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How about that for an unusual turn of events?
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Read more.Quote:
How about that for an unusual turn of events?
Finally! I was worried for a moment that my life would continue without the legendary driver support of Matrox!
I HOPE THEY DIE IN A FIERY PIT OF HELL.
My finely attuned Moose senses tell me,someone is slightly annoyed in this thread.
Still use them occasionally for the niche they seem to have filled.
Reminds me of the old G200+SLI Voodoo days though!
Some investment banks standardised on them decades ago, back when you only had one AGP slot, they would use PCI Matrox cards, because screw logic!Quote:
Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH
These cards could drive 4 or 8 screens each (I think 8 might have been the AGP only actually). Impressive for the time.
However, they didn't maintain or keep up to date their hardware or software. DirectX has a 2D component, I used this in my application because I wanted a fast graphing experiance, handling some many thousand ticks of data, updating in real time.
I found out that it was blue screening, all the time, as soon as I used certain APIs which they claimed to support.
In the end, I opted out of rendering via DirectX subsystems all together, using GDI+ which is incredibly slow.
I then made the mistake of raising a ticket with a very large banks desktop support team. Now, desktop support in this place I figured where just incompetent and nothing would come of it. But oh no, they proved that they had to go and be the Yodel of people, trying to prove that that they were correct to be still using matrox in 2012. ARGH, whats worse than a fornicationwit, one that is trying to suggest that the one thousand graphics cards they just ordered were not a mistake. I mean, who cares, that's like half a million quid, they wasted that on a daily basis, just replace them with something that works. No, they didn't like that. So imagine driving 8 screens without hardware acceleration.
Matrox drivers were awful, they claimed to support features which resulted with instant bluescreen on XP and Win7.
Oh I forgot to say, in 2008 I did a test to show how awful matrox cards were, and why having them on your PC is like having a virus.
Matlab. Not renowned for doing anything graphical, in fact, in my test, I didn't. It's just the hedge fund I was working for had a very important board member who used this application a lot.
So I swapped out the matrox card, for my ATI thing from my home media PC, rebooted, and ran the same matlab calcaulations again. 5 hours dropped to under 4. More extensive tests showed it took over 10% of performance away.
Matrox - Not even once.
Well back in the days of agp they where one of the rare ways you could run 4 to 8 independent displays off one pc, so you where often stuck with matrox.
Heck even back in the mid 90's performance was something that was done by other companies, not matrox, they've always cultivated a "professional" image and focused their drivers to work on specific bits of software and ignore anything else. (note, not work well but just work)
Then they rely on that "professional" image to sell overpriced hardware and sloppy drivers to people who think they are good because of the high cost and the image.
One thing I'd like to take issue with is the opening paragraphin the mid 90's nvidia wasn't a large company or a major player in the graphics, it wasn't really until 1999 with the release of the first geforce and working with microsoft on the xbox development that nvidia really took off and grewQuote:
The graphics market has changed significantly since the mid-1990s when it was populated by four large companies: 3DFX, ATI, Matrox and Nvidia.
Back is the mid 90's the 4th major player in the graphics market was S3
Riva TNT2 was pretty huge in my mind. But I guess that was very late 90s.
It was priced very aggressively too.
My first 3D games card was a Rendition Verite, as it was cheaper than a Voodoo card, and had a Quake OpenGL driver :)
oh Animus... calm thee self chap.....
It was indeed a decent card for it's time, late98/early99 but it suffered some issues, esp with the early drivers.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheAnimus
If I remember correctly it wasn't that cheap initially, but it was an early example of binning for multiple versions as there was a cheaper Riva TNT2 M64 which had half the memory bandwidth and a slower core due to chip binning/yield issues and the price was dropped later in 99 when the geforce came out.
It was the success of the geforce + the large contract with microsoft for the xbox gpu and the failing of many of the other gpu manufactures that gave nvidia the growth to become the major player in the early 2000's
Reminiscing I still remember my Diamond stealth 3d 2000 Pro in my first pc, and how amazed I was when I first saw the graphics of the original geforce
I had that same GPU in my second PC - unfortunately I didn't know much about PC's back then, and I got a PC from Time in 2001 with it, little realising that is was already two years old, and that it was soldered onto the motherboard, so I had zero upgrade options due to no spare AGP slot. It was ok ish initially with pre-2000 games, but painfully slow with most things. I remember I had to turn the settings down on Deus Ex to get it to run smooth.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pob255