G400 Driver Rant (Depressing)

[tufka dZeus]

maybe there is some powerdesk verion, or a embedded windows driver that works with the euphoria screensaver?

In win2k I don't get it to work anyway... I've tried 5.10 and 5.11 (and I am sure Gurm tried 5.01, 5.03, 5.04 and 5.06 too ;-)

[Randy Simons]

I've also tried the euphoria on my G200 PD 5.06 in W2k, I get flashing stipes, in which the image seems good. But it's not usuabable with those flashes. Perhaps a (double) buffer problem?
Once my system froze. (this should never ever happen even with faulty OpenGL code, IMO)

I've tried setting the OpenGL settings to "accurate" but the problem remains.

Come to think of it, I'll try some other settings now. I let you now when they are successful.

However, system freezes are not acceptable in my book, so I can safely say those OpenGL drivers are NOT what they should be (they never have been, for the G200, grr)

{edit}
Well, it now works. Half of the time. I've forced page flipping on using the Matrox tweak util, I do get to see the correct display one frame, the next frame is black, etc.

To me, this doesn't look like a hardware problem. But perhaps for Q3Radiant en SMP things are different.
{/edit}



[This message has been edited by Randy Simons (edited 03 August 2000).]

[Randy Simons]

The game Xtom3D also suffers from OpenGL bugs. In the first level, some vertical planes with alphablending are used to create a fog-effect, but it goes wrong on the G200. (software OpenGL looks good)

OpenGL quality is at accurate.

(dZeus: als je het wilt testen op de G400, ik heb de CD van het spel wel, drop maar een Hermes bericht (Gerald weet er alles van ;-) , of anders ICQ)

[Rob M.]

The reason why I suspect a different silicon revision is that the BSODs that I get look suspiciously like hardware failures.. You can program around things like that, but you can also revise the hardware...

Stil, please download powerstrip and report your silicon revision.. I'm really interested to see if my theory is right

[tufka dZeus]

xtom3d doesn't exhibit any alpha-blending problems on my G400, however, it does suffer a lot from the famous fade-modes bug....

if anyone else wants to try, you can download the xtom3d demo from 3Dfiles.com


[This message has been edited by tufka dZeus (edited 03 August 2000).]

[Himself]

I think Matrox has been taken over by Amiga management. That is, silience and no progress for ages, then a slightly faster model out too late for it to matter, followed by more silence and lack of progress. The driver development could be compared to AmigaOS development as well, minor updates every few years..

The dinosaurs over at Matrox are going to have to die off, methinks, the status quo isn't going to work.

[tufka dZeus]

just checked, PowerStrip reports I have a revision 03h G400

[Gurm]

Notice RDR hasn't responded since we called his bluff?

RDR: post your silicon revision for us.

- Gurm

------------------
Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Brian R.]

I'm not sure if this is relevant or not (cause I'm not sure if you guys are talking about Win2K or any OS in general), but in my MAX computer (Win98SE) euphoria runs fine. My G400 silicon is 03h.

Just for the sake of argument, I changed cards and installed a new MAX (silicon 04h). It runs euphoria fine in Win98SE also.

[This message has been edited by Brian R. (edited 03 August 2000).]

[Randy Simons]

You might have a point there The "complainers" all use W2K, if you say Euphoria works fine in win98, the same might be true for rdr.
The problems I have with Euphoria are minor (with some tweaking of the Matrox util).

Besides, what I've seen from Euphoria, it doesn't look *that* complicated. Some textures and some alphablending.

Anyway, I don't have win98 anymore (well, only a virtual machine, but that one has no G200 "hardware") so I can't test things. Perhaps Gurm can have a look?

[rdr]

Yes, I am running Win98. Sorry... I didn't realize we were only talking about the Win2k drivers!

[Brian R.]

Yeah, I had a hunch that you guys were only talking about W2K. Unfortunately, there is no defacto standard Windows at this time. It is very easy to generalize unintentionally. Many people are dual booting Win98 and Win2K. That is a problem for us readers when they start talking about hardware incompatibilities or driver problems. I don't assume they are only talking about one OS when they make a statement like -G400 doesn't run OGl at all - or something like that. Unless they quote their system specs or OS, it can be misleading. In addition, they may be talking about prior experiences with an older OS in addition to their current one. In this land of many OSs, I am easily confused.

[This message has been edited by Brian R. (edited 04 August 2000).]

[Joel]

This is from the readme file.

"Place the .scr file in your Windows\system
directory (Win95/98) or Winnt\system32 directory (WinNT)."

Doesn't say anything about Win2K and most of us know that there is enough difference between WinNT and Win2K to know that not everything that works under WinNT or for that matter Win98 will work fine under Win2K.

Joel

[Brian R.]

Not to start a brawl here or anything, but Euphoria runs very well under Win2K in my Geforce GTS system (not a W2K vs NT4 issue).

[This message has been edited by Brian R. (edited 04 August 2000).]

[Rob M.]

Ok, I don't know about euphoria, but my q3radiant certainly has issues under both win98 and win2k. There's two issues: Textures go missing when near light entities, and intermittant crashing (taking the entire OS with it in win98), especially while viewing curves in the 3d view.