Flat panel add-on

[Meek]

Hi.

I would like to hear if anyone has experience with the G400 flat panel add-on, and getting it to actually work with different digital interface panels. I am asking because as a result of not too happy things happening in the environment, there is now a 15 inch DFP TFT display connected to a PC via an 4 MB ATI Rage Pro adapter (my girl friend's machine).

Now, the natural place for this nice display would be with the G400, and I am thinking of buying the flat panel add-on.

I will need to find an adapter (DVI->MBR20) somewhere in this corner of the world for this to work, but will it work in the first place?

I did some digging on the forums, but could not find any success stories...

M.

[Meek]

Nyyh... this is a desparate attempt to keep this on the first page. Any experiences with the flat panel option would be appreciated (G400).

M.

[cjolley]

I'm interested in the answer too.
Keep bringing it up.
Eventualy some rich sob with a flat panel is bound to see it.
chuck

[shrike]

From a rich(no) SOB (yes) - Yes I have purchased the DVI add-on for my G400TV.

DVI to DFP cables can be obtained from Molex (USA) www.molex.com I think.

I have attempted to use my G400TV with a Viewsonic VP151 which has both DFP and analogue inputs. Analogue is fine but I can't get the DFP to work. The VP151 was recognised by plug and pray via the G400 DVI but the Viewsonic reported it wasn't receiving a signal so no display.

I'm hoping the problem was due to a faulty feature connector on the G400 which I found to be coming away from the card.

However, there may be incompatibility problems or less than full compliance with DVI/DFP standards by suppliers. A COMDEX review of the Viewsonic by CRN (www.crn.com)reported that the first graphics card they tried with it wouldn't work.

[jauhal]

Another rich snob chimes in....

I purchased my Marvel G400 a month ago. I already owned a Princeton Graphics DPP800 Digital Flat Panel. It's an 18" flat panel and I love it. I got the Marvel because it seemed like a worthy graphics card to drive such a fine monitor. I purchased a DVI to MDR20 converter from Matrox, I plugged everything in, and it worked great. Great performance, and a wonderful picture.

That is untill I tried running at screen resolutions other than the native 1280x1024 of the monitor. The graphics card does not scale the image thus an 800x600 image takes up only 800x600 pixels of the 1280x1024 image. This would not be a problem for me, but all of the kids games exhibit this problem because they are all written for lower resolutions. More recent games with DirectX support work because it does the scaling.

I contacted Matrox, and basically their response was, that's how the card works. Previously I had an ATI Xpert LCD card that drove the monitor. It worked fine, and performed scaling in the card to always drive the image to full screen size. I don't know if the scaling was hardware or software, I only know it worked, and worked well. Personally I feel this is a real limitation of the card.

The only other gripe I have is that you cannot get TV out because the Flat Panel add on is connected via the 2nd feature port. But, I new this going in to the purchase and am willing to live with it.

Don't get me wrong I love the card, it just seems like they should have thought about this stuff during the design phase.

SJ

[Haig]

Hi Jauhal,

If you can get the DVI specs, you can look on page 16 section 2.2.8.2 and you'll see that it is the responsibility of the monitor to do the scaling.

Haig



[This message has been edited by Haig (edited 20 February 2000).]

[Meek]

Interesting information, Haig. Now, if only I could figure out if my monitor does the hw-scaling or not... Was it also part of DFP specification? DVI was supposed to be backwards compatible, you know...

M.

[Diddl]

Maybe a stupid question but why can't DVI be used with TV-out? Now that the first 'digital' monitors are about to hit the market it would make sence to use the DVI interface for the primary monitor and still being able to enjoy TV-out for DVDMax.

Regarding thr scaling I thought that the G400 had a great scaling engine which is already used for TV-out. Why isn't this used for DVI?

[Meek]

Well, checked the flat panel add-on specs, and it says it does "full scaling to panel's native resolution on all D3D titles". Hmm. So only OpenGL and and non-3d applications are not scaled?

M.