhile ago that is used in business apps, and, there is also Appian Graphics and 3D Labs that also has dual monitor support.

It's been around for AWHILE now. Matrox just had the insight to make a dual monitor card that was actually affordable. I believe a dual monitor card that was PCI and had 8mb RAM was something on the order of several hundred dollars. Then Matrox came along.

They made a card that was decent for games, had many features, periodic driver updates, and did not cost an arm and a leg to buy.

Now, nVidia has jumped in the game just like Matrox did last year. You whiney geek people mak it sound like it was all Matrox behind this concept. Nope.

Personally, I am GLAD there is competition now in the dual monitor consumer level arena. Maybe this will make them correctly state their products specs, have decent drivers from the get-go, and, actually ship their cards out instead of hoarding them for several months like last year.

I still love my G400 and I won't trade it for anything. But, competition is usually a good thing.

[Kruzin]

"MATROX IS NOT THE FIRST CARD to have dual monitor support."

No, but Matrox was the first to have DualHEAD support. There is a key difference there. G200 has had multi-monitor versions (2 or 4 monitor) for some time, but it's not the same thing.

Other cards (up until this newest Nvidia) that do multi-monitors do it by building 2 or more video cards on one board. Multiple graphics chips, one for each display.

G400 was the first to output to 2 monitors from a single chip. This is probably some of the technology that Nvidia has "aquired" from their questionably employed ex-Matrox brains.

Yea...aint competition great when you have to lie, cheat and steal to compete. I spit on Nvidia and their below-the-belt business dealings...

[This message has been edited by Kruzin (edited 18 July 2000).]

[Ashley]

"DualHead" was coined by Rendition, not Matrox, and Rendition complained a lot about this at the time, but was soon after swallowed up by Micron, and the "borrowing" was forgotten.

Technically, the G400 chip cannot support two monitors - it requires a second chip to do that (the Maven). The S3 ViRGE/GX2 did the same long before that.

The G450 really looks to be the first production chip to support two monitors w/o external support, and comes much closer to Rendition's original DualHead in the RRedline than the G400.

[CrazyBee]

A single chip doesn't mean anything.

I don't know the specifics of the G400 chip or the G450. But, they could have simply put two graphics adapters on one die.

But, once again. The whole concept behind dual monitor support is far from new. Matrox just made it economoical.

True that stealing designs from another company is bad. But, in reality, it would have only been a matter of time before a very similar product came out.

Also, WHEN exactly did the ex-Matrox people leave? It had to be a considerable time ago in order for them to be able to adapt to the GeForce chip and then come up with TwinView on paper. Then prototypes. Then drivers. Then production runs. Etc.

Besides, having two of anything on a single chip die, and pipelined, is nothing new.

[rubank]

In order to enlighten you ignorants, I tried a lengthy comment here, but the server spit it out. So I´ll be brief:
More than a year ago, SIS announced their dual-head solution.
Go <a href="http://www.sis.com.tw">there<a/> and read all about it.

rubank