Matrox acknowledges G550 & P4 problems

[Inray]

Last week i sent here a post with my impressions from G550 vs G400Max. Unfortunately G550 was very slower than MAX on almost anything including 2D and desktop use.
I did all the tests on Pentium4 (850 chipset) computers.
Yesterday i saw the following post in Matrox support forums.
It seems that Matrox acknowledges a serious G550 / Pentium4 systems compatibility issue.
This (driver ?) issue slows a lot G550 performance. I hope next driver version will fix it.
I did the tests discribed there and i also confirm that G550 runs very faster (+50%) on p3 systems than on p4 ones.
So we should expect new fixed drivers to run reliable p4 benchtests.

http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/Forum1/HTML/006303.html

regards

Sakis

[Venturer]

So G400MAX is again the fastest one on P3 systems or it s slower than G550?

[Inray]

G400Max is still faster even on pentium 3 machines though the difference is noticable only on 3D games, 32bit color and high resolutions/ refresh rates.
G550 2D is almost as fast as MAX.
On P4/850 machines G550 runs very very slower on any mode but the real difference is on 2D high res/refresh and 32 bit color where it seems slower than many cheap non accelarated vga cards.
The strange thing is that i've got similar speed results with G450 on P4 systems
IMO Something goes wrong with 450/550 Matrox drivers and their P4 compatibility. Anyway that's good news as we can expect some performance increase on future releases.

Sakis

[ayoub_ibrahim]

*steps back still FIRMLY clutching his G400MAX*
OIC

[KvHagedorn]

Hmm.. another reason to get an Athlon...

[Inray]

If you own a G550 in a P4 machine try the following

Lower or turn off hardware acceleration from "Display Properties" - "Settings" - "Advanced" - "Troubleshooting"

Lowering accelaration increase 2D redraw / refresh speed (!) for many apps including Corel, Adobe, IE5, IE6, MSOffice and others.

I run tests on some different P4 machines (win2k) with same results. All of them use G550 though they use different hardware (mb, cards)
I didn't test games though. If you noticed similar behavour using them (directX and GL) post here a note.
I still believe that Matrox win2k drivers work almost excellent with G400 cards but not with their new cards (550 and 450)

Sakis

[Inray]

BTW i'd like to know your experiences from G550/450 - Win2k and Pentium4 (if possible)

[rylan]

By the way, there is a known BUG with the Craptel 850 PEe4 chipset.. it basically has problems handling multiple high bandwidth devices on the PCI and AGP bus.
So if you have a network card and video card that both like to eat up bus cycles, then your system is gonna crawl.

Intel knows about this, has since they released the Pee4, and they said 'it will only effect a small number of systems' so they are not fixing it.. heh. Yeah, small number, unless you have any decent cards in your system.

[Indiana]

Originally posted by rylan
By the way, there is a known BUG with the Craptel 850 PEe4 chipset.. it basically has problems handling multiple high bandwidth devices on the PCI and AGP bus.
So if you have a network card and video card that both like to eat up bus cycles, then your system is gonna crawl.

Intel knows about this, has since they released the Pee4, and they said 'it will only effect a small number of systems' so they are not fixing it.. heh. Yeah, small number, unless you have any decent cards in your system.

Hmm, sounds very much like VIAs problems to me (and even the "solution" is the same).....

[Inray]

Originally posted by rylan
By the way, there is a known BUG with the Craptel 850 PEe4 chipset.. it basically has problems handling multiple high bandwidth devices on the PCI and AGP bus.
So if you have a network card and video card that both like to eat up bus cycles, then your system is gonna crawl.

Intel knows about this, has since they released the Pee4, and they said 'it will only effect a small number of systems' so they are not fixing it.. heh. Yeah, small number, unless you have any decent cards in your system.

Yeah i know this problem but that's not the case. In all the tests i did only G550 cause that kind of delay problems, G400 for example work great.
BTW when i run G550 tests i had no other cards installed in PCI bus.
Anyway G550 has many issues not only P4/850 compatibility. Even if Matrox people find a P4 driver fix they can do nothing for 550 signal quality which is far worst than G400. And 2D quality was always the first reason for me to use a Matrox card.

[robertinkol]

This is interesting. I recently benchmarked a few computers running Matlab. I was astonished at how badly a 1.5 GHz P4 with a G450 did in the 2d and 3d tests under the Matlab BENCH program - it was soundly beaten by a PIII with the same video card and crushed by an athlon with a geforce mx.

Robert Inkol

[smanzo]

Originally posted by Inray
If you own a G550 in a P4 machine try the following

Lower or turn off hardware acceleration from "Display Properties" - "Settings" - "Advanced" - "Troubleshooting"

Lowering accelaration increase 2D redraw / refresh speed (!) for many apps including Corel, Adobe, IE5, IE6, MSOffice and others.

...

Sakis

Which means it's definitely a driver problem. If you reduce the Display Acceleration one notch, you're turning off Hardware 2D acceleration and forcing Windows to do the same things in Software mode.

[Greebe]

Inray, you must have a farqed up card cause none of us see your poor image quality.

Driver issues I can see being a problem tho... but overall these problems appear to be an issue with P4 setups... and peeps using XP (warez)