Matrox, Quadro or Wildcat for 2.5D guy

[TransformX]

Originally posted by Virgulino
Since I didn't find any specific information about the others, Matrox seems to be the choice.

About stronger 3D, I really don't need much more performance than P650, BUT DirectX9 would be a nice and useful plus to me.

There might be another path you could take:
Buy the best and cheapest solution to fit your *current* needs (probably a P650) and look for a new solution once Longhon's Service Pack 1 is out.

[Nicram]

Originally posted by Virgulino
...What kind of instability did you experience? Crashes/frozens/gremilings in the operating system as a whole, or just with the control/configurator application?

Few times Windows XP crashes with blue screen (mtxparhm.sys error). Ofcours You got right about the .NET.. but without .NET Parhelia "PowerDesk" is not working so You can't change any settings of the card. & I know it's problem with .NET more than with the drivers. For me it's just a domino. When first block crashes, the rest do the same

Ahh more about the crashes with Parhelia drivers. I got this with few first relases of the drivers. The newest are working well, no crashes etc. So P650/750 drivers are well too
But You know... G400 FoR EvER

[Virgulino]

Originally posted by Ali
I use a ATI9700Pro at home, with 2 20inch screens, and the stability is great. I think the uptime is around 80 days or so, and I only shut down to move things around.

80 days straight, without a single reboot, on a ATI?!
Ali, you may have just rebuilt my trust in ATI!
But how would you compare the image quality with a Matrox card?

At work, I have a Matrox G450 PCI and a G400 AGP, running 3 15 inch monitors. This has an uptime of 112 days at the moment, so the drivers are VERY stable, although I do seem to loos a few minutes on the clock every couple of days, that 'might' be driver related.

That stability is what I'm used to from old Matrox, and what I'm looking for in my new machine!
About the clock, I agree that's difficult to find the perpetrator.

The quadros I used at school had good 2D quality with the monitors they had (21 inch sonys I think). The computers themselves were VERY unstable, but it probably wasnt the video in that case.

Given your experience with all this cards, I think this means that the analog quality of this quadros would be what I've expected.

My father in law has a P650 with two 22inch monitors, and Ive used that for a little bit of playing with photoshop, and VBA stuff for him, and it seemed slower than my work machine. This computer has been on non stop since we built it though ( ~ 5 months I guess).

It's a very respectable uptime for a workstation, and exactly what I need.

If I was building another dev machine now, I would probably buy two G550s, one PCI, one AGP, and use three monitors (desk space becomes an issue after that). Probably cost around the same as a P750 anyway.

It's an interesting option.

Ali, your help was invaluable!

Thank you very very much.

[GNEP]

I use the Parhelia under windows XP. Typical uptime measured in weeks - rebooting only to fiddle with hardware or BIOS. This includes gaming sessions - so I would have to say that stability is v. good with the P drivers. In fact, if I did suffer any stability problems, the P drivers would not be highest on my list of places to look by a long shot.

[Virgulino]

Originally posted by TransformX
There might be another path you could take:
Buy the best and cheapest solution to fit your *current* needs (probably a P650) and look for a new solution once Longhon's Service Pack 1 is out.

Yes, I will probably buy the P650.

But about Longhorn, it's not that I love to run pre-production code in my machine, but as a software developer I *need* to deliver Longhorn-tested code as soon as I can test it!

Of course, when I put my sysadmin-hat I'm still running NT4 SP6a.

[Kurt]

Originally posted by Nicram
Few times Windows XP crashes with blue screen (mtxparhm.sys error). Ofcours You got right about the .NET.. but without .NET Parhelia "PowerDesk" is not working so You can't change any settings of the card. & I know it's problem with .NET more than with the drivers. For me it's just a domino. When first block crashes, the rest do the same

Ahh more about the crashes with Parhelia drivers. I got this with few first relases of the drivers. The newest are working well, no crashes etc. So P650/750 drivers are well too
But You know... G400 FoR EvER

Never had a bluescreen with my P750. Runs like a charm on Win2K SP4 .NET 1.1. Drivers are 1.5.0.107 + original BIOS (1.3-12).

Remember: some drivers require a BIOS update too.

[Ali]

Originally posted by Virgulino
80 days straight, without a single reboot, on a ATI?!
Ali, you may have just rebuilt my trust in ATI!
But how would you compare the image quality with a Matrox card?

To be honest, I dont do much on my home computer. My wife plays some games, like RTCW, but I just use VPN, SSH, the net, and email on it. Not too hard to be stable when doing that. I was using AVRStudio there a bit when in the middle of a project, but I burnt out both com ports, so do that all at work now.

Anyway, good cooling is the key to stability. Home computer is water cooled, and has a huge old full tower case.

ATI quality is good. I use a Dell 2000fp for the primary monitor, and its as good as you could expect. The secondary monitor is an old CTX 20inch crt thing that Ive had for years and years (since I was doing freelance autocad on a 486)!! Its a little blury, but thats the monitor, not the card (it was the same on my G400).

My father in laws machine with the P650 in it doesnt do anything. Its basically a way for him to download digital pictures from his camera, photoshop them a little, and send them to the printer. He might check email etc, but nothing hard. Its in his climate controlled study, and on all the time.

All the computers I use have UPSs, full line interactive ones. Thats probably most of the reason for the stability I get. Also, I probably overcool them as well.

Also, I checked my uptime at home. I lied about 80 days, its actually only 66 days. Oh well, not a bad guess I suppose. The last shutdown was due to swapping out a hard drive rather than a crash though.

Ali

[spadnos]

Originally posted by Virgulino
...
About the clock, I agree that's difficult to find the perpetrator. ...

It's partly an integer <-> floating point issue. The original IBM PC had a 1.194304 MHz time reference (1/4 of the 4.77MHz CPU clock), which went into a 16-bit counter. That caused 18.2236328125 overflows per second. That interrupt was used for the DOS time-of-day timer (and for scanning the keyboard, hence the 18 keys/second repeat rate).

Windows still uses something like this - except now it's a 1000 or 1024 Hz interrupt. The first problem is - how do you count micro (or milli-) seconds from that? You can't quite get a 1.000 ms rate from that clock, so you count until some threshold, then add to another integer, then count the number of times you do that, and subtract one or add two every once in a while (like leap years). The second problem - the crystal references aren't tuned for high accuracy - PC's weren't really meant to be left on all the time, so a few seconds off per day is no big deal - it'll re-sync with the RTC (MUCH more accurate - like 30 seconds/year) at the next reboot.

So, even though you have a 1 ppm accuracy clock in your computer (the RTC), it isn't used after bootup. The other time references aren't that good - who cares if the CPU runs at 2.160 GHz or 2.15784 GHz? (remember even 0.1% accuracy is still 86.4 seconds per day)

You could try using eiter <A HREF="http://www.kaska.demon.co.uk/">Tardis</A> or <A HREF="http://www.gknw.com/mirror/cyberkit/">CyberKit</A> to do time sync.

Just run it every day or week or so (and select "synchronize local clock ).

Just to relate to this thread - I don't think it's the Matrox driver doing it.

- Steve

[VJ]

Originally posted by spadnos
Just run it every day or week or so (and select "synchronize local clock ).

Very interesting read on the clock-thing!

BTW, in XP there is a built in functionality to sync the clock:
- dubbel click on the time
- tabpage 'internet time'
- choose the server (you can add others to the list)

Only downside is that it only checks once a week (there doesn't seem to be a setting for this). Before that I used Dimension4

http://www.thinkman.com/dimension4/

Vigulino:
I recently bought a Parhelia, after look for months at different videocards. The overall feature-packages and 2D quality convinced me... (I can't seem to get away from Matrox cards; this will be my 4th consequtive one )

Jörg

[Che Guevara]

Errr... I never had any problems with Parhelias drivers, .NET or winXp. I also never heard about such problems. The performance of Parhelias drivers compared to other Matrox cards is good if you have a ram size in your system which is normal for todays pcs...


@Virgulino: I would also go for Matrox

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Che Guevara
Errr... I never had any problems with Parhelias drivers, .NET or winXp. I also never heard about such problems.

That's because you're an extreme Matrox fan boy.

[Kurt]

Originally posted by VJ
Very interesting read on the clock-thing!

BTW, in XP there is a built in functionality to sync the clock:
- dubbel click on the time
- tabpage 'internet time'
- choose the server (you can add others to the list)

Only downside is that it only checks once a week (there doesn't seem to be a setting for this). Before that I used Dimension4

http://www.thinkman.com/dimension4/

Vigulino:
I recently bought a Parhelia, after look for months at different videocards. The overall feature-packages and 2D quality convinced me... (I can't seem to get away from Matrox cards; this will be my 4th consequtive one )

Jörg

you can also choose a time server in Win2k (like time.windows.com)

[DentyCracker]

I have had problems with the matrox drivers once, when installed the 1.05 drivers without removing the previous drivers. that was easily rectified. Other than that I have had no driver related problems in XP or server 2003. I fiddle with my machine too much for me to have long uptimes, though I have had the machine up for 30 days without rebooting once.

[Che Guevara]

@Wombat:
LOL , yes, I'm a Matrox fan, but believe me, I had never problems with .NET or the P drivers. I don't like Microsoft too, but that's means not that every piece of software made by M$ is that bad, xp for example is allright, execpt it's spy-functions...

@DentyCracker:
You're right, never just overwrite old driver, if you don't do that, everthing works absolutly fine.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

sigh....

although I got a book on C++ .NET for my brithday, i refush to learn the .NET part my self...