New matrox driver posted

[KeiFront]

http://www.matrox.com/mga/support/drivers/files/2kxp_106_beta_dx9.cfm

- This is a BETA (unsupported) driver release for Matrox Parhelia 128MB/256MB (AGP), Matrox Parhelia 256MB (PCI), Millennium P650 and Millennium P750 customers wanting to run recent DX9 games.

- This driver is a DX8.1 driver compiled with DX9 DDK in order to run on new games that support stream offset functionality. This is an unsupported final driver.

[James_D]

Yippi.. Battlefield Vietnam now works..

JD.

[DGhost]

wow... it took long enough for them to release even this...

[bsdgeek]

If it's labelled as final, does that mean it will never get updated? Supposedly it just takes a couple of switch-flips and a compile in the DX9 DDK to get this to work, can't be too much of a hassle to keep it up to date then, right?

[DGhost]

bsdgeek - you are more or less right about the complexity of recompiling this in the DX9 DDK... at least from my understanding... it should be about as hard as recompiling an app in a new compiler or recompiling an app using a newer version of a library... for the most part things should work, although they would have to fix any problems that would crop up because of DDK differences. and then go through the validation process.

all in all, since they have had a G400 DX9 compatable driver out for a really, really long time, I am really suprised that it took them this long to work on it. go figure.

[Marshmallowman]

It does sound a bit weird.

unsupported beta final driver wtf???

Beta implies its for testing, therefore there is another coming?.


But releasing a driver may sound as simple as throwing some switches and compiling, but you are missing the testing and vaildation stage, no responsible business should release untested drivers. "Final" implies it has been tested/validated, but even beta's should have undergone at least some preliminary testing.

[a_h]

Probably they mean "we've tested, it works, maybe it still has some bugs, but we don't care".

Since DX9 is becoming standard (at least for games) I cannot understand why they say it's final. So upcoming driver releases are plain DX8.1 again?

Cheers, Hannes

[VJ]

IIRC, the Parhelia has some DX9 features. Are they still performed in hardware, or through the DDK fallback ?


Jörg

[DGhost]

according to the release notes, it is the DX8.1 driver compiled with the DX9 DDK. so... no new DX9 features, except support for newer DX9 features that are card independant.

[Haig]

Hi gang,

this driver will allow DX9 based games which support that function to play on our DX8 hardware. Nothing more than that.

It's labelled as final because if it wasn't, you would be expecting a non beta release which we currently have no plans to do.

It's labelled as beta becuase we don't do a full QA pass on gaming.

[DGhost]

Haig...

so basically... to reiterate what i believe has already been discussed on the MGA TS forums... Matrox has no current plans to migrate the Parhelia drivers over to being DirectX 9 "native" drivers?

[Venturer]

Originally posted by Haig
Hi gang,

this driver will allow DX9 based games which support that function to play on our DX8 hardware. Nothing more than that.

It's labelled as final because if it wasn't, you would be expecting a non beta release which we currently have no plans to do.

It's labelled as beta becuase we don't do a full QA pass on gaming.

Haig

so next Parhelia's drivers release will be only DirectX 8.1 compliant yet?

[Haig]

Correct.

[Venturer]

Originally posted by Haig
Correct.

And what if you will find a bad bug in the current 1.6.099 DX 9 release? No more support?

[Haig]

If the bad bug is with a DX9 game, it will not be addressed. If it's a bad bug with an application, then it will also show up on the non DX9 driver where it will be fixed in that driver only.