OK people... what would you like to see from the next Matrox card?

[Goc]

Any suggestions?!?!

[cjolley]

At the risk of repeating myself.

chuck

PS. OK, DuRaNgO, now it's got QuadHead



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ABit BH6 w/ Celery 333@500, 128mb gh@cas2, 10gb IBM@7200, SB Live Value@3.0, noname CDRom@40x, Mitsumi CDRW@2x2x8, Zoom@56k, Princeton EO75@1024x768x32x85hz, USB mouse,Matrox G400 MAX!!!!

[DuRaNgO]

jim

[adriant]

I think that T&L is very important, and good T&L at that. You have to remember that not everyone just wants a PC to play games. T&L is the biggest factor that discriminates between High and low end cards, The G400 is basicaly a very god low end card, and 2D is fantastic but it can't hope to keep up with high end cards in 3D aplications. I think in the next couple of years there will be a smaller margin and high end cards will have to come down in price or lose a lot of business.

My dream card is pretty much a faster G400 with good T&L, and after that I really hope some of the companies like Kinetics bring out bump mapping support in 3DS MAX. I am working in the games industry and to have an NT operating system like win2k supporting all the above would make my job as a 3D artist a whole lot more fun and productive

[Himself]

My next card will have either T&L or tile based rendering, but I won't buy until there is good driver support for it. (Rules out G256) If Matrox makes something like that, great, my pennies go to whoever does. A GigaPixel technology card with T&L added would be very cool.

[Unam]

T&L is important, but I would like to see something that scales well. I like 3dfx and ATi's idea of multiple chips. It would be really beneficial to see dual G400's on a single card, each capable of driving a monitor (slightly different version of dual head) or working in tandem on a single monitor. Matrox could easily up the clock speed and upgrade the RAM on the card. Monster fill rates, flexible, scalable and drop dead visuals to boot! I'm still not sold on texture compression (yet) I've seen the S3TC in action and it's okay but why compress textures if you don't have to? A really good AGP implementation and a reasonable amount of on card RAM (32 or 64 MB) should easily do the trick.

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Asus P3B-F1, PIII 600B, 128Mb PC133 RAM, 18.2 KA drive, HP CDRW & Travan drive, SB64PCI, G400.

[Jorden]

Let's have multi-monitor-support

Anyone who doesn't want to play any of his games on a <font size="6">VIDEOWALL ??</font>

Jorden.


[This message has been edited by Jorden (edited 02 December 1999).]

[CrazyBee]

Hmm.. how about both the DACs be the same (I can notice the difference)... dual head with TV out of course... more neat-o-keen effects like EMBM supported..

DVD hardware decoding..
better gamma control for the second head..
next generation processor and, thus, more RAM

availability and good drivers from the start would be a big plus..

CB

[merchant2112]

how about a card that meats all of the anounced specs? oh wait matrox is the only one to come close to that one. good drivers, t&l that blows away every thing ect...

hey matroxs drivers are getting better and they do have hard ware that just rocks.

oh my god i just sarted playing drakan again (now with the patch) i cant beleave how good it looks.

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my system has arived. all together and if i new about the usb bug in 98 with this board i would have been fiished a lot sooner.

msi 6167 mobo k7 500 wk41 now at 650.(not overclocked its a real 650 they underclcoked.) 256 meg ram ,addtronics case w 250watt sp power supply, matrox g400, maxtor diammax 2500+ 10gig hd,10x aopen slot dvd, 3com 10/100 nic and 56k ext modem, xitel p storm sound card. lots of controlers joystick throttle rudder raceing wheel, and 19in monitor, usb logitech mouse.

i found the fix for the mouse hang problem.





[This message has been edited by merchant2112 (edited 02 December 1999).]

[Goc]

Right on CB!

I've seen someone on the forums say something about Quad head

Of course T&L support would really come in handy... if for nothing else then to take away those nVidia dudes something to brag about (personnaly, I don't see T&L to be such a plus, especially with processor war going on between Intel & AMD - result - cheap & powerful processors).
Matrox! Implement some kind of texture compression method, and give us full AGP 4x.

And in the meantime Big M, try sticking couple of G400's together... It seems to be working for 3dfx and ATI...

[Fyrespray]

Ack multi chips no thanks if u have multi chips you have to split the memory on the card between evey chip. Keep doing a good old one chip solution thats what I say. T&L sounds nice as well i have to say but tbh i think Matrox have got their gfx quality bang on atm what i'd like to see in the next generation is then continuing to give up the best image quality of an card out there and also the performance to shut up all those nvidia owners out there : )

Fyrespray

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Celery 366 @ 550,Abit BM6, 128Mb PC100 Ram, G200 8Mb, AWE64 Gold, Win98SE.

[Goc]

hey Unam... I think texture compression is a really good thing. It's not because you can put lots of textures into your memory (of course that is a big plus too), but beacuse you can have a card with TC and 8 megs doing everything like a 32 meg one without TC...

And really, what do you think what makes all recent boards cost 200 - 300 $ perhaps more?
It's the memory chips! So I think that TC is really a BIG deal, since it can take the performance/price value to totally new heights

What do you think is cheaper: 8 or 64 Mb?

P.S.
I don't say there shouldn't be 64 megs on a single board... Put it on, but give us a cheaper choice too!

[IceStorm]

I want:

- QuadHead support, definitely, with each head equiped with a 400Mhz RAMDAC.

- QuadHead FLAT PANEL support.

- T&L engine on-board.

- 2 Gigapixels/sec fill rate with multitexturing, minimum, AND hardware antialising.

- 128 to 256MB of SGRAM on-board.

- I want the card to LOOK like one display to the PC, and have the HARDWARE do the screen divying up, so you can game with all four monitors at once, using the TurboGL. :-)

- I want to be able to set the resolution/depth SEPARATELY for each head when operating in "2D" mode (desktop of Windows).

- I want FULL Linux support for the extra outputs.

That's what I want, and I'm willing to pay $750 for it.


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Primary System: Athlon 550, MSI 6167 mb w/BIOS 1.3, 3x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, G400 MAX in multi-monitor mode, Two Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 900u monitors, Intel Pro/100+ Management Adapter, SoundBlaster Live!, DeskTop Theater DTT2500 DIGITAL Speaker System (Sweeeeeet!), WDC WD20 5AA 20GB HD, WD AC310100 10GB HD, Toshiba SD-M1212 6x DVD-ROM, HP 8100i CD-RW, Epson Stylus Pro, OptiUPS PowerES 650, MS SideWinder Precision Pro USB joystick, Gravis Xterminator gamepad (no DX7 drivers yet), Logitech 3-button mouse, Mitsumi keyboard, Win98 SE, Belkin OmniCube 4-port KVM, 10/100 5-port Linksys Ethernet switch, Epson 1200u scanner, Epson Stylus Pro printer, Logitech QuickCam Pro with the little stand and the lense kit (cool).

Secondary System: PIII-450, Soyo 6BA+ IV, 1x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, Millennium G200 AGP, V2 SLI rig, Intel Pro/100+ Management Adapter, SoundBlaster 32, WD AC41800 18GB HD, Creative Dxr3 DVD decoder card, Hitachi GD-2500 6x DVD-ROM, Win98 SE

Tertiary System: PII-266, Asus P2B BIOS 1008, 1x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, Millennium II, 3Com 3C905, 3Com 3C509, ADSL Modem 640kbit down/90kbit up, Mylex BT-930 SCSI card, Seagate 2GB Hawk, Seagate 1GB Hawk, Quantum DLT 4000 tape drive, NEC 6x CD-ROM, Linux distro S.u.S.E. 6.1 (IP Masquerade works!)

Quaternary System: Ocean Rhino 9 motherboard w/Intel 430HX chipset, P200MMX, 4x64MB EDO Parity RAM, Millennium II, 3Com 3C590, SoundBlaster 16 MCD, Fujitsu 3.5GB HD, WD 1.2GB HD, Haven't chosen an OS yet.

And a JetDirect EX print server that bootp's its address from the Tertiary System.

All specs subject to change.

-The pessimist says: "The glass is half empty."
The optimist says: "The glass is half full."
The engineer says: "I put half of my water
in a redundant glass."

[This message has been edited by IceStorm (edited 03 December 1999).]

[Unam]

Hey Goc, I agree with your comment about cost, my thoughts were I've seen S3TC in action and it looks no better than what I already get with my G400. I don't know what costs are associated with licensing TC from S3 are but RAM is still cheap. (Unless you are buying RAMBUS #$%@#%$$%@!!!)

[This message has been edited by Unam (edited 03 December 1999).]

[KvHagedorn]

Alright, why do you need or want Quad-Head?? just because it is more? Get normal. I would like to see the dual head feature refined in this way: 2 separate outputs, each with its own RAMDAC and memory, with both having performance greater than the present G400 MAX. In addition, an s-video or perhaps third HD15 output specifically for TV-out. That's the way that should work.

Add T&L, faster processors, and more and faster memory, and you've got it!

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Kind Regards,

KvH



[This message has been edited by KvHagedorn (edited 04 December 1999).]