P650 or ATI 9x00 ?

[thop]

Nah Indiana i saw many benchmarks, not only the cheated ones. 5200 wins in all of them. I wish it wasn't so, but facts silence me

Personally i don't buy the DVI quality difference thing ... that sounds mighty suspicious to me ... like gold plated oxygen free copper cables with happy electrons for 1000$ per meter. Image quality difference like in games (aniso, AA, etc.) is a totally different thing.
But i'm open to any reasonable explanations

[Cobos]

I'm no expert on this but to me it seems that DVI simply removes the issue of downgrading the signal the graphics card creates... I.e. what goes out of the graphics card is what you see...
Assume you are nearsighted and are watching a TV. Lets say you can watch a normal 28'' TV or a new HDTV. As long as you are using your glasses what comes out of the TVs is what you see, so removing the glasses is like using analog signals. But the image that comes out of the 2 different TV's is not the same (assuming the same program obviously) as the HDTV has twice the resolution.

Anyway this might have made it clearer or simply more confusing

Cobos

[thop]

To be honest ... the latter

[Indiana]

Originally posted by thop
Nah Indiana i saw many benchmarks, not only the cheated ones. 5200 wins in all of them. I wish it wasn't so, but facts silence me

HEY! You're answering to the wrong person, it was Topha who suggested that the performance lead of the 5200 came through those dirty driver tricks.

I was the first who mentioned the FX 5200 non-Ultra at all (it didn't even appear on your list in the first post), because the 5200 non Ultra is about the only competitive product nVidia has out at the moment - if you can live with a card that's that slow performing.

[Indiana]

Originally posted by Maggi

or the one series of gfx cards that was unable to use trilinear mipmapping together with anisoptropic filtering ... cough cough

Or one series of gfx cards that is unable to do higher than 2x anisotropic filtering? :cough cough:

[thop]

I'm sorry you're right

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Indiana
Or one series of gfx cards that is unable to do higher than 2x anisotropic filtering? :cough cough:

sad and true as it is, but that one also makes up a difference

[Umfriend]

Would it make sense to say that:
Image Quality is the measure of how well a signal put out by a GFX card represents the internal presenation of an image (in a frame buffer)?
Rendering Quality - is the measure of how well an image is created given a set of instructions and data (polygons, camera positions, lights etc).

Input -> Rendering -> Digital presentation in Card memory -> DAC >- Analog ouput

Input -> Rendering -> Digital presentation in Card memory -> DVI output

Maggi refers to the result of rendering and az to DVI output?
Umf

[Maggi]

sounds good to me ...

[Seaspray]

DVI

Someone send me a Matrox card with a DVI output and I will test

Certainly I cannot see any difference in DVI between the GF and my old Radeon 8500LE (although the analog output of the Radeon was horrible).

Sorry I don't mean to bash ATi, maybe I just had a duff one.

However, I alway's thought M's main explantion for their claim of superior (anaog) image quality was that they used higher quality (and thus more expensive) DACs than the competition. If the DAC is being by-passed, what difference does it make?

Mind you, I'm not sure about the argument that digital is digital and therefore there cannot be any quality difference is true, just listen to the difference between a £500 CD player and a £50 one.

Why not add an old GF4 with DVI to your list? There are plenty still around and they're quite cheap now. It will be faster than any of the other cards you mention in 3d (although you say you don't play games much but then you choose a 5200 because its 'faster'?).

~J

[thop]

That's true i don't buy it for the games but if i'm already buying one then why not the fastest? GF4 are all active ... so thats not a choice.

[Che Guevara]

Maggi is right

@az: Never heard anything about 5th-order filter or high-precision RAMDACs ?

There is a white paper on matrox.com about that.

[Umfriend]

Mind you, I'm not sure about the argument that digital is digital and therefore there cannot be any quality difference is true, just listen to the difference between a £500 CD player and a £50 one.

So you actually listen to the digital ouput of those CD players? Amazing stuff
Seriously, both will have a DA-convertor, and those make a difference. Filtering, clipping etc. Also, the actual drive may be better or worse, the device that generates the frequency (crystal?) etc. But yes, if you use the digital out of them CD players and connect them to a D/A convertor, you should not hear a difference.

Maggi is right

@az: Never heard anything about 5th-order filter or high-precision RAMDACs ?

There is a white paper on matrox.com about that.

I thought we had just established that they were talking about different things....?

[az]

Che Guevara: high order Filters and High-Precision RAMDACs are nice for analog output, but aren't even used when you have a digital output signal

AZ

[the main lobe]

I don't recommend nvidia

I have a GeForce4 4200 (Asus) right now, I really miss my g400. I should give a shot at fixing it...If you dual head at all the Matrox overlay options are vastly superior to the nvidia options. Unless you run linux, there are some cool nvidia tools out there for linux. Image quality is noticably lower on my analog output. Once I can buy a hi res oled digital display I'll consider using the digital. Not sure if you like to watch movies (output to the television), but if this is the case, don't buy nvidia card. P650, does need a not included cable to do tv output, the 750 includes it but no passive cooling...this is my delema.