G400 Max, have we seen all it can do?

[skeoch]

I recently attended a LAN game, which I organised. There where 20 people in attendance. The PC there ranged from P2's with Voodoo2 cards, right up to P3 733 with Geforce 2GTS. What I noticed was the G400MAX is really a very good card.

You never get a better chance to compare against the competition, and thankfully most people there didnt try and convince you their's was best.

To summarise, the colours on the Matrox where more contrasting (clearly), and the 3d game performance was about the same. The geforce user's even commented that it seemed more consistant (lower on the whole but consistant all the same) while the geforce seemed to race most of the time with some noticable stutters.

Back to the question, do you think there will any more gains in future driver releases, or will it just be fixes?

background info:
we were playing Halflife Counterstrike, and most people were playing 1024x768 16 bit

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P3 700Mhz cB0 stepping, G400MAX,Abit BE6-2 RV Bios,Quantum KX 7200 13Gig,256Mb 100SDram,Asuscom ISDN,SCSI 100Mb zip int,SB Live Value,Tosh 6702, HP 9110i.

[Alec]

Well, I´d like to see some more improvements, even though I´m more then happy with Matrox drivers, as they are ROCK-SOLID:



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I never sign without reading the small print first.

[skeoch]

It would be nice to get maybe a 10% increase, unrealistic but nice.

It would be nice to have Tracey Lords hoover my appendage, unrealistic but nice.

[Gurm]

This is a tough one. I'm tempted to say that there will be only minor speed increases from here on out. However, from the 5.40 drivers to the 6.04 drivers some people gained 10fps, which is a 20% increase!

Don't go thinking we're ever going to see 60fps though, that's just being unrealistic. But another few fps here and there isn't an unrealistic expectation at all.

Most of us have been (and still are) willing to accept that we will never have stellar fps, but we will always have the highest quality graphics.

And it doesn't hurt that our 30fps is a consistent 30fps - which I'll take any day over 60fps which drops to 10fps sometimes.

- Gurm

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

[skeoch]

Ok this is probably a really stupid suggestion, made on a large assumption, but I was day dreaming and it seemed good.

I belive the G400 chip itself is completely programmable, would it be completely beyond the realms of possibility to reprogramme the chip to use tile based rendering which I understand is where the next gen cards are going to get round bandwidth problems.

Feel free to pick apart that idea.

[Marco]

With tgl the speed increasement was terribel. Something about 60% better than before. Now I'm gettin 170 FPS in Q3Arena on my System. That's enough I mean. Didn't need any increasement need the G800 !

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Celeron FCPGA 566@850
Asus P2B, G400 DH 4A 32MB SG-Ram oc@144\192 128 MB Cas2 PC100

[skeoch]

forgive me did you say you get 170 fps in quake3? what on earth settings do you use?

[SteveC]

8 pixels by 4 with 3 colours.

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[DuRaNgO]

most matrox users run in 32bit
jim

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P3-700e @ 1052! Check it here!
Abit BE6-2
TwinMos 256mb pc-133
G400 32mb DH
Maxtor 15.3gb 7,200rpm
SB Live!
Toshiba 12x DVD
Iomega 650cd burner
Winblows 98se & DX7
and 384k DSL!

[Rags]

I thought the Q3 Demo Test had a broken timerefresh in it, well anyway...

[Liquid Snake]

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what's TCL?

[cerb]

I have messed around at times and tweaked my q3a config to the point where it will hit 200fps (these are all scores on the instantaneous frame counter) in a corner, around 100-120 in corridors, and ranging between 40-70 in melee's in open areas.

What I aim for is to get rid of those times of 40fps. Still, 40fps minimum is not bad.

In timedemos at 800x600 (32bit, I think - it doesn't make a lot of difference anyway) I got an average of 55 on demo002

On q3dm13 I'm at 100+fps about 60% of the time. Not too shabby and it'll do me till the G800. :-)

Cerb

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Athlon 700
ASUS K7V
192Mb RAM
32Mb G400 DH (Win2k driver ver 5.14)
SBLive! Value
26.4GB Total HDD
Actima 8xDVD
LG 32x4x4x CD-RW
CTX VL950T 19"

Purrin' like a kitten.

[Dogbert]

There is a known problem with the Voodoo 3 cards, they don't do all the visual effects in Q3. This gives them a fps edge in favour of less visual effects so a comparison with a Voodoo 3 isn't fair.
For the question, yes, new drivers MIGHT give you a few more frames (2-3%) but we're already at the end of the G400 lifecycle and I'm sure matrox did their best to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of it if only because it affects sales.

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I like to con people, but I also like to insult them. What if I could combine the two, I would call it - Consult !

[skeoch]

Himself, you make you point clearly, but I would argue that the Turbo Gl addition was targeted solely at gamers/tweakers.

Also I prefer Matrox's steady progression to Nvidia's experimention any day.

[This message has been edited by skeoch (edited 18 October 2000).]