Matrox has layed off 10% of its work force.

[Rags]

I have stated my problems with ATI's win2k drivers on this forum before, but they mainly are with the overall 2D performance and stability while running VS4.

Rags

[SmellYfeeT]

I have had a Rage 128 all-in-wonder for two years now, and it still has itty bitty glitches. Lets not talk about when I bought it, cause nothing was working and they kept updating their stupid drivers every week to fix a problem one by one. So after 2 years, I guess they have got it close to acceptable. That said, I have a Matrox Millenium II , in my old system that is still kicking around for 4 1/2 years and NO problemo! Not even from the first day I had any problem with that. That is why if I need a Gaming card , I will wait for the next card but since I don't I am going to get a G550-Marvel in a 2 month time

I really don't understand why some people are so pissed off at Matrox for not making a Gaming Card sooner. Why don't you just go and buy another card that will feed your need! I know that Matrox has scrapped a really big project which if had made its way into the market would be the biggest thing. But it didn't because it was too expensive and I guess late as usual. and lets keep in mind that Ram prices have never been this low, so Matrox can now make a huge chip and still be able to sell it at a reasonable profit since the majority of the cost is not the Ram anymore and is the graphics chip itself. Where as 2 years ago Ram prices were so high that it really didn't make sense producing a big graphics chip.

Why am I talking about this anyway! I write too much when I;m sleepy

My point is , yeah, ATI sucks. Matrox rules

[GT98]

I agree that ATI's Drivers suck big time. I had a AIW Radeon before I got my Kyro 2 and the biggest bitch I had with it is that it seemed that everytime I tweeked something for a particular game, it would FUBAR up all the other games! I ditched the Card a couple months ago for my Kyro 2 and I couldn't be happier! I switched over to W2K mainly because of this card and its performance it offered in W2k compaired to other products out there.

I had a system that I put together for a friend that had a GF2 Ultra in it and yeah it was super smooth in games and what not, but anything above 1024x768 on my monitor would give me headaches! There was HUGE differance in quaitly between that Asus GF2 Ultra and my G400 Max I was running at the time.

I've owned a G200 Marvel and a G400MAX, in my current system and I really want to put another Matrox Product in my next system. But if they don't have anything to offer that suits my needs by the time I get it I'll be happy with the Kyro till they do!

If you decide to goto the "dark side" in graphics cards theres no reason not to stop visiting here. The group of people here are second to none if you run into any problems computer wise.

Scott

[Alec]

This is an excerpt form emulators.com about ATI cards:


"ATI Video Cards - AVOID THEM! Use nVidia instead.

As anyone who has visited our web site in the past few years knows, we have warned against the use of ATI video cards. Since the release of Windows 98 two years ago, every RAGE PRO, RAGE II, and RAGE LT video card that I have tested suffers from serious problems. The bugs aren't in the video cards themselves, since under NT they tend to work just fine. The bugs appears to be with the Windows 98 (and Windows Millennium) video drivers.

The bugs will manifest themselves in any number of ways:

*

Fonts are corrupted. Fonts are displayed italicized when the should not be, or bolded when they should not be. This bug is documented on ATI's web site and as they say, there is no fix for this. We have reproduced this problem in both Windows 98 and Windows Millennium using various ATI video cards in common Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Works. No other video card that we have tested shows this bug. The bug also does not appear under NT or Windows 2000.
*

Black screen. This is one of the most frequent product support questions that we receive here at Emulators. People install SoftMac or Gemulator, and then report getting only a blank window. In just about every single case, when we ask the customer what video card they have, you guessed it, ATI. There are two workarounds. 1) our new SoftMac 2000 8.0 and Gemulator 2000 8.0 releases specifically have a fix for this, although it does slow down the video output. In 8.0 the fix is an option that can be turned on an off. 2) Windows 98 users need to merely download the updated drivers from ATI's web site instead of using the ones that came with Windows 98. Again, this bug does not occur with any other brand of video cards that we've tested.
*

Corrupted screen output. Again, a problem that can be fixed on most ATI cards by simply downloading the latest ATI video driver, although we've seen this bug appear in Internet Explorer 5.0 even using the latest drivers. The problem is that ATI's video drivers seem to have an internal limit on the size of a bitmap that can be "blitted", or copied from memory to the screen. Beyond some threshold, the bitmap will be either corrupted or simply display as black. This bug occurs both in Gemulator 2000 and SoftMac 2000 when Zoom is enabled, when in a monochrome video mode, and when displaying large bitmaps in Internet Explorer. Ironically, the bug occurs when viewing ATI's own web site!


I know ATI is a popular brand of video card, that it's built in to most notebook computers, but it is simply unacceptable for ATI to ignore such serious problems. They've known about the bugs for over 2 years, they've acknowledged them, yet only fixed one of the bugs and only in some drivers. This is simply not good enough, as I call on everyone to boycott purchasing any further ATI video cards. Buy a Number Nine card, buy a Creative Labs card, buy a 3dfx Voodoo card, but do not buy ATI.

RADEON - just as stupid as before

A number of people have asked me about ATI's newer 128-bit RADEON cards. I've gone out and purchased two of these cards, one with the built-in TV tuner and one without, and I have to say, ATI is still up to its old game of writing buggy and unstable drivers. Using the 4.12 video driver included on the ATI driver CD-ROM, the test machines randomly lock up, especially during disk I/O. Perusing ATI's web site a few days ago, I saw that random lockups are a "known problem" of the RADEON cards, and that ATI now has a version 4.13 driver for download. So I downloaded the 12 megabytes of 4.13 driver.

As with past ATI offerings, the RADEON video drivers are too brain dead to upgrade themselves, as is almost always the case with any other device driver from any other company. No, as usual, ATI tells you to uninstall your original ATI video driver, reboot the machine using the default VGA driver, then install the new driver. If you ignore this advice, you're hosed. The 4.13 installer literally barfs and tells you to uninstall your existing driver.

So here's the tickler. After running ATI's own "Uninstall ATI Video Driver" utility and rebooting the computer in standard VGA mode using the default VGA.DRV driver, the 4.13 installer STILL barfs and refuses to install, giving me the same error message about having to install the plain VGA driver.

Folks, this is just nonsensical bullshit. ATI is one of the world's largest makers of video cards, yet after how many years they are INCAPABLE of writing a simple easy to use installer, they are incapable of figuring out how to update a video driver on-the-fly as most other companies do, and they take YEARS to fix basic bugs in their video drivers.

After blowing $299 on this most recent ATI RADEON All-In-Wonder Pro video card, my opinion of ATI has not changed. AVOID ATI VIDEO CARDS or you'll just blow a lot of money and waste hours rebooting your computer. If this is something you like to do with your life, be my guest. But I have any number of other video cards from other manufacturers installed that work out of the box and don't crash or require driver upgrades every month. It's your choice to take my advice or keep supporting a brain dead company like ATI."

http://www.emulators.com/secrets.htm

[The Rock]

What a load of pure CRAP. I had a Geforce 2 before I got the Radeon, and had TONS more lockups with the GF2 than I do now. Any website dumb enough to say that an entire company sucks is not to be trusted. Hell, there is no such thing as bug-free drivers these days. Matrox has bugs, as does Nvidia, as does any Kyro 2 or any ATI card. I'm not buying into that crap until I see these supposed problems on my own system, which I haven't. I *do* get the odd lockup with Soldier of Fortune when I turn on EAX sound, but thats minor and seemingly NOT ATI-related. If you owned a Radeon, and had all sorts of problems, fine; your entitled to your own opinion. But to blindly bash a card by posting some crap from a website is foolish. This Radeon is the best card I have owned since my G400. If they were as buggy as you people say, it wouldn't be doing so well sales-wise.

Bart

[Rags]

Using your logic then the GeForce driver problems you experienced never really happened. I mean after all, if the drivers were crap then no one would buy their cards. Ahhh...but that isn't the case, is it?

Rags

[cbman]

I never had a lock up video wise that wasn't user related (Playing around with the clockspeed settings a little too much)

That was on a G200, TNT2, GF2, and Onboard Video, and an ATI Rage Original, and a SIS 6326

But I have seen it happen before...

Oh well.. There are lots of things I see at work that I haven't seen personnally on any of my systems... (Mainly because its broken when its come into the shop)

[The Rock]

Rags:

Touche. What I *should* have said was that I haven't seen these problems. I know all video cards have some issues, but the point I badly attempted to make was that I'm sick and tired of people bashing ATI based on OLD reputations of horrible drivers which don't exist anymore. ATI is doing pretty damn well on the driver front. Not perfect, but they have a bigger better driver team now than they had in years past. Plus, the updates are more frequent. Overall, I don't think anyone who had a Rage 128 a few years back, and who has used a Radeon for more than 2 days, can argue that point. I understand that Athlon users have MUCH more difficulty with the Radeon than us Intel people, but I can't say that its all ATIs fault since I'm Athlon-illiterate.

Bart
P.S. I'm really not an ATI zealot, but this "blind bashing with no factual backup" gets real annoying.

[Greebe]

I'll stop bashing ATI when they refund the money I invested in past product crapage. In my book three strikes and your out... and that was a long time ago. I could really care less if they have improved their drivers today, when knowing that at least a little of my money floated them til they pulled their heads out and fixed the issues. Did they care about me (and all the others) then, hell no, why should we care now?!

If you don't like the additude then blame them... they started it... we're just finishing it.

Just my 2 cents

[Rags]

Originally posted by The Rock
Rags:

Touche. What I *should* have said was that I haven't seen these problems. I know all video cards have some issues, but the point I badly attempted to make was that I'm sick and tired of people bashing ATI based on OLD reputations of horrible drivers which don't exist anymore. ATI is doing pretty damn well on the driver front. Not perfect, but they have a bigger better driver team now than they had in years past. Plus, the updates are more frequent. Overall, I don't think anyone who had a Rage 128 a few years back, and who has used a Radeon for more than 2 days, can argue that point. I understand that Athlon users have MUCH more difficulty with the Radeon than us Intel people, but I can't say that its all ATIs fault since I'm Athlon-illiterate.

Bart
P.S. I'm really not an ATI zealot, but this "blind bashing with no factual backup" gets real annoying.

Rock, If you took any of my postings as ATI bashing, you are mistaken. I was just stating fact. ATI put out crap cards with crap drivers and no support. Along comes Radeon and they sell like hotcakes. Now I hear all these pissing and moaning freaks saying that if Matrox doesn't announce something they will leave for good...blah blah blah. I don't buy it. If/when Matrox releases another world beater, then people will still buy it, especially considering their excellent support, good quality, and EXCELLENT drivers (on their consumer video cards, no comment on their video editing consumer cards).

Then you said that there are no problems with the ATI drivers when me, and many others on a VC++ mailing list have all the same issues that have yet to be addressed (5+ months now!!!). ATI may, in fact, be improving in gaming, but I think they are neglecting win2k in other ways that many cannot afford to settle with. As always your mileage may vary, offer not good in Puerto Rico, must be 18 or older to confirm order, actual specs may vary, and viewable area is less than screen size.

Rags

[The Rock]

Rags:

Actually, all that anti-ATI-bashing stuff wasn't directed at you, but at the post where someone quoted an online source bashing ATI. For the record, I pray to god that Matrox drops a bomb that has some speed. If they do, I'll sure buy one. I miss that Matrox 2D.

Bart

[Alec]

Hey, The Rock,

I was not bashing ATI personally when I posted that excerpt. I don´t care about ATI at all. I was reading this thread and remembered that article... so I posted it, cause I felt that the guy knew what he was talking about. I was actually CONTRIBUTING to the discussion.


Oh, and that someone is me (Alec).

[The Rock]

Alec:

Didn't mean to pick a fight, but that guy who wrote that article didn't sound like he knew his stuff AT ALL. He whines that ATI cards have problems with CONSOLE emulators?!?! Now THATS rich; I'm willing to bet the people who code emulators dont have much of a QC department. And he says "buy Nvidia instead", which is idiot clue #2. He sounds like yet another web-dork whos been anally greased by free Nvidia cards. I wasn't taking issue with you Alec, but the guy who wrote that ridiculous rant.

Bart

[cbman]

You trying to say that Nvidia cards now come with anal grease... hmmm... good thing I got rid of mine...

I can see the application instructions now.

[Greebe]

good thing I got rid of mine...

and that's coming from a newly wed, held off at the pass with only two desktops and no lap (dance) top in the forseeable future?