To buy a Matrox or not?

[Kurt]

If you need multimonitor support and/or excellent image quality on CRT, go with the P750.

If you think it might be too slow for games, go for the P8x.

If you really want to play games but still have 2 screens (1DVI+1CRT), get yourself a ATI (BBA=built by ati) or Sapphire Radeon 9800Pro AGP8x - or BBA/Sapphire X800XT PCI-E.

[JerryMouse]

Originally posted by Kurt
If you need multimonitor support and/or excellent image quality on CRT, go with the P750.

If you think it might be too slow for games, go for the P8x.

If you really want to play games but still have 2 screens (1DVI+1CRT), get yourself a ATI (BBA=built by ati) or Sapphire Radeon 9800Pro AGP8x - or BBA/Sapphire X800XT PCI-E.

Thanks for your input! I like getting as much feedback as possible on all this. Anyway, yes, I definitely need multimonitor support. Right now I always have two desktop monitors going along with my laptop right beside me, so I might as well have (3) monitors and not have to always use the laptop.

I haven't decided for sure, but I'm leaning towards the P8x.

People seem to agree that the Radeons (as opposed to a GeForce card) are the best "compromise" for both gaming and 2D image quality. I'll keep that in mind.

Thanks,
Jerry

[Wombat]

Parhelia only supports 3 monitors in stretched mode. If you've got 3 monitors of different size, you might want to look at a 2-monitor video card, plus a second, PCI video card for driving the 3rd monitor. Cheaper and more flexible. And better supported.

[Whirl-Secret]

Hello JM

I was in your situation about a year ago and ended up buying a P650 on cost grounds. I am a mostly 2D pro with some video and 3D thrown in. I had my bro's Radeon 9700 before that.

The P650 has been incredible for me. I understand everyone's whining about Matrox here but for a 2D IQ-freak who will play some games, there is no other path but Matrox imho. The image quality blows away anything from 3DFX, ATI or NVidia that I've used... even desktop icons look great Oh and the Glyph antialiasing happily replaces cleartype for me, imho it's better.

And btw I have played Far Cry, Homeworld 2, Quake 3, FuhQuake all acceptably with the P650. And it's anecdotally even a slightly better Photoshop card than the 9700 was.

I love my P650. To upgrade to twice the 3D with a P8X would be really cool but honestly I don't need it.

Oh and Doom3 is a little beyond this card's power.... it does play but isn't worth it inho because the graphics have to be turned down so much it looks worse than the original doom

[DGhost]

I've been refraining from commenting too much on this, but I might as well....

I use 2x DVI LCD's. The only major ways I can tell the difference between my GeForce FX 5700U and the Parhelia it replaced is really in 3d. The GeForceFX 5700U runs faster and has much better image quality. and it was only half the cost of what I paid for the P.

my experience with the Parhelia was never really a good one. Yes, it was a card that offered some pretty nice features. But, I just always had issues.

It has some pretty good image quality. however, even when I was running it on a CRT the banding issue pretty much ruined the IQ of the 2d desktop as I was often running 3d applications windowed while working. oh yeah, and you could not run two DVI LCD's at different resolutions on the initial model parhelia. the P650 fixed that bug as well.

Glyph AA was nice, except for the fact that it really doesn't do anything special compared to ClearType and it had a tendancy to randomly corrupt the fonts on the screen.

16x FAA was nice, but it would cause artifacting about half the time, especially on newer games. the GFFX that I have solves this problem rather nicely by being able to run games at higher resolutions.

The hardware overlays were nice, however I always seemed to have problems when GUI acceleration on XP was turned up, GlyphAA was on, and either an overlay or 3d app was running. it seemed the card or drivers didn't like doing multiple things at once.

the OpenGL drivers were crap. no excuse for this one, especially for a "professional" card. instead of fixing underlying problems they resorted to implementing hacks to solve application specific problems.

gigacolor is nice. however the issues it would cause in poorly written applications definately were annoying.

everytime I have it in my system I find myself having to reboot (or having blue screens) ever couple of days. I find the system frequently winds up with annoying little ""glitches"" - font corruption, pauses when transparent effects (ie, XP's fade effects) or drop shadows (another thing that happens when you look at the start menu) are used in conjunction with 3d acceleration or a hardware overlay, corruption of graphics after a while, etc etc.

i make it sound like these things happened all the time - some of them did, some of them only happened on certain computers (ie, z-fighting issues when using the stencil buffer to draw shadows in OpenGL would happen on both Athlon and Intel systems, and then in the next driver revision fixed it on the Intel platform but not the AMD platforms, etc), some happened randomly on both.

it was never bad enough i wanted to throw the card out, but it was certainly a card I elected to replace when I got the chance.

[JerryMouse]

Whirl-Secret wrote:

I understand everyone's whining about Matrox here but for a 2D IQ-freak who will play some games, there is no other path but Matrox imho. The image quality blows away anything from 3DFX, ATI or NVidia that I've used... even desktop icons look great.

Whirl-Secret -- I really appreciated your great post. I definitely fit your description of a "2D IQ freak" who likes to play some games. What's the 3D image quality like with your P650?

As noted in one of my posts, I've only compared a P750 with my old video card -- a GeForce4 Ti4200. I thought the IQ of the P750 outdid my old card in all respects.

DGhost: I also appreciate your thoughts, thanks! This is a tough decision for me. If newer GeForce and Radeon cards really do give you excellent 2D IQ that's indistinguishable from a Parhelia (or other Matrox card), then in terms of price and 3D performance, it'd seem clear I should just get a mid-range Radeon or GeForce card.

But, I really was blown away by the IQ of the P750 in comparison to my old card.

So ... It'd be nice if I could find a place that carried all the video cards I was interested in and then let me see them in action.

-- Jerry

[DGhost]

it would definately be nice to find someplace where you could see the image quality difference. unfortunately, I switched over to DVI LCD's instead of CRT's a while ago so it is difficult to evaluate the analog image quality between the newer GeForces versus the Parhelia.

from what I recall the major benefit of the Parhelia was the fact that in Multimon situations the second head is every bit as good as the first (with the exception of 3d) - something that NVidia and ATI have yet to accomplish, IMHO. NVidia does some nice tricks in hardware to make it hard to tell (ie, the hardware overlay can be on either head (but not both at the same time) if in dualhead independant). the one exception on the Parhelia in this regard (at least on my 4x card) was that 3d acceleration on the second head was horrible if it was in dualhead independant.

it is a shame, Matrox has a really really great dualhead implementation with the Parhelia. my biggest problem was always that it was far too buggy for a $400 video card. and the fact that Matrox has refused to take any steps to fix it.

[Whirl-Secret]

Jerry:

look at DGhost's post count, and look at mine... he certainly knows his stuff and is a good person to go by.

From his post though, it looks like he is a bit disillusioned with Matrox and his reasoning for this is very fair. Do note however that a lot of his issues come from annoying things from the original Parhelia that are fixed in the Px50 and P8X. At least I think so.

One thing to consider when listening to me as well is that I do not have nice monitors... an old 19" and the occasional crap 14"LCD to go alongside it. My dad has a Geforce 2 MX (iirc most ppl agree it has appalling IQ) with a nice Eizo monitor and it is perhaps a similar experience to look at. So if you have good monitors, then perhaps the difference is not so great. But from 9700 Pro to P650 on my main monitor there was a great IQ jump. Even games like Subspace (old DX6 multiplayer game) look way better on the P650 somehow.

One thing to not expect is good Gaming experiences, at least on a P650. Sure it can run things if you mess with config files (especially DX9 games), but there is often corruption, for instance the well-known hyperspacing nasty whiteness in Homeworld2 with Fragment antialiasing. However, how many problems have other gfx manufacturers also had? My bro's 9800 Pro also has a Homeworld2 bug where it slows to 2-3fps if he zooms in too far... wierd.

As for 3D, well I honestly only do some 3DS Max work and then export it to Shockwave 3D. No real bugs there. A gig of ram makes viewport mode fast, and a fast CPU makes rendering fast... my most complex scene atm has around 60,000 polygons and it rotates/zooms fine in viewport mode even with shading on.

Erm, I did a very quick screenshot of me typing this post for you to see the glyph antialiasing and desktop quality - this is in Mozilla 0.9.3. One of the things that hit me first about the Matrox was little things like the quality of desktop icons... maybe I'm a fool but maybe they look nicer than with NVidias in the attached image.

There are other things, like my other current post about Winamp Visualisations not working, but again I bet any gfx card has probs like that from time to time.

And one thing about the cost of Matroxes..... well ok take one of my projects atm, I'm getting paid around 3000 GBP for a web project that will take me about a month full-time to complete. To pay 110 of that for a gfx card that helps me with nice image quality and good photoshop speed is nothing to me. I don't give a crap that a cheaper card could play games faster. Oh and photoshop itself is expensive too eh? Well it's like some people want to pay the price of GIMP or Paint Shop Pro and then expect to have Photoshop's features. OK it's a strange analogy but basically I have no problems with the Matrox cost and I am happy with the performance. Oh and it's passively cooled too, so it's quiet. (Note, P750 and Parhelia have fans)

Dghost speaks the truth and many people are disillusioned with Matroxes, I am just speaking for the others who aren't.

....

Btw have you considered a 3DLabs Wildcat? I was but chickened out of getting a card that someone described would 'break windows' if I played games in it. Maybe you could be braver than me?

[DGhost]

Yeah, you could call me one of the disillusioned Matrox users.

I understand that problems exist in products from time to time. I have no issues with that. My gripe is when a company releases a $400 ""professional"" card and refuses to acknowledge the problems, let alone fix them.

the P8X did fix a lot of problems with the original P. Unfortunately, it is also what the original P should have been. Matrox, in their all-knowing wisdom, continued to sell and market the P because they knew it would sell in certain circles just because of their name. despite the *obvious* problems that existed with it - the banding problems, the fact the DVI outputs cannot run at different resolutions, the fact that a number of retail cards shipped at the wrong clock speeds, the BIOS graphics mode problems, TV Output issues, etc etc.

as far as comparing the driver related issues to other manufacturers... if other manufacturers had problems with almost every single game that came out *and* took their sweet ass time in fixing them, i could see those companies having problems as well. if you take a video card from ATI or NVidia and test it both with the initial drivers and a driver set from ~1 year after release, you will notice a difference. in both speed differences and application compatability. sadly, even after the first year hardly anything happened. after the second year things had gotten better, but a lot of things were still unresolved. for a card that cost $400 the support was just not there.

While I do play games from time to time, I am by no means an FPS freak. I prefer products that work to ones that I have to fiddle with. I am not against spending extra money to get a product that has quality to it. sadly, Matrox completely failed with the original P. the P650/750/8x are all supposed to fix a lot of the initial issues, which would be nice, but personally they are not worth spending the money on.

yeah... i'm slightly disillusioned...

oh, that screen shot looks like GlyphAA (or ClearType for that matter) is disabled. screenshot attached of what ClearType looks like, and if I recall correctly GlyphAA was just a hardware implementation of ClearType...

[XHotKolaX]

Originally posted by DGhost
oh, that screen shot looks like GlyphAA (or ClearType for that matter) is disabled. screenshot attached of what ClearType looks like, and if I recall correctly GlyphAA was just a hardware implementation of ClearType...

On a tangent:

Not quite the same. Gylph AA is usually only noticable on really big fonts. On our regular ones it looks like window's default even when you pull it to the extreme. It does some very slight clean up of letters to me.

Clear type kinda..I dunno. I see too much red and blue when clear type is on. Makes me feel as if I'm dizzy all the time.

edit: I'm one of those that won't be using Matrox for much longer for all the issues already outlined.

[Nowhere]

Originally posted by XHotKolaX
...
Clear type kinda..I dunno. I see too much red and blue when clear type is on. Makes me feel as if I'm dizzy all the time.
...

That's because (AFAIK) it's meant for LCD displays.

[DGhost]

yes it was. and even on LCD's it looks like ass.

[leech]

Cleartype vs. GlyphAA; No comparison. Cleartype plainly sucks, both of them only affect fonts that are 12pt or greater (maybe it was 14pt. or greater, I forget, it was a while ago that I did the comparison) but yes, if you zoom in on them, the Cleartype one uses red in a black font, whereas the GlyphAA is nice and black with grey to round out the letters. Much like the Font AA that is in GTK.

I have an Unmodded Parhelia 4x 128MB Retail for sale, if you are interested. Been meaning to sell it for a while. I can even burn you a disk with all the latest drivers on it, plus the .Net 1.1 so it'll be easier to install, rather than the quite old drivers that are on the CD.

Leech

[Whirl-Secret]

Further info here about cleartype vs GAA:

http://hardware.mcse.ms/message65270.html

no doubt there is more info in these forums too. Interestingly, looking at my screenshot with my laptop (intel integrated gfx) it doesn't seem as nice as with the CRT and Matrox on the other comp, but oh well.

I'm no hardware expert. Even if it's just a placebo I have to admit that imho GAA is nice When I get the money from that project above I'll buy some nicer monitors and then will have a better opinion I guess.

[Amiga Blitter]

sorry for the wrong post