I've been seduced!

[Himself]

Hey Joel, where did you get my old TNT 1 from?

Anyway, hands up from all those people who have tried a Radeon? BTW, nobody should buy a GeForce 2 GTS, I have a riva 128 and a TNT 1 and they both sucked, the drivers were crap and the company lies like a rug.

Rags,

Yes, I agree this thread is off topic, it belongs in general hardware.

[paulcs]

Livius, I was refering only to the retail market. (I should have been clearer about this. Sorry.) 3dfx has absolutely dominated retail videocard sales since the Voodoo3, at one point holding three of the top 5 slots (including, I believe, number 1 and 2) and five of the top 10. NVIDIA doesn't sell videocards, and there lies the confusion. 3dfx, in the retail market, competes against Guillemot, Creative, and Elsa, as well as Matrox and ATI. In a broader sense, they compete with NVIDIA, and I'm sure NVIDIA is cleaning their clock, but in the retail market, they compete with other videocard manufacturers.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[This message has been edited by paulcs (edited 03 September 2000).]

[paulcs]

Rob, given that this is the Matrox Hardware Forum, one could easily argue that your posts are the only ones on topic.

Were the boards you had problems with all manufactured in the same place (Ireland, Thailand, Canada, China, etc.)? I still think there's a bad batch out there. I had the same thought Joel did. The errors you described indicate that the boards are running out of spec or that the chips are bad and can't run properly in spec.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[dZeus]

the performance difference between 2x and 4x AGP texturing speed is indeed questionable, and the difference on the G400 with 1x and 2x isn't even that big.

About these people having problems with their G400 running at 2x AGP: I still can't believe the G400 in general is causing this, since I know quite a lot of people with a G400, and each of those runs at 2x AGP stable.

The G400 is picky about line noise on the AGP bus, so everything from a low quality motherboard, powersupply, RAM, or maybe even line noise on the electric grid in your neighbourhood could cause this.

If you test the G400s with a quality brand RAM on a Asus P3B-F, with a 'Athlon recommended' PSU, connected to a UPS, then I am willing to believe your G400 are faulty if they only run at 1x.

[LAMFDTK]

nobody should buy a GeForce 2 GTS...Nobody should Vote for AL Gore....

[Livius]

paulcs, the fact that 3dfx has dominated the retail market for the past 18 months is, as you notice yourself, of little relevance after all in terms of who sells the most chips. Witness the serious problems 3dfx has right now.

[paulcs]

I was refering to boards, someone misunderstood, and I clarified. I didn't think the thread had anything to do with who has the most chips in circulation. None of the big consumer level graphics companies are going to compete with NVIDIA in terms of how many chips are in circulation. Not for a while at least. Nobody else has their business model.

I can't even remember why I first brought it up.


Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[paulcs]

By the way, Livius. I think I misinterpreted something you posted earlier in the thread and responded sarcastically. I'd like to appologize. I thought you were referring to the people on this forum not being able to properly install a videocard, and that might be why they had so many problems with ATI boards in the past. Now I realize you were referring to something else.

Again, I'm sorry.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[This message has been edited by paulcs (edited 05 September 2000).]

[Dyre]

I gave ATi a chance with the MAXX... I waited around for it to do WELL. Then, like every ATi product before it, it failed. Mainly based on driver problems and lack of support. Im not giving the Radeon a chance. When it was first annouced i started laughing... they promised so much then, and as of yet have failed to deliver. Has there even been a driver update yet? Get back to me in a couple months, if you have new drivers (that accually FIX anything) ill be suprised.

ATi = hahahhaahhahah
Power VR (Kyro) = hahhahahahah

ok, im done trolling./

[Humus]

Dyre:
I've seen a couple of driver updates coming already, I don't think that's a prob.

And why are you laughing at Kyro?? It's the smartest graphics hw that exists, but it's just too low clocked. It has raw power like a TNT or TNT2 but still performs like a GF.
The Radeon uses some of the concepts in the Kyro too, that's why it performs so well.

Both these cards has a much more elegant approach, no brute force approach. That's why I think they are interesting.

[Narayan]

You wanna see just how BAD ATi drivers can be? Just head for this article:

http://www.shybe.com/Bugs/ATI_Wonder/index.htm



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Currently powered by:
P3 600EB@700, Matrox G400 32MB DH, QDI Advance 9, 128MB PC133 Goldstar

[paulcs]

I had a good time with the ATI bug page.

I should put this in historical context. The site linked below is from late 1998 and well into the notorious OpenGL Debacle. This is not intended as a slight on Matrox. It's just a little bit of nostaglia.
http://www.kensai.com/personal/g200/

As unhappy as some people are with the G450's specs, this is nothing compared some of the stuff Matrox has gone through in the past.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Hunsow]

The ATI bug page is pretty scary, but wait until you visit the ATI help page.

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[Himself]

I seem to recall a few sets of G400 drivers and 3KMark2000 with some nice effects as well. The helicopter scene was nuclear and the multitexturing test was a series of lines being overdrawn.

BTW, images like you see in the examples above look more like hardware problems than driver problems.

[Livius]

Well, I've had a similar experience with an ATI TV Tuner card (TV Wonder something). The most amazing stuff was that drivers wouldn't install - both the automatic Setup program and the Device Manager option kept on faling (or rather succeeded in producing an error message). I tried the damn card on 3 machines with the same result. I ended up with a poor Pinnacle/MIRO tuner, which I re-sold a few weeks later.