New openGL drivers for NT, when ?

[Galvin]

Curious if anyone knows when matrox will update the openGL drivers for NT. Last update was over 2 months ago now.

[PaulS]

The voice of experience says:

"Get use to it".

NT has never been very high on the priority list.

Paul

[orangejulius]

Umm.. Before the G200+ series, it seemed NT was *very* high on the driver priority list.

In fact, back then, Matrox was one of the few manufacturers with quality NT drivers!

[Ant]

Quite right NT was always a very high priority for Matrox before the G200, the NT drivers used to be better than the Win 9x drivers. Those were the days

[Scytale]

NT support was why I bought my first Matrox board (Millenium classic), and it was the reason for promoting this board professionaly.
Matrox was simply the best NT solution, drivers were far better than alternative solutions.

The sad thing is that Matrox had to jump the W95/3D band wagon, and NT support has been reduced to the bare minimum. In all those years the only added feature has been the not so funky ICD.

We have to face it, at this time competition has cought up and offers a better (more feature packed, more complete) NT solution.

[PaulS]

I guess this is what happens when manufacturers concentrate too hard on OEM markets. Unless 2000 takes off as a mass market OS, then I can't see anything changing soon.

There is another thread running about some inaccurate info and benchmarks posted by 3D Labs. I checked out the site, and was not interested much in the Permedia cards, but one of the Oxygen series has a RRP of US$299 and a street price under $239. It has a full OpenGL ICD, with SSE and SMP optimisations, as well as DX7 support under 2000 (now!).

I emailed them, and hopefully they will put up an (accurate) comparison between the G400 MAX and this card.

Has anybody tried one of these cards? What is the 2D quality like, especially at high resolutions? How does the ICD compare to Matrox's?

Paul

[Scytale]

I don't know why 3DLabs resorted to those stupid lies on their site. Pretty moronic, really.

However their Permedia series boards used to be very nice NT vehicles. I haven't tried the Permedia 3, but I expect that it will be a great solution for general purpose NT workstations and occasional CAD. Unless 3DLabs screwed up with the P3, OpenGL will be excellent, it's their field of expertise.

The Oxygen cards are typical CAD boards. The GVX1 looks pretty impressive...