PHA8x128 arrived today!

[Wombat]

Originally posted by az
Matrox can't be "aquired" if the owners don't want to sell, as it's a privately held company.

AZ

The <I>company</I> can't be acquired, but the engineers can, and some have.

[leech]

Allright, so where did the engineers go that do the 2D display tech? Hopefully they went to nVidia... I think probably that will be my next card.... ONLY because I plan on completely switching to linux, and let's face it, nVidia is the only one with consistently working drivers for linux. (I've heard bad things about both ATI and nVidia, but at the moment, they're the only two that actively develop drivers for linux, and nVidia even supports the *BSD's). The only things really stopping me right now from changing video cards is the crap drivers for windows that ATI has, the crappy 2D display that nVidia's have (any good reviews on the new ones yet?) And that I have three monitors, which really only the Parhelia supports Surround Gaming (which is fun as hell).

Now if only ATI would work on their linux drivers more, release a triple-head card with Surround gaming support.. then I'd switch.. but until then... that P8x is looking pretty good....

Leech

[Nicram]

Remember that Matrox is not only graphic cards. They got no any competition in medical display controllers & they got very nice digital video solutions & their Imaging hardware/software... all of that will keep Matrox alive very long... Matrox just must to make some special graphic card hardware but if they will want that... they will i think, but now, they want to first make they cards to be useful in some special jobs. It's good way to keep Matrox Graphics still on the market.

[Wombat]

I don't find ATI's windows drivers to be crappy. They're a lot better than the 2x.xx nVidia drivers that I had to use for a while, and they're better than the P drivers I had to use as well.

[Che Guevara]

Originally posted by Wombat
I don't find ATI's windows drivers to be crappy. They're a lot better than the 2x.xx nVidia drivers that I had to use for a while, and they're better than the P drivers I had to use as well.

I know many ATI users that won't agree...
ever heard about VPU recovery ?


P8x sounds nice at the moment, but of course gaming on Matrox hardware will be impossible if they don't release anything new...
But ATI drivers
and nVidias 2d iq and their 'marketing'

...volari


It really does not look good on the graphic market.

[bsdgeek]

I don't have many problems with Matrox drivers, but if you do find one, don't expect it to get fixed anytime soon.

Nvidia's Windows drivers are pretty good, though lately they've added a bit of bloat. As leech mentioned, they're the only ones to support FreeBSD.

Don't know a thing about ATi except for playing with my friends' machines every now and then.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Che Guevara
I know many ATI users that won't agree...
ever heard about VPU recovery ?

I've heard a little bit about it, but never seen it in action. Doesn't it let you OC your card, but then it stops a failure from becoming catastrophic?

So you're talking about a feature other cards don't even have. Are you saying Matrox cards are better because they simply crash your box?

[leech]

Ok, quick example of crappy ATI drivers... downloaded the newest drivers (at the time, I think it was Catalyst 3.4) for Byock's g/f's computer, because Raven Shield looked like it was in 16-bit color. Before installing the new drivers, I tried to set the 3D settings all the way to quality under the display properties. Well look at that, the mouse disappeared and would only appear as a block of multi-colored pixels in the upper part of the screen. I know the mouse was still moving around, because the buttons on the display dialog would highlight as if the mouse was over it, but I could see no mouse cursor... THEN I removed the old drivers, installed the new ones (of course after several reboots) I went and tried AGAIN to check the quality settings out... well as soon as I opened up one of the dialogs for the display settings, under the advanced (can't recall exactly which tab it was...) there was a dialog that wasn't even DRAWN properly on the screen. The check box and the text was as if the top 8 or so pixel lines of it was over the actual text. (hope I described that right. Basically as if in an art program you had created the exact same line of text and tried to lay them on top of each other, but did a horrible job at it....)

Of course Byock's excuse.... "It's only a 9200..." SO? This is a 2D problem, doesn't have anything to do with speed. Just crappy drivers. And the fact that more likely the average computer user would have a 9200 rather than the flashy 9800XT or PRO or whatever, seems to make me think that ATI should at least consider making proper dialog boxes.

Oh and for the record, the problem remained with changing the settings to quality and having the mouse cursor behave erratically like mentioned before. The only way I could find to fix this was to reboot. Even changing the setting back did nothing to fix it.

The only issues I've really had with Matrox's Parhelia drivers are in Europa 1400 Gold Edition, between years (in the T&L version) a scroll does not appear properly, and the right side is cut off... which kind of sucks, because that's where your yearly summary of cash flow is, but the game still is playable. The the other issue that I've had of course is from the few DX9 games out. The Beta DX9 driver almost made Conan playable... well, at least the menus worked... and CMR4 was messed up with the DX9 driver, but I went back to the normal driver and all is well.

Those are the only driver issues I've had. Well... there is the whole FAA issue... but that's hardware, rather than software from what a lot are saying...

Leech

[leech]

Figured I'd split this in two posts, and since this part of my "Quest for a new video card" is a little more on topic...

When browsing around support forums for different games, I find a lot of "I have ATI card XXX and such and such hardware, but I'm having this huge issue." Then of course you have those that have the nvidia and postings that say, "Well, I have version blah of the driver and it's broken" Then the reply is, "Oh, go back to the earlier version of blah and it'll work better." THIS SCARES THE CRAP OUT OF ME.

I'm thinking of this possible scenerio. "Ok, everyone, let's play Colin McRae Rally 4. Everyone, let's make sure you use the nVidia drivers 56.78 so that it works best." "But if I install those, I won't be able to play Unreal Tournament properly." "Oh nevermind that, we're playing CMR4 now, we'll all re-install the other drivers when we go back to playing UT." And yes, I have heard people talking like that at LAN parties. Maybe not quite to that extreme, but close.

Though from the benches of UT2003, it sounds like the 1.04 drivers for the Parhelia were the fastest for it. Though that could be due to other things as well. Point is, the newest drivers, SHOULD by the simple fact that they are new, have better functionality. Granted all software has bugs in it. But one would think that when a new version comes out, it's not going to break something that was fixed two versions ago....

It really seems that there is only one way to make a choice, and it's solely based on your needs, and well... if you're a general all around computer user that would like good drivers for 2D and good 3D and linux/BSD support.... we're basically screwed. For Gamers of course you just want whatever's fastest that you can afford. (though personally, from a Gamer's point of view, there is such a thing as TOO fast, and I'd much rather be able to crank up the visuals and have it good.)

Bah, rant over... Just kind of had to express the fact that the graphics card industry sucks nuts.

Leech

[CaineTanathos]

aren't the drives from Nvidia not better than ATI?

I think Matrox will be out of the business for atleast one year (proberly too)
Microsoft did screw them, by changing the Dirext X specs.

Off course its possible they won't release a gamers (fast 3d) card again.

I think its best for them, they wait until the specs from Directx Next are finallized. It seems that the gaming industry is getting too microsoft dependant.

[Faramir1966]

What exactly did MS change?And does it have much impact on Matrox?(just asking because i have no clue)

[leech]

Originally posted by CaineTanathos
aren't the drives from Nvidia not better than ATI?

I think Matrox will be out of the business for atleast one year (proberly too)
Microsoft did screw them, by changing the Dirext X specs.

Off course its possible they won't release a gamers (fast 3d) card again.

I think its best for them, they wait until the specs from Directx Next are finallized. It seems that the gaming industry is getting too microsoft dependant.

The drivers could be the best in the world, but since nVidia cheats and has Image Quality problems, it won't matter. Seems we, as consumers, are the ones who get shafted. I haven't seen any reviews yet on the 6800 family of cards to see if they have decent quality...I am considering getting one... but we'll have to see...

Microsoft screwing someone? Nah, that never happens.....

Leech

[CaineTanathos]

the moved some features from DX8.x to dx9.0 , from what I heard

me considering a 6800 too (not the ultra, the GT) since I had pretty bad experiences with ati.

about the image quality problems, not sure you can see it when playing, only with those special tests. in games it has proberly better quality than the parheilia with the anisoptropic filtering.

I am just very curious with the 2d image quality

[Che Guevara]

@Wombat:

Lol , nice feature. Some games crashed sometimes with a message of vpu recovery (Painkiller, Söldner,...) which run fine with the last driver version without vpu-r...

My ATI using friends are not interested in overclocking, but in a stable system

[Tomasz]

VPU Recover just resets the graphics card if it locks up -- usually VPU Recover just reports a crash and does not cause it. Personally, I have never even seen it in action on either my Radeon 8500 or 9800 systems, which, I guess, is a good thing. In fact, I can't even remember the last time that a game crashed on either of these systems (note: I don't really overclock... much... )