Matrox 3D = poor visual quality?

[Alec]

Himself, you missed my point.

Even if the G400 has visual glitches (in UT, for example, even after patch 4.28, although less), the vibrant colors and excellent 16-bit dithering are there. Vibrant colors are part of the hardware, and they show in every game, unless the game´s textures suck. And even if they suck, they´ll suck less on a G400. Of course that, in order to tell the differences between cards, you´ll have to use a good monitor, as in audio you´ll have to use good speakers to compare sound cards or audio systems.

I´m not defending Matrox blindly, all card brands have their strong points, i could well be bying 3dfx, Ati or Nvidia in the future - it´s just that we´re talking about visual quality, and that is Matrox´s turf.

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[Gurm]

Ah yes, a clarification - when we talk about 3D image quality... we mean vibrancy of colours, accuracy of textures, etc.

We are NOT talking about whether the polygons go in the right place or not. Heh.

- Gurm

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[Indiana]

Alec (+Gurm) have put it exactly as I see it:
Except for the better trilinear filtering and for the VCQ (if I understand this correctly that means that everything is always rendered in 32Bit depth and only scaled down to 16Bit for display in 16Bit modes, correct me if I'm wrong here) most of the differences derive from Matrox' general superior display quality, this has nothig to do with the actual 3D rendering of the polygons/textures/..., but with the afterwards following display of the resulting (2D-)image on the 2D monitor.

NVidias colors do look "stonewashed" on the normal 2D windows desktop as well when directly compared to a Matrox card, it's just that you don't notice it as much here, except you have one of these childish/ugly colorful desktops (I still like the "professional" looking MacOS8 look here)....

I also think that this difference does matter to some people but not to others - like it is with audio equipment or with monitors, some don't even see the difference between a No-Name 200$ 17" and an Eizo... Must be the same people that always tell you the Geforce had the same crisp image as the G400. Although admittedly the Geforce's display is waaayy better than that of the old TNT (this was one of the main reasons for me to ditch my Asus VT3400TNT, together with Asus' crappy drivers).

[Himself]

For me, the state of game art is crude enough to swamp anything a video card card can do. I want more quality in game art and detail before I even bother with how well my video card renders pong.

[Alec]

Himself, what you said is half-true, because the way the graphics cards and their drivers "treat" a given game varies. Games do look different on different cards, and whoever says the opposite IS wrong.
Not everyone has the eye to notice the differences, but they do exist, as with sound cards.

[Gurm]

Himself,

I understand your point of view. However, a bad video card... HURTS MY EYES. I can't look at it.

Do I have sensitive eyes? Yup, without a doubt. I've needed glasses my whole life, and sunglasses when it's only moderately bright outside.

So I feel that the Viewsonic monitor (easily TWICE as expensive as the Princeton Graphics) and the G400 are well worth the investment. It's the primary reason I have failed to jump ship - every time I use a different video card I'm reminded of how lucky I am to be seeing the crispness I am seeing.

My wife doesn't get it - she asked me to come play Baldur's Gate with her. She fired it up and it switched to 60hz and I made her quit it so I could tweak her system to run that video mode at 85hz. She didn't understand why I couldn't just "leave well enough alone".

So although you may not care much about display quality, a lot of us do.

Once again, it's like audio quality - there's a reason that I have upgraded the stereo in both my vehicles - despite the high quality of the alpine system in the Volvo and the similar alpine system in the BMW.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Himself]

I can sympathize, I have perfect vision, but I do find sunlight to be a bit of a strain after being in my cave for long periods of time. I'd wear sunglasses but my head is too big for most of them, the ones that do fit look like visors.

I think what you are talking about is general ramdac quality at high refresh rates, in my mind that is about the analog component, not the 3D component. Whether trilinear is emulated or not isn't a factor in eye strain. I can't stand blurry displays either when I'm reading text, I just don't care when it's in a game, you have to use your imagination to ignore the lacking game art anyway.

Oh, to the guy who mentioned it, the vibrant colour thing is just a marketing term, it is just saying there is a good ramdac and it uses 32 bit precision all the time.



[This message has been edited by Himself (edited 06 October 2000).]

[Gurm]

Himself,

It's more than just a good RAMDAC. Honestly. It's better filtering, better color representation, better texture handling, etc.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Pace]

So then to recap...

We like Matrox's output to a monitor but it's only making glitches more vibrant?

Can anyone else compare a game across different cards with regards to driver errors? I've not got a G400 to test drivers but I know from posts here that their have been glitches.

Maybe we could collaborate our efforts? i.e. someone tests a G400 with 5.5, someone else 6.0 and another a TNT2 5.30 (me ). We could run HL, Q2, Q3, UT & SoF and look for glitches?

Is this what you'd like Strider?

Paul.

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[SteveC]

Hey - look back at the thread title!

Matrox 3D = poor visual quality

i.e. the m3d has poor quality! I agree!

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Strider]

Pace, while what you suggest is interesting, I do not think a "visual glitch" hunt will happen (nor do I think we need one). I was just looking for people's past/present experiences regarding visual anomolies. It would appear that the problems are generaly restricted to OpenGL drivers. Glitches in a game like UT can not be attributed directly to Matrox given Epic's D3D coding effort.

These glitches have been steadily eliminated with newer icds. I am curious in getting some info on how other cards do in terms of glitches. If you could let me know how the TNT2 does in terms of visual screw ups, I would appreciate it. It would also be interesting to hear how effective things like trilinear filtering and mipmapping are on the TNT2.

[Pace]

Well if people have already tested this out for themselves I'm sure they'll post!

I've generally found the Detonator drivers to be good performers in Win9x/NT and very few glitches in Q2, Q3, UT and Voyager. However the Detonator 3 drivers are 100% unstable on my system. A clean install of Win2k (P2-350, P6SBA, 256Mb, 20Gb IBM, Pioneer 10x DVD - no other cards except TNT2) was instantly brought down by the 6.18 drivers. I've now went back to 5.30 and have found them reasonable but I'm suffering slightly poor performance (maybe due to running IIS5 on my machine)

Paul.

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