Matrox 3D = poor visual quality?

[Muad'Dib]

While yall are talkin bout other forums and such , does anyone happen to know of an ATI forum? I suddenly have to fix my cousins computer and I think he's got an ATI in it. Not sure though as I haven't gotten round to opening it.... hehehe

Dimitri

[Joel]

Try over here www.rageunderground.com/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi you may find something.

Joel

[Admiral]

Don't know about you guys but I always liked TurboGL.
For Quake 3 they managed to screw the ICD since the beta 5.50.xxx drivers, shadow and weapon marks problem. They fixed that with PD 6.04 (after 7 months) but now some green spots show up on the stairs. So, I'm still using the TurboGL in Q3.

For Elite Force and Heavy Metal FAKK2 demos (based on the Quake 3 engine) I had to put the opengl32.dll file in to make them look and move normal.

With Sin, Heretic II, Quake2 and GLQuake I've always had better performance using TGL.

In the end I'd rather have TurboGL support more games

[Admiral]

Good medicine that ATI forum
Whenever you feel like picking on Matrox go visit that forum

[Strider]

I will certainly have to visit other forums (and maybe I should have done that before I posted) however it is difficult to judge if a given problem is unique or of it is wide spread. I am sure for any given game in which people find problems we can get someone to stand up and and say "it runs and looks great on my Matrox". But I don't think that something like the Half-Life issues were an isolate problem caused by poor computer setup.

According to Admiral the 6.04 drivers are not the cure all for visual quality. Granted this is only one such observation. If Matrox does indead have the best game visuals, than I pressume that other video cards are seeing the same kind of glitches or worse. If they do not have these problems than how can we claim that Matrox looks the best.

Joel, I certainly aggree that Matrox can focus on OEMs. But does anyone really want that to happen? If they want to go the bussiness/profesional route with their cards, that's fine. This whole argument then becomes pointless. However I doubt that anyone wants to see Matrox take this approach. I want competitive (or even better, competition crushing) performance, stability, features, and the top visuals. For some reason we are not seening the kind of visuals that we should (i.e. stuff doesn't look the way it should), and I don't think that we can dismiss this as a game or end user problem.

Regarding driver update, I am finishing off some important work and do not want to mess with anything until I'm done. I also don't feel like going over my monitor setup. Are the current settings saved in a file I could copy over once I do the driver update?

[Indiana]

Originally posted by Strider:
Do Voodoo5 and the new Nvidia cards look worse than G400 (assuming one uses equal resolution, 32 bit colour and no texture compression or FSAA)?

Yes.

OK, this was a bit short, but it's true. The G400 (and even the G200) looks better in, say, 1024x768x32, all other settings the same, than the Nvidia and Voodoo(3)-based boards I've seen.
I had a TNT myself earlier and a friend of mine had a Voodoo3, replaced by a GeforceDDR (Elsa Erazor X2, which is said to be the "best-looking" Geforce board) and if you connect both computers to the same monitor and compare things like Quake, 3DMark2000 (yes, even though this program seems NVidia based in it's speedmarks, it shows the quality quite well...), Vampire,... you can't help but see that things are looking better on the G400.
The colors espcially of Nvidias boards look somewhat "stonewashed" when compared to Matrox, and the trilinear filtering of at least some of Nvidias chips does have some major dithering involved up to the point where you could say that bilinear actually looks better - I have some screenshots of trilinear filtering in Q3 on G400 and TNT2 where this is quite well documented. Of course NVidia doesn't take a performance-hit as large as the G400 when using trilinear, then...

What's sad but true is that the OpenGL driver of Matrox cannot compete with NVidias, neither in terms of speed, nor completeness. But the issues are more that OGL programs are not running at all on Matrox-cards, or showing strange effects, but in scenes where they do run correctly they still look better.

[The Rock]

Strider:

I think Half Life is most of the problem. That buggy pile of crap had visual anomalies on 3 different cards I played it on. I assume most of them are fixed since HL has been patched to death by now, but that fact alone points a finger.

Bart

[Himself]

Frankly, I can't tell the difference between video cards in 3D for most games out there.
They can only look as good as the game was written to look, a new video card can't perform miracles. There is no sense in being anxious about video cards until there are games worth the trouble.

[Chris B]

Strider.... Ok so you may not have been trying to bad-mouth Matrox, but that is how it looked to me, regardless of the "?" in the topic line.

I didn´t mean anything by that remark other than this:

Everytime somebody posts a thread like this, it´s the exact same thing. It´s the same arguments every damn time (and I think that is also what Guru meant), and 90% of the time it just turns into a flamewar (glad to see this one didn´t).

So what I was trying to say at the time was... why bother, we don´t acomplish anything... some like Matrox and some don´t and honestly... who gives a hoot ?

I know it´s a pain in the ass, when some dillweed join the MURC just to post a thread that matrox sucks, and this and this card is so much better, but why not just ignore it?

So no need to get defensive! It wasn´t meant personally for you... just a general statement.. and no offense intended

[This message has been edited by Chris B (edited 04 October 2000).]

[Gurm]

Another thought for Himself - what's the difference between your bottom of the barrel Sony components and top of the line Harman Kardon units?

Or better yet what's the difference between Sony and Harman Kardon if they have the same features?

Well, that's the difference between the G400 and anything by anyone else. (In reverse order. Heh!)

Just 'cuz you don't see it don't mean it's not there. Many people can't tell the difference. It's the same with audio. We had to break it to some poor fella in the general hardware forum that his Sony Boom Box was just... well... NEVER gonna sound as nice as a rack system.

- Gurm

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

[Himself]

Audio is 80% speaker quality, if your amp has a high enough S/N and low enough THD so you can't hear anything wrong, then it's all about speakers. Quality in analog is not relevant, we are talking digital here. The only analog bits in video cards are things like ramdacs, and that is about 2D quality, not 3D rendering quality.

Drawing 3D is mathematical, if a card uses the proper accuracy and algorithms for a paticular operation, the only difference in quality is of a subtractive nature from cards that take shortcuts. They all *should* look identical. My point being if you add 2 + 2 to get 4, you can't upgrade the video card to get a better result than 4. If you video card gives you 3.89, then sure.

If you have a G400, you probably have 4 for most things, most cards are quite accurate outside of one or two things that got skimped on or the driver screws up. The G400 uses 32 bit accuracy, if a G8001 uses 64 bit accuracy, considering the games out there I doubt you'd notice and you'd probably only ever notice with a magnifying glass. There difference between 4.00 and 4.0000 being rather moot.

If you have a G400, the only thing you need is more speed, not more image quality. If you want better looking games, wait for better looking games to arrive on the market. If you want to compare video card quality with counts of screwups and shortcuts, I guess you can do that, but you end up picking games that favour one or the other and really you are comparing drivers/game compatibility, not 3D quality.

Let me put it another way, EMBM won't add bumps to games that don't support it, TCL won't add polygons beyond what the game is designed for, 32 bit won't do much for 16 bit games, about the only image quality improvements to be made in most games that are already out there are things like FSAA. You can have a better ramdac for a sharper image, you can have fancy gamma controls, but by and large image quality is as good as it's going to get in the games you have.

Take a G400, GTS, and V5 and equalize the settings (same gamma, no fsaa, same Z bias, vsync on, etc), I doubt many people would be able to play a game and see any difference in rendering quality at all. Of course a faster speed giving you smoother animation is a quality issue of it's own.

My $02

[Strider]

OK, lets recap. The Matrox cards do indead look better than anything else. The difference might be small, but it is there. Lot of the problems and glitches appear to be in OpenGL, or are due to the games themselves. It is still uncertain if other card maker experience the same kind of glitches.

Chris, I made strong statements to attract attention, not start a flame war. It appears that the general concesus is that when Matrox cards run "glitch free" they are clear superior to anything else in terms of visual quality. I certainly agree with this. But is there a point where the number and extent of glitches becomes so bad that the "lower quality" but more consistent alternative gives a better visual presentation?

To use an anology, most people would prefer to listen to a CD instead of a casette. What if the CD skips? If its only one or two minor skips than the CD is still the better option, but if the skips are prevalent and detract from enjoyment of the music, than the old analogue tape might become a real option. So Matrox is the CD, but the competition has been making some good sounding tapes. How many skips can the Matrox CD get away with before the tape becomes the prefered choice?

[Gurm]

Strider,

The problem with that particular analogy is as follows:

Tape from ATI: Snaps halfway through. ATI announces no support for tape decks ever again.

Tape from nVidia: Sound is dull and lifeless. Alternating weeks (driver revisions) cause the tape to be in a different language or have the wrong music entirely, or perhaps to not play your favorite band.

Tape from 3dfx: Is in mono, but claims that their "patented technology" makes it sound like "three quarters of a stereo signal".

Tape from BitBoys: The tape shell has no tape in it, but the specs sheet that came with the tape looks AWFULLY impressive.

Tape from NEC: Is an 8-track in Quadrophonic. Would be really cool if anyone had a Quadrophonic 8-track player.

- Gurm

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

[Strider]

Himself: great post, this is the kind of discussion I was going for.

So if Matrox 3D quality is in no way poor, lets define a new term; "visual presentation" which a combination of 3D quality and driver/game compatibility. To rephrase my original question, given the number of reported driver/game compatibility issues (regarding visual annomolies), is Matrox still giving the best "visual presentation"?

Indiana compared nvidia to G400 and in terms of 3D quality the G400 comes out on top (better colour and trilinear filtering). Using the 2+2 apprach, the G400 gets 2/2 for 3D quality vs 1.8/2 for nvidia. The question now is how good are game/driver compatability issues? If they are equally good/bad than Matrox comes out on top. In order for nvidia to give the best visual presentation it would have to have signifactly less glitches than Matrox in order to overcome its inherent lack of 3D quality. Maybe Indiana could offer input the amount of visual annomolies seen with nvidia.

>>but by and large image quality is as good as it's going to get in the games you have<<

Yes, but this image quality is not consitent within a game due to various glitches.

>>Take a G400, GTS, and V5 and equalize the settings (same gamma, no fsaa, same Z bias, vsync on, etc), I doubt many people would be able to play a game and see any difference in rendering quality at all <<

unless the drivers fall short, such as bad banding/dithering, flickering textures, butt ugly S3TC implementation, etc.

[Strider]

LOL, good one Gurm!

Maybe I am giving the competition too much credit. I guess I should shut up and ejoy the bliss between the clicks that the G400 is putting out.