G450 and MX twinview review

[Ali]

Since nothing is happening on the Matrox front (where is Ants G450 review, and why has nobody overclocked their G450 yet?) I thought I would post this.
http://www.gamepc.com/reviews/hardwa...susmxtv&page=1

It gets into the differences between DualHead and TwinView a little.

Ali

[cerb]

Just reading this review, and one thing I found bothered me a little and that was statements such as this :

There are also a host of other options in Matrox's Powerdesk setup, which make this a better DualHead solution, for "business-type" work anyways. Of course, this is to be expected, as this is Matrox's second generation multi monitor card.

Yeah, the G450 is Matrox's second generation multi monitor card, but the software implementation of DualHead is the same as it was for the G400. The technology may have improved from a hardware point of view (ie, faster secondary ramdac, etc) but there was no functionality added to the software.

The screenshots they showed of the DualHead tab in the Advanced setting are still exactly what I saw when I first got my G400 DH, and yet they make it sound as though the functionality of the first-generation drivers seen on the G400 were perhaps as limited as nVidia's are now.

From a software functionality point of view, I feel the G450 is no better as a business solution than the G400 was. The G450 wins by a nose (due to the new hardware specs), but the MX is quite a few lengths behind (in software and most likely in hardware, too).

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Cerb

[Snake-Eyes]

Agreed, Cerb. I had the exact same thought when I read that too. I looked for a quick- comment on this article page, but didn't see anything. Good thing, for them.

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Ace

[Snake-Eyes]

Agreed, Cerb. I had the exact same thought when I read that too. I looked for a quick- comment on this article page, but didn't see anything. Good thing, for them.

------------------
Ace

[cerb]

Yeah, I thought about tracking down an e-mail address on the website and mentioning my thoughts to them, but I'm at work so didn't want to take too long (although I ended up posting a lengthy reply here, didn't I. :-P )

Cerb

[Ali]

Broken link? Typos? Suggestions? webmaster_at_gamepc.com

I cant be bothered myself, and its no big deal. Somebody might want to put them straight though.

I put that _at_ in there so no Email bots will log their address and spam them (had that happen to me, and it SUCKS)!

Ali

[Stringy]

on the O/C'ing note, I remember reading someone who O/C'ed their sample, but didn't get very far...
they said they didn't even reach Max clock rates... when Matrox was asked they said that the Internal RAMDAC and TVout might be reasons why higher clock rates aren't very applicable...

though I have no idea if he tried to actively cook it or not....


Craig

[Joel]

You know, I just don't get it. Whenever we see a review like this involving a Matrox card they usually only use 3DMark2000, which we know is bias toward the nVidia cards, or Quake III, which we know the Matrox card will be slower because of it's ICD. Why don't they ever do any D3D comparsions? Why don't they actually post screen shots to show us the image quality difference? Makes you wonder.

Joel

[DGhost]

Because then maybe there would be a demand for them!

Anyways, i'm not a fan of GamePC. several good products they have tried and failed to get working, mostly as a result of their stupidity. Especially when other people have good luck w/ it, they always say, 'its crappy'. Even when the boards they got were preproduction engineering samples that got accidentally leaked. oh well.

Working at a computer store, we evidentally had Matrox cards for sale a while ago. No one bought them tho - either too pricy or too unknown. i dunno why - they have always been a name for me to recognize.

-Luke

[swr]

<BLOCKQUOTE>
Why don't they actually post screen shots to show us the image quality difference?
</BLOCKQUOTE></P>

I hope you're not suggesting that people use screenshots to compare RAMDAC output quality. Think about it for a moment. </P>

Sure you can compare the "correctness" of 3D rendering, but that's only half of the story.</P>

[paulcs]

For the most part, I thought it was pretty balanced and that he liked the G450. He covered and took a stand on 2D performance without trying to quantify it with a meaningless 2D benchmark. He said, flat out and without reservation, that the 2D output of the G450 was superior, particularly at high resolutions.

In my opinion, benchmarking Direct3D performance is just a minefield of problems. 3DMark 2000 is the standby, but many reviewers and users are very suspicious of it. Are the numbers valid? Does it measure anything other than 3DMark 2000 performance? It's hard to say, and it does seem to favor NVIDIA boards, from the TNT2 to the GeForce2 GTS, by a fairly wide margin over same generation boards from every other manufacturer.

UT has its problems as well. The game itself appears to have CPU-related bottlenecks. It scales poorly from resolution to resolution and bitdepth to bitdepth and sometimes from board to board. Ironically, the GeForce2 seems to put up some really lackluster UTBench numbers.

DMZG is heavily optimized for NVIDIA products and Expendable is getting old. I just started messing with the Evolva timedemo, so I haven't had a chance to really shape an informed opinion. I'm a little suspicious of it simply because it's a D3D benchmark.

I believe the most valid and reliable benchmarks are OpenGL tests, and this plays right into NVIDIA's hand. It's what they're good at. It's very frustrating.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[paulcs]

I'm not an expert on Dual Head by any stretch of the imagination. However, I've also noticed that many sites have implied or stated that Matrox's software implementation of Dual Head has somehow "evolved," that Matrox has added features in drivers over time, and that's why the Dual Head implementation of the G450 is more sophisticated than the MX.

I suspect many sites are looking at the feature, in depth, for the very first time. Matrox seems to have sent the G450 to every gaming site on the planet and sent it to Ant late. Certain assumptions about Dual Head were made early on in the G450's review cycle, others picked up on them, and a myth begins to circulate. It's why, I think, Matrox ought to get the board to Ant first (as opposed to last). Reviewers read each others work, and Ant has some authority when it comes to Matrox products.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net