Matrox Drivers 5.41+ beta ICD are still the best!~

[Rob M.]

Also note it was the 5.41 that was the last PD5 driver that worked for most via owners. The 5.52 had an opengl ICD that would crash in quake3 on startup.

[Indiana]

One caveat: The machine I tested this on had an Asus KM7 board, that uses the AMD751 chip an not the VIA one. So I can't tell if the BetaICD will work on VIA based machines.

Another reason to retest this against the actual release ICD on my Duron machine (with Abit KT7 -> VIA KT133 chipset).

[This message has been edited by Indiana (edited 17 November 2000).]

[Darin]

Several months ago, I played with a few different ICDs, and also liked the 5.41 set the best (read down in this thread). I had found that the 5.13 were actually a little faster, but they had some visual glitches that weren't present in the 5.41 drivers. At least in my testing, it did seem like they actually got slower as they got newer, although the newest ones at the time I did this was the 6.01 betas. I haven't compared with the newest ones, and can't really compare apples to apples anymore, because I've replaced my G400 with an AIW Radeon, and moved the G400 to a server running Win2k (using Win98 on my workstation). I don't even have Q3 loaded on the server. Since so many people had complained about Win2k compatability, I am using the latest drivers in that machine assuming they would be the most stable since FPS isn't really important now.

[This message has been edited by Darin (edited 17 November 2000).]

[Casper99]

Just wondering, for those that have used the beta ICD what is the date of yours?....mine is "Wednesday, September 15, 1999 11:52:48 AM"

If yours is different please send me a copy and if no one has mine i can send it to you!

Once again i have found this ICD to be better than any other out there including the Turbo GL, and have notice nothing for problems with it when playing Quake 2-3 , or Tribes, or any other Open Gl application or game, although i havent tried all the OpenGl games out there but i beleieve its a real testament to this driver when i can play Tribes flawlessly with the 4.51 Powerdesk and replacing its Open Gl with the above mentioned beta ICD!.....and the beauty of it is that you can still use the Tweak utility to overclock your card and squeeze even more juice out of this card!........and to think i was one of the people who used to cry foul with my G200 and no Open Gl ICD...hehehehe sorry Matrox!

I wonder if Matrox will look into this combination and expand upon it as it appears to work with everything quite nicely!

cheers!

[2Whyzzi]

G400 5.41 drivers did absolutely nothing for Super7 VIA chipset owners. I was so disgusted with the performance of the 5.30+TurboGL1.0 on my FIC 503+ board, I went out and spent the ($79 canadian, eh) on a 16Meg Savage4. Although that video card didn't really work on the outset, once I updated the Savage's BIOS and downloaded some tweak drivers, woohooo way better performance and extremely good visual quality. (this, fortunately, was at the time when Savage4 drivers were mature enough to actually be useful).

Admittedly the card 2D isn't great, but I get good 3d performance and visual quality, with the added bonus of kick ass framerates in UT using the METAL API. Besides, this put the G400 somewhere where it could really show off - in my Celery BX.

Anyway, just for the heck of it... I'll bite and take your challenge - I'll re-aquire the 5.41PowerDesk and the GL400Beta, run Q3A and Soldier of Fortune, maybe even Matrox's own overclocking utility (I think I had managed 117% on my vanilla G400 32meg before switching to PowerDesk 6.xx) and report back to this thread on the GAMING aspects of this combination.

OH - and if anyone is actually interested in a Savage4 - Stay away from ALL 16meg versions - your shooting yourself in the foot if you want to run 32bit colour. I learned that lesson the hard way...

------------------
Abit BH6 r1.01
Celeron2-566 o/c to 850MHz+Slotket!!! 1.8v
256 Megs PC-133 Cas3
Matrox G400 SH OEM (not oc'd) rev=03h
Diamond Monster Sound MX400

[This message has been edited by 2Whyzzi (edited 17 November 2000).]

[Casper99]

2Whyzzi,

YGM
I didnt send the 5.41 drivers as it is almost 5 megs and im not sure of your email limitations?....You can download them from Matrox site!

cheers!

[Pace]

I can see why Gurm has left this thread hehe

Don't suppose I need to reply either...DOH!

Paul.

[Casper99]

Pace,

Yeah i can see why too!....ignorance isnt bliss nor is arrogance.

DOH!

[Rags]

Gurm is correct. That beta ICD is no good for a few applications, and there are some D3D probs in the 5.41 drivers. If this combo works for you, then great, but they don't work out for some others.

Rags

[Admiral]

For me the TurboGL is still the best.
No more visual problems with the latest ICD but it's a bit slower and it takes longer to load in Quake 3. I've used TGL with Quake 3 since it got out and still use it.
Only problem with TGL is that I can't see the movies when combined with PD6.*(black screen with sound still playing). While in Quake 3 this isn't a problem in STV it's rather annoying.
An updated TGL would be nice, but it seems they dumped it for the ICD.

So, there you go, there's people for whom the latest ICD works best, other people use mixed drivers and others TurboGL.

[2Whyzzi]

Originally posted by Admiral:
Only problem with TGL is that I can't see the movies when combined with PD6.*

What? You actually have the TurboGL working PowerDesk 6? When I tried GL games refused to initialize. Tell us your method and I'll attempt to include it in my benchmarking...

Any benchmarking tools would somelike to point out that are actually any good?

Thnx

[xortam]

I run TurboGL w/ PD6.14 (haven't tried the new drivers yet). I get higher FPS ratings in the Q3A benchmarks (before the 1.25 patch) when I run 800x600 on a PIII-450. Wish I had some Q3A 1.25 demos so I could benchmark before updating drivers and adding new memory.

[Admiral]

I don't have a special method it just worked.
When the beta 6.0 drivers came out the movie problem showed up. It also worked with beta 6.01, WHQL 6.04 and latest 6.1.

In Quake3 1.25y, 800x600x32, geometric detail on high, texture detail on high, bilinear filtering I get 54.* fps in timedemo 000 and 52.* in timedemo 001, 002 won't work.
With Quake3 1.17, same details, I get 49.* in timedemo 1.
---------------
MSI 6163 Pro, P3E 650@900, 128 ram, G400 vanila@154/205

[This message has been edited by Admiral (edited 18 November 2000).]

[Indiana]

Something to mention: the beta ICD Casper is talking about is NOT the same as the one delivered with PD5.41, it's an even older version.

I just retested this thing on my Duron/ABitKT7-RAID, the G400/16MB ran at 164MHZ Core and 205MHz Memory-clock.

<IMG SRC="http://www.indiana.claranet.de/TirtaPD6-5_41.gif" BORDER=0>

This apparently doesn't give good scores to Matrox Win2k support, the PD6 OGL also looks very weak...
Not much difference between 5.41 OGL and the old Beta on the KT133, however.

Under Q-III the Beta OGL had some problems on the KT133, resulting in low scores (esp. at higher resolutions) that were not apparent on the AMD751.
I got the following scores:

Q-III, HQ (800x600x32, trilinear), demo001
PD5.41+BetaOGL: 40.7fps
PD5.41+includedOGL: 49.8fps
PD6.10+includedOGL: 49.1fps

Q-III HQ (1024x768x32, trilinear), demo001
PD5.41+BetaOGL: 20.3fps
PD5.41+includedOGL: 31.8fps
PD6.10+includedOGL: 33.9fps

At least one score where PD6 was faster. Matrox optimizing drivers for Q-III like NVidia is doing?!?

As a conclusion the ICD delivered with 5.41 gave the best results overall on the ABit/Duron (since the BetaICD's problems in Q-III), TGL didn't work at all.
D3D is faster with newer drivers (~3500 3DMarks2000 with PD6.10 vs. ~3300 3DMarks2000 with 5.41).

[Salmonius]

I used to have a g200 and a VIA MVP3 based mobo. The best driver was 5.41. Anything above that crashed.

Then, I got a CUSL2 (i815) with a pIII. I was getting some bad results in UT. Like the screen being all black and stuff like that. I waited for the g450. Then I got an MX. I am only sad I don't have TV-out. Now, I am waiting for the g800. We'll see what I buy next.