New Beta Drivers for G400!!

[Ovi]

Originally posted by orangejulius
Anyone gotten these to work on the G200?

Edit: is it possible to copy G400ICD.DLL to C:\WINNT\system32\G200ICD.DLL and have it work?

I don't think that's possible!
So for now, Boo, Hoo, no new G200 drivers!
Ovi

[pabst]

Anyone besides me actually insall the 5.71 drivers on win2k and benchmark Q3??? I play 640x840, 32bit color with trilinear filtering. 552 managed 56.5fps, meanwhile 571 only got 30.3 I installed four times and got substantially slower framerates every time. I tried every color depth, z-buffer depth, and filtering method. Anyone else get the same results???

[EvilDonnyboy]

Yea these drives are BS. My FPS have dropped almost 50% in 16bit in Q3 as well (compared to 5.51 drivers). It doesn't drop as much in 32bit in Q3, but there's still a drop.

Also my 3DMark 2k1 score dropped by 100 marks (not very "little" IMO). So it's not just Q3.

So these drivers are BS. I'm going back to either the 5.51 drivers (5.52 gots the Bilinear filtering problems) or the certified 5.32 drivers.

[Alec]

I just tried 5.71 on D3D in W2K last night with Unreal - Return to Na Pali. Seemed the same to me (playing at 1024x768 16-bit, max. textures). Didn´t try OpenGL... the new tray icon is cool, though.

[Werdna]

it's amazing how many people have viewed this post and not replied

I guess for now we hold off on downloading them, especially considering they're no longer available from the FTP

[Jorden]

Andrew... I'm downloading them perfectly alright now through www.murc.ws

[Jorden]

Okay, downloaded and installed the Win9x/ME drivers.

After uninstalling and reinstalling the new drivers:

- Cool... no reboot needed to reinstall the 32bit Z-Buffer (or is this a bug?). It seems to be working in 3DBM 2001. Changes aren't high on a P3-750 with a Max though. one or 2 points.

- My Powerdesk image in the system tray has changed to a ... errm... a what? A ... I haven't got a clue. It's Matrox blue though, so I guess it's okay

- Pwoarh, the multidesk is now working. I can choose what program or other app I want on my second desktop. But did I need an extra multidesk icon for that? Isn't it possible to run it from directly under Powerdesk?

- I earlier set my AGP memory to be used by my primary monitor only. I had to reset it ofcourse after installing the new drivers, but I would like it if the percentages of videomemory being switched wouldn't go in 10% parts. Would it be difficult to make the bars 2 or 5% slider-bars? (BBs?)

Jord.

[Alec]

Jorden,

It´s the blue planet in the Matrox logo. I like it, I think it´s cool.

[Surfwienix]

using the 6.71 beta drivers makes NO difference to my quake3-fps!!??

6.51 -> high quality = 40,9 fps
6.71 -> high quality = 40,9 fps

[pabst]

Surfweinix : according to your sig, you're using win98se. I don't have a win98 machine to test the beta drivers. The framerate loss I got was on a win2k machine. And in my particular case, the 571s are undoubtedly slower than 552s. It may just be something really screwy with my machine since this thread has been viewed 1500 times and only 2 have reported any framerate problems with Q3 ...... oh well, at least the linux drivers are damn fast.

[EvilDonnyboy]

Let's see ur spec's pabst.

btw, I used Q3 1.17 for benching. I'm using 4.32 via 4in1's (except using Microsoft's SP2 IDE driver). I use MGA Tweak to oc my G400 SingleHead 32mb (SDram).

[pabst]

The previous Quake results were from 1.29h Anyways, I got bored, so here goes nothing. All my benchmarks are at stock speeds.

AMD K7-750 Thunderbird
MSI K7TPro (KT133) Bios 2.9
256MB Crucial PC133 ECC (3-3-3)
IBM 75GXP 45.0GB (not all of them are bad)
Pioneer DVD-105-S
TDK 12x10x32 CDRW
Matrox G400 32MB SGRAM AGP-2X Bios 2.1-35
Sound Blaster Live 5.1 (I miss my AU8830)
Princeton Graphics 17" AGX750

Windows 2000 SP2
IE 6.00.2462
DirectX 8.0
VIA 4.32 4in1's (MS SP2 IDE Driver)
Ultra DMA is enabled

Busmastering, 32bit Z, and hardware mouse are enabled in powerdesk options


I did a clean install of all the games, so whatever option isn't listed is at its default setting. I did not even attempt a clean install of the OS, so results may vary.

Quake 3 1.17 demo001
high quality settings at 640x480 and 800x600, high quality sound
6x8 8x6
571 37.4 29.2
552 59.3 41.0
551 59.2 41.0

MDK2 v1.001
3/4 texture detail, 32bit color, trilinear filtering, mipmap, fullscreen, 3d sound disabled
6x8 8x6
571 34.4 28.6
552 56.0 51.4
551 57.0 51.7

Serious Sam v1.00 dunes demo
640x480, 32bit color/textures, normal texture size, detail textures, fullscreen, normal shadowmap, standard lens flare, vsync off, widescreen off, 44kHz DirectSound
high low avg
571 53.2 11.5 19.5
552 54.0 21.6 31.1
551 61.8 22.9 33.2

I also did UT and 3dm2k (only Direct3D benches I had). The Direct3D tests were generally a bit slower with 571, but not enough to worry about (that's why I didn't write them). As far as D3D goes, there are far worse drivers than 5.71 (yes, I tried them all). I benched three OpenGL games and all of them show that something is screwy.

Strangely enough, 5.20 was actually the fastest driver; stability, however, was not its strong point.

I don't have a Win98 or ME machine, so those of you cursed with those, are on your own.

<END_OF_LINE>

[Surfwienix]

oh, sorry. didn't see that you're talking 'bout win2k

[Inray]

I don't know about game speed with the latest Matrox beta drivers but they fixed a serious (for me) problem.
Using previous drivers cause OfficeXP/Word (all the latest patches) image rendering problems. Whenever i had images on a word document i missed part of them while scrolling.
The latest G400 driver solved that problem (i didn't notice such an issue using other card)
New beta driver also fixed the delay in power desk monitor settings dialog.

[PeTe]

If 1/2 performance is the price of fixing couple bugs.. make the drivers buggier ( or what the h*ll that word should be ) and give us some SPEED..

PeTe