Matrox Legendary 2D Image Quality Revisited

[Biggs]

I remember the first time this article was posted here, a Murcer contradicted the results and claimed that site's methodology was seriously flawed or something. Also, other Murcers gave their own opinions(based on their first-hand personal experience with their respective Matrox graphic cards) that it doesn't matter what the "objective" results say but what they actually see is what makes all the difference in the world. However, everyone has varying types of hardware to comprise the "chain" of video card to cable to monitor refresh rates to monitor. We can also include the variances of the monitor's refresh rate and settings(i.e. color, brightness, contrast, etc). The bottom line is, should this test be trusted or taken with a grain of salt?

Anyway, whichever camp you're in, here are the updated results,

Tecchanel Video Cards Image Quality Test

Same the previous results, the G550 was in the creme de la creme together with the ATI FireGL 8800 and PNY Quadro FX 500 where the latter edged it out a teeny wee bit.

P.S.
Like you, I'm also stumped on why the fabled Parhelia didn't fare so well.

[Wombat]

We're not stumped. The P has some serious problems with its DACs, among other things.

[Chucky Cheese]

What Results??

uh BIGGS...your link takes me to some babelfish/altavista site...

http://babelfish.altavista.com/urltrurl?lp=de_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tecchannel.de%2Fhardware%2F583%2F

pretty neat translator though!

cc

[XHotKolaX]

See that "translate" button next to the "German to English" tab?

Click it.

[DentyCracker]

Never saw a G550 so can't comment. Have used various nVIDIA and ATI cards (though not those two mentioned) and a G200 and G400 and the P has the best IQ I have seen.

[X-Caliber]

Wombat,

"We're not stumped. The P has some serious problems with its DACs, among other things"

Please fill me in.

[Wombat]

For starters, the infamous Parhelia banding issue has something to do with the rest of the Parhelia die (and likely specifically the 3D-core) causing interference with the P's on-die RAMDACs. The problem doesn't show up on DVI, or on the 3rd head in triplehead (which uses the DAC of an external chipset).

[brokenwallet]

Ok, i'm a little lost. Bust isn't signal quality and image quality 2 different things?

[Wombat]

Nope. The cleaner the signal, the sharper the definition of pixels will be on an analog display.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

I guess you are thinking image quality as actual 3d rendering technique / or special functions like the text anti-aliasing on P whcih enhanch 2D image quality.

Signal quality is the actual signal. both digital / analog

[Wombat]

Yes, but signal quality isn't such a big deal with digital outputs.

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Wombat
For starters, the infamous Parhelia banding issue has something to do with the rest of the Parhelia die (and likely specifically the 3D-core) causing interference with the P's on-die RAMDACs. The problem doesn't show up on DVI, or on the 3rd head in triplehead (which uses the DAC of an external chipset).

It's not solely caused by 3D apps, but rather caused by anything that puts real stress onto the GPU.

a definite 2D cause would be the system check utility that comes with PowerDVD, which uses all kinds of video overlay at maximum performance ... run that one and see your display pumping in luminosity



therefore, to me it rather looks like an internal power supply issue, as if they forgot to add some capacitors to have a bit more juice in the backhand, in case its needed

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Maggi
I
a definite 2D cause would be the system check utility that comes with PowerDVD, which uses all kinds of video overlay at maximum performance ... run that one and see your display pumping in luminosity

Maggi, you know I respect you, but you're the only person I think I know of reporting this. Everybody else I've talked to, and my own tests, seem to show that simple overlay does NOT cause the problem.

[Maggi]

no prob ...

it's definately there on the BB board I have and on the retail board I purchased for my working rig and it gets really obvious when you set your desktop background color to a neutral light grey ... best to be seen on a DH environemnt so that your eye won't get distracted by all those colors from PowerDVDs overlay test.

Even better, if you'd switch VGA1 off right after starting the test and only look at your 2nd VGA.

Also, I recall another person in this forum was confirming this PowerDVD issue ... maybe I can find it as a reference.

Cheers,
Maggi

[Maggi]

ok, using this forum's search option, I found three people that saw the problem I described when using PowerDVD's system test.

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?postid=304844#post304844

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?postid=308372#post308372

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?postid=327307#post327307