G800 or whatever

[Himself]

Pertti,

I guess you read newspapers from across the room as well.

[Liquid Snake]

1280x1024 is not a 4:3 resolution, which is why it looks strange. I run 1280x960. Text is very readable. My monitor only goes to 1600x1200. Text is still readable at that resolution (although my vision isn't the greatest, so I have a bit of trouble). If you wear glasses, take them off to see what 2D on a nVidia card looks like

[This message has been edited by Liquid Snake (edited 14 October 2000).]

[cerb]

A friend of mine kept asking why I use 1280x1024. He uses 1280x960 cause he messes around with Photoshop a fair bit and can notice that things are out of proportion a little. I use it as well and he was pointing out the fact that 1280x1024 is not a 4:3 res.

With the new tweak utility I've now allowed my drivers to use this res and have it at 85Hz. Strange thing is my monitor tells me it's 1280x1024.

Cerb

[cerb]

I'll have to try that out sometime... see how small the font is. 1600x1200 is just too small...

Cerb

[Jorden]

I guess Pertti has a magnifying front before his monitor? What monitor can do that resolutions at 15" ?

[Pertti]

Quite a lot of them actually, but you need to use the Matrox monitor profiles to enable them.

I have always hated the way MS keeps wasting the working space, even with the default small fonts. I have never had any use for the big fonts, let alone trying the accessibility, or several other options to make everything even bigger.

The way they are going (due to BG having problems with his eyes ), means that within a few years we need to have 50" monitors just to see couple of lines of text in Word

I guess the only thing MS wants us to see on our monitors, is one BIG OK Button

No Magnifying classes here, just Matrox display adapters

[Himself]

I can relate to the MS thing, I wrote my own shell to get rid of explorer windows.

[atko]

There are three "big" name in the bussines video card market: S3, ATI, Matrox. Matrox is not a big company in the business market (they have a market share of 5 to 10% and ATI has 30%, S3 has 30+%), but they are the company who sells quality products.
You are arguing about the drivers and support of Matrox. Yes it could be better, but ATI has got much worse and S3 much more worse driver support.
NVIDIA products very powerful chips but these chips are ill... Very ill. I think you've heard about the problem of memory bandwith.
I was lucky to test an ATI Radeon 64DDR card in the last month. It is not a bad card, but it doesn't worth the money. Radeon is a damn fast chip, but I don't need that power, because I think that 1024x768x32 at 50FPS is perfect for EVERY game and a GeFroce SRD is able to do this... Unfortunately the 50% of new features of Radeon is not supported by the well known APIs. Do you remeber the G400? Matrox did his best to made the developers to support the new features of that card... What do NVIDIA and ATI do? Nothing. They only want to sell their products to the consumers, but they don't do anything to push the developers to the right direction... After a year of Matrox G400's debut a lot of title supported it's features. After a year of the GeFroce's debut can anybody name a game which support T&L??? GeForce's production will be stopped in a month so it is an old product but nobody supports it's revolutionary feature. The main problem that games are still fill-rate limited. My ghz system is able to do the geometry, but my video card can't push out enough pixels... This is the ONLY thing why I must to buy a new card.
This is the problem, and this is why Matrox doesn't announce G800 (or whatever), because there is nothing which can support its features. Maybe after the releasing of DX8...

[WMTJ]

Originally posted by Greebe:
WMTJ, you can't see the forest from the trees mon. Please read other posts here concerning nVidia, ok

This is not a flame, please don't take it as such.

Cheers

What?! Forest? Trees? All I'm saying is that Nvidia has the big bucks for R&D and they can't even get 1.8Gpixel outta one chip right now! Matrox has be running software simulations of their chip from last year, you know when 480Mpixels(NV10) was the standard! Yea that time of year. Sure they can adjust for the projected market climate, but how much(they need big money). Before one confirmed peice X-Box information was known to us.Think about it fall 2001 release looks like it would correlate with uh NV25 release. Man Nvidia gonna kick da ass of the comp. with the NV20!.Besides I don't really think Matrox wants to go to the high end gamers market. The air is too thin up there!
Sorry for the rant, but I think 1.8Gtexels and maybe lower from one chip would be closer to realtiy than anything else. Besides Matrox is too efficent to waste all that fill rate w/o a really major bandwidth saving approach. All this is just hiperbably(I can count not spell!) and we should take it all as such until something offical is announced .

WMTJ


[This message has been edited by WMTJ (edited 14 October 2000).]

[Surfwienix]

the best res for 19" is 1440 x 1080 !!!

[Dogbert]

Guys,

While we're discussing things here, nothing changes on the Matrox front while all the others are moving forward.
We heard about something between matrox and SNK, meanwhile nVIDIA released the GeForce. Heard about Matrox and AMIGA, VSA 100 is out.
RT2000 (why should I care ?) GeForce 2 , Radeon etc. The answer a-la matrox: G450 (nice joke). nVIDIA will show us a GeFORCE 3, ATi will show us a Radeon MAXX and Radeon 2, 3dfx will launch the Voodoo 6000 and matrox...?
While matrox gives us roumors and hardware we won't use on out home PC, the competition is racing forward.
In a few months we'll still be here talking about the great picture quality of the G800 which will be just 5% better than the competition at 40% the frame rate.
To all those who like protecting he G450, I saw no new innovation in the G450. By the time the G800 will be out, it'll be low tech/old news .
Seems matrox is going the same way Be Inc is going.

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

[Greebe]

Do you feel better now? Not that you're right, but the incompleteness of your rant leaves alot to be desired.

I've written before to others making such broad based claims and yet here we are again rehashing the senerio.... fact, NVIDIA stole employees from Matrox, this included technology. Thus things have slowed down a tad. It is not a long term concern and the products should be done shortly. BTW, the G450 didn't flop, it hit their target market squarely.

If you want to rant at least have your facts straight. Please

[Damien Green]

When it comes to video cards, a lot of people seem to be shouting: Speed, Speed, SPEED!!! They only seem concerned with how many polygons or pixels a video card can push, with aspects such as quality taking second place.

I can't really see why, a Geforce card may be the fastest out there, but who cares! After all how much difference does it make if Quake runs at 180+ FPS rather than 80-100? I shouldn't think it makes too much difference. Even on a G400, Quake III is very very payable, even at resolution of 1024 x 768 in 32 bit colour, and damn smoothe to boot.

I read in a British Computer magazine just the other day about the experiences of someone at a computer show where a number of different computers with graphics cards including the Matrox G400 Max and Geforce 2 cards were running Quake 3 etc. The comment that was made was how much better the image quality on the Matrox cards was, how the colours were more vibrant, less washed out and with more contrast. More surprisingly, despite the fact that the Geforce cards ran faster, they suffered from far more gameplay stutters than the Matrox cards, with the Matrox G400 giving the most consistent performance levels.

The G800 will no doubt be announced soon, it will probably perform around twice the speed of a G400. I think that's plenty, certainly for me anyway. On a G400, games are already playable. On a G800 they will be even more playable - so what's the big deal. Matrox may no be as fast as Nvidia, but the drivers will no doubt be far more stable (anyone else had detonator nightmares?) and hell, it will all look a lot better.

[Dogbert]

I don't know about you, but I'v been playing Carmageddon TDR 2000 and I get real low framerates. It's barely playable.
speaking of drivers, I guess you haven't been through the G200 nightmare or the OpenGL nightmare. I'm using matrox for too many years to be told I'm just ranting. I know too many video cards for too many years. The 2D of the G100 is more than enough for my needs, the picture quality of the G200 is everything I need. Now I need some more brandwith for hi-res speed. I love picture quality, but in motion picture, not in a slide show.

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

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Dogbert:
... I guess you haven't been through the G200 nightmare or the OpenGL nightmare. I'm using matrox for too many years to be told I'm just ranting ...

Well, most of us participated actively in that fiasco, but if you'd be honest and the above is true, you must have noticed the complete turnaround that Matrox did right after the disapointing G200-ICD issue ...

Don't get me wrong, we didn't forget it, but we did forgive them since they are now really focussing on their customer's demands ... heck, they even set up their own tech-support forum.