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Alright... i got my P last friday, and have a bunch of comments/thoughts/experiences with it...
first thing i have to say is so far i love the card...
I switched over to the P from a Radeon 8500, so i am gonna refer to the differences a lot through out this...
many people have said that image quality is better... with the monitors i have right now, i did not notice a difference (they also only run at the fairly low res of 1280x1024@60hz) in the standard desktop. however, as soon as i fired up a game it became very obvious which one was the clear winner. same thing when i started watching a DVD. the P does have significantly better color representation than the 8500 does, at least in my opinion. colors in general seem to be a lot brighter than what they used to be.
performance seems to be better than the 8500, except in a few places. most noticably the P seems to have lots of performance problems with stencil shadows enabled in OpenGL stuff. this is noticable in both JK2 and NWN. plays fine with everything else maxed out (and is smmmmmmoooooootttttthhhhh), but as soon as you enable shadows both drop through the floor. Morrowind was quite smooth, with the exception of being inside a city. that probably has to do with the processors in my system more than anything.
stability of the card is very good. the only time my system would hard lock was when my normal OpenGL screen saver was running and it tried to shut the monitor off.
Dual-Head on it is fantastic. this is probably the best single-card multi-mon implementation i have ever used. the picture quality on the second monitor is as good as if it was the only monitor on the card. typical matrox flawlessness. any app i full screened on the second head (or even had it windowed on the full head) would not stutter or skip or pause due to anything happening on the first head. In XP especially, i have noticed it has a tendancy to cause things to skip if GUI acceleration is enabled and you pull up the start menu, or say if you scroll an IE window really fast. Did not happen at all on the Parhelia. This card will definately be great when Longhorn rolls around.
the only problems i had with programs not running correctly was with Podracer and Milkdrop. Podracer only works in Windows XP when multimonitor stuff is disabled (totally disabled, cannot have the second monitor in the display control panels), and even then it just renders a white screen in game. With Milkdrop, if you try to make it render to the second monitor, it brings up errors about not having enough video memory to do it correctly. both monitors were at 1280x1024 and in gigicolor. also, while in gigicolor, Milkdrop will not render to the desktop correctly. you either end up with a green screen or with a black screen, depending on which mode you overlay with. everything else i have tried so far runs fine, except a couple OpenGL apps that run a little slower than they should.
My impressions on the drivers is pretty poor. i really do not like having to reboot to change just about any setting. Also, the PowerDesk-HF app reaks of something the driver team threw together in order to adjust the card and someone decided that it should ship with it. the fact that only option that the systray icon has is to launch powerdesk-hf is quite annoying. it does not do anything useful. and the control panel addition is just a button that says "Matrox Powerdesk-HF" and a description of how to open the program through other means. absolutely worthless. i would much rather have the old, traditional PowerDesk software to control a card than this stuff. it offered (so far) much more control and ease of use than this stuff.
hmm, what else beyond that...
FAA is dead sexy.
Serious Sam 2 with everything maxed out on a P is dead sexy.
i do really love the P so far, it is an impressive card. most of my problems with the card are because of the fact it is a brand new product, and the drivers have not yet settled. it has definately found a place into my main system. I would not hesiate to recommend this card to anyone who uses multi-mon on a regular basis, as it is probably the best single card dual monitor solution i have used next to the multi-chip cards like the MMS cards.
first thing i have to say is so far i love the card...
I switched over to the P from a Radeon 8500, so i am gonna refer to the differences a lot through out this...
many people have said that image quality is better... with the monitors i have right now, i did not notice a difference (they also only run at the fairly low res of 1280x1024@60hz) in the standard desktop. however, as soon as i fired up a game it became very obvious which one was the clear winner. same thing when i started watching a DVD. the P does have significantly better color representation than the 8500 does, at least in my opinion. colors in general seem to be a lot brighter than what they used to be.
performance seems to be better than the 8500, except in a few places. most noticably the P seems to have lots of performance problems with stencil shadows enabled in OpenGL stuff. this is noticable in both JK2 and NWN. plays fine with everything else maxed out (and is smmmmmmoooooootttttthhhhh), but as soon as you enable shadows both drop through the floor. Morrowind was quite smooth, with the exception of being inside a city. that probably has to do with the processors in my system more than anything.
stability of the card is very good. the only time my system would hard lock was when my normal OpenGL screen saver was running and it tried to shut the monitor off.
Dual-Head on it is fantastic. this is probably the best single-card multi-mon implementation i have ever used. the picture quality on the second monitor is as good as if it was the only monitor on the card. typical matrox flawlessness. any app i full screened on the second head (or even had it windowed on the full head) would not stutter or skip or pause due to anything happening on the first head. In XP especially, i have noticed it has a tendancy to cause things to skip if GUI acceleration is enabled and you pull up the start menu, or say if you scroll an IE window really fast. Did not happen at all on the Parhelia. This card will definately be great when Longhorn rolls around.
the only problems i had with programs not running correctly was with Podracer and Milkdrop. Podracer only works in Windows XP when multimonitor stuff is disabled (totally disabled, cannot have the second monitor in the display control panels), and even then it just renders a white screen in game. With Milkdrop, if you try to make it render to the second monitor, it brings up errors about not having enough video memory to do it correctly. both monitors were at 1280x1024 and in gigicolor. also, while in gigicolor, Milkdrop will not render to the desktop correctly. you either end up with a green screen or with a black screen, depending on which mode you overlay with. everything else i have tried so far runs fine, except a couple OpenGL apps that run a little slower than they should.
My impressions on the drivers is pretty poor. i really do not like having to reboot to change just about any setting. Also, the PowerDesk-HF app reaks of something the driver team threw together in order to adjust the card and someone decided that it should ship with it. the fact that only option that the systray icon has is to launch powerdesk-hf is quite annoying. it does not do anything useful. and the control panel addition is just a button that says "Matrox Powerdesk-HF" and a description of how to open the program through other means. absolutely worthless. i would much rather have the old, traditional PowerDesk software to control a card than this stuff. it offered (so far) much more control and ease of use than this stuff.
hmm, what else beyond that...
FAA is dead sexy.
Serious Sam 2 with everything maxed out on a P is dead sexy.
i do really love the P so far, it is an impressive card. most of my problems with the card are because of the fact it is a brand new product, and the drivers have not yet settled. it has definately found a place into my main system. I would not hesiate to recommend this card to anyone who uses multi-mon on a regular basis, as it is probably the best single card dual monitor solution i have used next to the multi-chip cards like the MMS cards.
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