Nvidia uncaps another 15% power in latest driver - MATROX WHERE ARE YOU?

[odditory]

Well my Parhelia retail purchase is suffering buyer's remorse just a little more today. I got it to run my two two flatscreen monitors with its Dual DVI thinking that Matrox had the "dual screen" thing down better than all others. I also had to buy Pivot Pro monitor software for $50.00 to be able to turn my flatscreens into portrait mode because Matrox drivers don't do that for me. I also haven't been all that thrilled about gaming performance with the Parhelia, just barely passable for games like Comanche.

I had my eye on the Gainward Ti4600 for a long time before my Parhelia purchase with its dual DVI ports but thought that the Parhelia had a better upgrade path with its triplehead feature. Well, NVIDIA in their usual tradition have uncapped yet another 15% performance improvement in their latest free Detonator 40 driver. Early tests show 3Dmark and other benchmarks scoring various cards at 15-20% higher framerates at the exact same clockspeeds just by the driver update...

On top of that, Nvidia's also improved their free nView multi-monitor software included in the driver update to v2.0 with among other new features, a pivot ability! Thats likely to mean that the pivoting is hardware accelerated versus the slowed-down performance of the third party PivotPro software that slows down display performance in portrait (pivoted) mode.

Lastly, I just read a report from John Carmack that basically gave the finger to the Parhelia as far as Parhelia optimization for Doom 3 goes. "The Parhelia will run Doom III, but won't have the back-end support (card-specific programming optimizations) that ATI, Nvidia and 3Dlabs cards will have" is what he said in a nutshell (2nd Article down HERE)
ARRGH ..

My Parhelia has cost $400.00 + 50.00 in Pivot software to run two flatscreens in dual DVI portrait mode. I could've bought the Gainward Ti4600 off ebay for $225.00 and had the pivoting for FREE.

This pisses me off... Matrox... WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU? Is any relief in sight?

Please stop dicking around working on that dumb-end-user friendly surround gaming patcher GUI and uncap my Parhelia or at least give me an overclocking tool!

-Odditory

[K6-III]

NVidia's driver releases getting huge framerate boosts have usually been attributed to them being held back in the first place.....either that or the LOD is dropped for default.

What I will say is that the Parhelia drivers are far from perfect and perhaps quite a bit worse than my Radeon 8500 drivers were, but at least multimonitor works properly....

I decided I'll hold out for decent drivers and an OC utility....Matrox has always delivered before....

[Greebe]

Matrox is also building hardware and drivers from the ground up. Meaning that there is much more work to be do and is far more difficult todo than simply tweaking another whatever out of what has been on the market for quite some time now.

And if you hadn't caught the tease K6-III made his refernce to "or the LOD is dropped for default. " ie cheating to achieve high synthetic benchmark results.

The drivers for P are coming along fine as we have been hit with a meriad of beta's to test of late. Also the card does run very well in games and at least Parhelia doesn't suffer for the frame rate jerkiness the likes of fanATIcs or nVidiots suffer from.

BTW once the majority of the driver bugs have been ironed out (this applies not only to games, but Pro3D apps and the like) they will start concentrating on optimizing the drivers. We've already seen so positive improvements already so please have some patience and ignor (for the most part) any hyped drivers from the competition and you'll feel alot better.

[Greebe]

Oh one last thing... this isn't Matrox. This is the MURC, a users site that has no affiliation to Matrox. If you wanna whine, please go do so on their forums. Thx

[TdB]

isn´t there supposed to be a new parhelia-driver at the end of the month(very soon)?

BTW, in exactly which games do you need extra performance?
all the games i have tried on my parhelia runs great(except for a few artifacts in quake2).

[Greebe]

Like the infamous Soon™ (hehe), yes I suppose so, but when I haven't a clue.

[Wombat]

Besides, nVidia's improvements seem limited to 3DMark, and not real games.

[K6-III]

The issues I'm currently experiencing:

MotoGP BSOD when pixel shaders enabled. (no BSOD, but incorrect rendering with leaked betas...whoops)

On levels with FOG in Quake3, get strange lines with 16x FAA enabled.

Can't enable FOG in Speed Busters, a title actually on Matrox's website shown as a demo for EMBM.

This is only my third day with the card, so this is all I've come up with so far...

[KeiFront]

The only improvement is the nature test in 3DMark. That's why most people get a higher 3DMark score (woot )

Some games are a little bit faster others are little bit slower.

And you get some decreased image quality http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/2002/08-30.php

[TdB]

On levels with FOG in Quake3, get strange lines with 16x FAA enabled.

well, me too, i also get white lines in alpha-textures in q3a with 16xfaa.
and I can see the edges in some of the skyboxes in UT, again with 16xfaa, and anisotrpic filtering in UT gives rainbow-colors to distant textures.

however I am sure they will fix all of it, just give it some time.

[Greebe]

K6-III & TDB, both of your posts are off topic. Keep to the subject or start a new thread please.

[UtwigMU]

From Arstechnica Front Page, by Caesar
25% seems to be a bit of an exaggeration, but on a test machine in the lab I took an Athlon 1900+ box with a GeForce3 from 29.42 to 40.41, and saw decent improvements. 1024x768x32 3DMark2001 went from 5168 to 5286 (a ~2% improvement), and 1600x1200x32 jumped from 3814 to 3908 a (~2.5% improvement). More recent cards can expect slightly higher returns.

And GF2/MX perform worse with later drivers. See www.guru3d.com.

It's like when CPU manufacturer tells you that nextgen CPU performs 10-30% in optimized apps you will never use.

Don't believe all the hype from any hardware manufacturer.

[Paulr]

The latest NVidia driver release was so obviously an attempted "Spoil ATI's party" release.
However most sensible people are realising that the 25% increase is in 3DMark2001SE only and not actually in games.

Funnily enough I like a game I can play rather than sit back in front of and watch it display pretty pictures.

[piaxVirus]

The only improvement I can see is with 3DMark in the low detail and nature tests. No usable improvement in games. Comanche scores went down. Looks to me as all they care about is 3DMark tweaking/cheating instead of improving gaming proformance (while maintaining rendering quality).

If you want a pivot feature. Get the ball rolling by contacting the Matrox sales department. Complaining to the MURCs won't help.

[rylan]

Some quick info.. the portrait scheme that NVidia uses is also software rotation, similar to how the Pivot software works. Its going to be inneficient since they don't spend much effort optimizing the rotation code, and it has to be done by basically yanking data from the framebuffer across the agp bus and shoving it back in, so you get the performance hit.

Hardware rotation on the other hand is much much faster, but it has to be done in the graphics core framebuffer to re-arrange the pixel mapping. We do this stuff at work for our high end medical display and flat panel cards.