GeForce problems

[digiflow]

I heard a while back from somewhere that the GeForce (I know this is a Matrox forum, but I thought you guys would prob be up ona all video stuffs) has problems when it gets hot. How true is this, as I am bored with my G400 Max playing worse than a 2D card under Win2K.

[Muad'Dib]

Well, at least he started nicely and made the rant part short....

Dimitri

[WarFlail]

This raises an interesting side-point, though. Does nVidia have a support forum like MURC? Every single problem that I have had with my G400 has been quickly resolved by the extremely helpful assistance from MURCers, but if I "got bored" with my G400 and decided to get a GeForce2 GTS and started having problems (as I am sure I will), who could I turn to for help?

Obviously, I would rather have a graphics card that works flawlessly and therefore doesn't *need* a forum to resolve any issues, but I haven't had anything like that since I had a Canopus Pure3D II... Modern cards these days, I don't know... :-)

-=W=-

[Thundrchez]

I had (note past tense) a GeForce 256 (Guillemot 3D Prophet, 32MB, SDR) video card for a while. I did not have any heat related problems when running it at the default core & memory clock speed. When overclocking it, though, it was a bit more tricky to get it to its max stable clock speed, and it was very finickey about the temperature.

IMHO, you should not be running w2k for a gaming platform. It just ain't there yet. I know that w9x is an unstable, unprotected piece of crap, but it is the best pc gaming platform in terms of driver support & game compatability. Someday w2k may get there, but it ain't today.

[Saud]

I got bored too and got the Leadtek GTS2. It is fast in the 3D department, and I haven't had any heat issues. The Leadtek has a HUGE heatsink though. I do miss the dual head feature, and it doesn't have envirement bump mapping.

I will never sell the G400, I Like the best of both worlds, the G400 is in my other system.

[heman]

I have a G400 as well as a GeForce2 (Elsa Gladiac 32meg DDR). While the scores in 3DMark are impressive for the GeForce2, the G400 plays just as well for UnrealTournament IMHO. The machine with the GeForce is unstable and frequently locks up (this machine was rock solid when it had the G400 - IT NEVER CRASHED). At over 1/2 the cost of the GeForce, the G400 ROCKS!!!! As soon as I can find a sucker for the the "crasher", I'm gonna get another G400.
Unless you are a 3dMark egomaniac, the G400 is the card to use!!!!!!

[digiflow]

The reason I am using Win2K is (a) it's better for most things I want to do (I am a sysadmin, and Win2K is better than the alternative of NT...) and (b) I have a dual processor system, and (c) Win9x is crap.
Under Win2K, it is impossible to say that a g400 plays as well as a geforce. On my dual 500 celery system, G400 Max, with the latest beta drivers (I have tried both 5.06 and 5.10), I get about 20 fps in Q3A in normal at 640x480.
I have another system using Win2K and a TNT2 M64 and a PIII 450, which pulls about 40 fps at the same resolution.
Now tell me that the G400 is better - and this time mention the drivers -Detonator 2 make Matrox's efforts look (as they are) appalling.

[dZeus]

the P3's SSE instructions would help the framerate a lot with your G400, since it is very PCU dependant.... the SMP capability (don't read compatibility) feature has been put in the drivers only in the latest revision I think... so after some more revisions you will see a performance increase with the SMP system...

[Snake-Eyes]

Hehe. By now you've received my ICQ messages on your post, heman. All I can really say is this- you either need to do some rework on the system you've got the Elsa in, or you were smoking some strong stuff when you compared the cards, hehe.

The G400s still have better color vibrancy than the Elsa's (at least, my Max does). But I think that if you wanted to, you could spend a few hours playing with gamma adjustments to get the same kinds of output from the GTS cards. Not that you should have to. IMHO, Matrox pays much more attention to this issue, so that their cards are nearly perfect out of the box in this area.

However, framerate wise (games and benchmarks), my Elsa is LOTS faster than my Max. I get 10-15 more frames per second with my Elsa and all the same settings that I used with the Max and UT. What's more, I had to play strictly at 800x600 with the Max with all the goodies I like to see turned on. With the Elsa (this was BEFORE upgrading the processor, too), I was able to run it at 1600x1200, and still got maybe 3-5 frames-per-second more than I got with the Max. I play at 1152x864 resolution in UT now- because UT seems to introduce some sort of control lag at the higher resolutions, but the framerates were fine. To top it off, at the moment it renders UT much better than my Max (no texture or z-buffer errors that I've found), and more stably. My Max crashed fairly often (remember me popping in and out of games frequently guys?), but the Elsa seems rock-solid. The only crashes I've had lately seem to be overclock related (processor).

Anyhow, I didn't get the Elsa for benchmarks, I got it for the sheer performance, which allows me to run higher resolutions with the same overall performance. If Matrox just gets moving and releases the G800 soon, I can get back to the color quality too, I hope!

------------------
Ace

[Snake-Eyes]

Just for the record, so those who haven't seen my posts in other topics don't get all riled up (no need for a repeat of that, I hope), I DO still have my Max. I moved it into my other box, along with the P3-450 that has been powering it all this time. It's still too good a card to get rid of. If only it had somewhat more performance than it does, it'd still be in this system, too. I sold the TNT2U (originally given to me by a friend) that was in the second system for $20 so that I could keep the much more valuable Max (similar performance to the TNT2U, but better feature set, as well as overall image quality).

Um, maybe we should halt this conversation in this thread, and if needed, continue it in the General Hardware forum? Seems we've gotten a little too far off track, right?



------------------
Ace