Review of the Matrox G450 For Linux

The Evil Dwarf from Hell writes "Hardware sites for the most part concentrate their reviews of new equipment for the Windoze OS. AnandTech has a head to head review of the Linux drivers for the GeForce2 MX and the Matrox G450. The GeForce2 MX dominates in the test scores, but the G450 is interesting in its ability to use 2 monitors simultaneously. A single desktop that is 3840x1280 is incredible."

Comments

Re:Are the MATROX drivers open source as well?

[SquadBoy]

AFAIK, The matrox drivers have been OSS from almost the start. On the other hand the EULA from Nvidia says this. "No Reverse Engineering. Customer may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE, nor attempt in any other manner to obtain the source code. No Separation of Components. The SOFTWARE is licensed as a single product. Its component parts may not be separated for use on more than one computer, nor otherwise used separately from the other parts. No Rental. Customer may not rent or lease the SOFTWARE to someone else." This is sad because I really like their chipsets and would love to use them but on those machines where video is important I don't feel I can because I simply can not think of any reasons for using closed source for mission critical applications. I *really* wish that Nvidia would open their drivers.

Dual Head

[MeowMeow Jones]

So, when you start hitting CTRL+PAGE DOWN, will one monitor shut off while the other instantaneously switches into letterbox mode?

Re:Are the MATROX drivers open source as well?

[twilight]

That's not QUITE true.

Actually, the Matrox drivers are open source, but rely on a closed source library (hallib) to achieve dual head or TV/DVI out. This is because
copyrighted code (by Macrovision) in the library.

So, you can get any Matrox card working with OSS drivers, but if you want dual head, you'll have to link with that library (its distributed in the drivers from their site).

NVIDIA's drivers, on the other hand, are closed source. I regret not bringing this point up in the article actually.

Jeff Brubaker
Linux Tech Writer
Anandtech

Re:Bah

[twilight]

Actually, I wrote the article, the GeForce2 MX DOES support Twin View (the Windows drivers didn't implement it until recently), the card I had was a Twin View capable card, but it's not suppored under XFree86 yet.

Jeff Brubaker
Linux Tech Writer
Anandtech

Re:Bah

[HeUnique]

Hmmm...

I'm looking at the photo's of the 2 cards, and to tell the truth - I don't see on 2 VGA out connectors - only 1 normal VGA and the other which I don't know what it is (DVI?)

So how can you connect 2 SVGA monitors to it?

Heh

[Icebox]

Soon I bet Maxtor will sue Matrox for reengineering their name.

Open/Closed deciding factor for me

[Greyfox]

I've been orphaned by too many companies in the past, and no longer purchase hardware with closed source drivers. When I was upgrading a few months ago, I was interested in both Matrox and Nvidia cards. I did my research, saw that the Matrox drivers were open, and bought the Matrox card despite its slower speeds. I will consider doing business with Nvidia, if they open the source to their drivers.

I would like to also mention that I dashed a query about Linux support for the Matrox rainbow runner off to the contact address on their web page and never got a reply back. So though I like Matrox in general, they get a thumbs down on their customer service from me. I don't think it's too much to expect a timely (or any) reply to an E-Mail query for information, even if the answer is "We don't know."

Re:Bah

[twilight]

haha.. good catch.

Those aren't my pictures actually, I didn't even put them in the article. The "senior editors" added that to break up the text a little bit after I submitted it.

The card I have is actually a Twin View 1 VGA 1 DVI connector card. Anand tried getting it to work with a DVI->VGA adapter and had a lot of trouble. Then again, he only had a few minutes to play with it before I grabbed the thing for the article. :)

Evas, window managers and OpenGL acceleration

[tjwhaynes]

I first came across a few comments by Rasterman on how he was intending to try and lever OpenGL acceleration to render windows in Enlightenment many months ago. This struck me as being a smart way to get true alpha transparency support for the windows/menus/icons and not completely stuff up the CPU with processing by offloading the processing to the GPU. It also opens the doorway to a whole host of fancy, over the top special effects such as spinning, shrinking windows when you iconify them and the fancy transient effects seen in the Mac OS X window manager. This is the first tests I've seen of the actual code, but does anyone know how close the development code is to being an effective OpenGL accelerated window manager?

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Re:Evas, window managers and OpenGL acceleration

[twilight]

It's a LONG way off. Evas is 90% done by the looks of it, and Raster even has the first app using it, Etcher. Check out screenshots on http://www.rasterman.com/

As for EFM and Enlightenment, they're BOTH going to be rewritten and combined. Hopefully enough code will carry over that it won't be THAT major of an effort, but I wouldn't expect to see anything for a while.

The alpha blended, transparent window thing wont work even with Evas due to X limitations. Check out the Render extension though, http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/ -- it'll do it and they almost have it working with normal X servers judging from teh mailing list.

Evas is good for things like actually drawing out the windows. If you've used EFM, you know that it can start slowing down with a lot of icons -- and it should, that's a lot of alpha blending going on. With Evas, every icon will be drawn with hardware acceleration. (evas_test goes from 10fps in Imlib2 software mode to over 100 using OpenGL typically).

Jeff Brubaker
Linux Tech Writer
AnandTech

Re:Evas, window managers and OpenGL acceleration

[spitzak]

Lots of tech problems with this, mostly that the actual child windows and window borders are not controlled by OpenGL. You can draw the desktop and window borders using OpenGL, but the boundaries are going to remain opaque and square (unless you use the shape extension, but then they still lack partial transparency).

I do think a concerted effort should be made to merge the remaining graphics functionality into OpenGL (add TT anti-aliased unicode fonts, arbitrary clipping regions, and the ability to create and transform windows to the glxContext). Then programs could work exclusively in OpenGL and never think about drawing with X. However I mentioned this to Brain Paul once and he seemed to think it was a terrible idea.

Re:Evas, window managers and OpenGL acceleration

[be-fan]

It's a terrible idea because it breaks OpenGL complience. Also, you don't put a windowing system into a graphics library, you do the reverse. The true solution is this. Dump X. Dump the hell out of it. Develop Berlin. You've got your rotating, spinning, OpenGL accelerated windows.

Re:Evas, window managers and OpenGL acceleration

[spitzak]

I do want a merge. We don't have to call it OpenGL.

But I definately want a single "graphics context". It is insane that I have to use totally different code to draw a rectangle in my X window verses my OpenGL window. And for text, OpenGL has a way to specify a position and a color. I think it is entirely illogical that I cannot use these values to control how my text is drawn. Therefore any new way to add text should be added to OpenGL, or we should add *all* of OpenGL to the new "graphics context" that can draw this text.

I would also like to see a high-speed way to draw an image projected through the current transformation. Using OpenGL textures works, but I think there is too much overhead because it assummes the texture will be reused. In the case of a movie or other cg image that will change this is a waste.

For the windowing system I consider this a graphics operation is based on how NeWS worked: when I create a window I need a shape (path), a position (transformation), and a parent window. All of these are attributes of a "graphics context" and thus I again see to reason to not make "create a window" an operation in the graphics context.

We've been had!

[bfree]

Duh Slashdot,

yet again we have provided someone with a rake load of traffic for.....NOTHING.

The linked article is cobbled together review of the g450 for WINDOWS (I haven't looked at the GeForce side) with a cover page discussing Linux. You can see here the trail of where this story came from! The review features lovely snapshots of Windows drivers and it doesn't look like the reviewer has been near X.

I haven't been as happy in a long time as when I saw this story posted (this is essentially the decision I am making in the next fortnight or so baring the Radeon) and to have actually read a document on what you could get out of these under Linux would have been brilliant. Instead I am another person writing a comment about the quality of the posted story on /.

_LINUX_ drivers?

[jaakko]

What the fsck? Who cares about _LINUX_ drivers, the thing I want is _XFREE86_ support. Damn linsuxers.

Please do moderate me down, I'm so terribly wrong about this. Your windowing environment isn't X (what's that?), it's either "KDE" or "Linux".

Re:We've been had! Look Harder!

[tjwhaynes]

The linked article is cobbled together review of the g450 for WINDOWS (I haven't looked at the GeForce side) with a cover page discussing Linux. You can see here the trail of where this story came from! The review features lovely snapshots of Windows drivers and it doesn't look like the reviewer has been near X.

Sorry - you are going to have to swallow your pride a little! Scroll down that page to the base where it has a link to XFree86 background and you will find the rest of the review. Just because there are links to two Windows reviews of the two cards doesn't mean that that is all! :-)

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

3840x1024

[Pooh]

With the release of XF4 i tried to use multiple monitor to get a "unified" desktop using different video card. In 10 minutes i set up a desktop of 3840x1024 with a matrox g400 (single head) agp, a s3 virge pci and a ati rage pci. It's really easy and the result worth the place on the desk : it's fun to have several gnome-terminal tail'ing -f log file and monitoring stuff while leaving place to do something else. Without the need to change the virtual desktop, only by turning the head. And think about GIMP on a resolution like that!

Xinerama is a good thing, but the current architecture can't help us. There is only one AGP slot and available PCI become a problem when a sound and ethernet card are installed. With the speed of new bus a well designed serial bus fast enough to handle video could be used to install serveral screen on it, and the video card could be included inside the screen!

A standard slot inside the screen could be installed inside all future screen to excluded the video card from the main board and giving the choice of the user to use one video card instead of an other... to let USB (or other future bus) monitor be used in a infinite number on the same computer.

Correct article link

[twilight]

Since everyone seems to be reading the wrong article, there must be something counter-intuitive with AnandTech's interface. So here's the direct link.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1322

are BOTH screens fast (accel) now?

[TheGratefulNet]

the 400 was a disaster; only 1 screen was accel'd.

to-date, I have built 3 dualhead systems; all with matrox cards. usually 1 agp and 1 pci. and various flavors of cards, even as old as the millennium-1 4meg pci.

the only time I had X hangs on dualhead/dualcard was with xscreensaver. I think it did evil things to ram when it overwrote buffers ;-( but lately this seems to be fixed. I run production dualhead at work (cannot afford reboots or hangs!) and also at home (same thing: I work at home a lot and need high reliability).

with an agp/pci combo, you can see the speed of bitblts on the agp screen whereas the pci side is a bit slower. but even on my millennium-1 pci side, opaque window moves at 1600x1200x16bpp are still quite usable.

given that you can buy older pci/agp matrox cards for well under $50 ea, its still a good win to use a pair of cards. sucks that I lose a spare pci slot but what the hell - both cards DO run quite fast.

once you get used to dualhead (and xinerama) you never want to go back..

--

Re:are BOTH screens fast (accel) now?

[TheGratefulNet]

You weren't using the kernel's framebuffer drivers were you?

no, just 'regular' old xinerama and xfree 3.9.16 (was the last stable reliable version that seemed to work with any and all matrox cards I owned).

I've had, at various times, millennium 1 and 2, g100, g200 and even a mystyque. my home box has a g200/sgram + millennium-1 and my work box is a g200/sdram + millennium-2.

when I brought my windows friend to work to show him my dualhead display (and actually dragging windows across phys screens) he yawned 'but win* has had that for a long time'. then I typed 'uptime' and showed him 3 months of uptime (since my last hardware change - wasn't linux's fault). that quieted him down a bit ;-)

--

Re:are BOTH screens fast (accel) now?

[TheGratefulNet]

You are talking about the G400's Dual Head feature, right?

sorry, I guess I was a little offtopic. no, I was talking about dual video cards (I did say this in my first posting to this thread).

the dualhead support in xf86 3.9.x was very slow - probably due to the linux frame buffer support in the kernel. but I've heard that dualhead is still better with a pair of cards, even today.

--

Re:Typical Slashdot IGNORANCE: THEY ARE *NOT* OSS

[twilight]

Actually, that's not quite correct. The Matrox drivers released on their site are completely OSS and all changes in them will be incorporated into the next release of XFree86. Hallib, the closed-source library that you mention, is necessary ONLY for Dual Head, DVI and TV out. As distributed with XFree86, the driver will work fine, provide 2D AND 3D acceleration.

The library only handles:
1. Setting the card's clock
2. Initializing screens properly for
TV, DVI or Dual Head output.

This comes straight from a Matrox Linux developer too, by the way.

Consider the Matrox "released" drivers to be nothing more than the code in DRI's CVS tree linked with Hallib. That's not quite accurate, but it's close to the case.

Jeff Brubaker
Linux Tech Writer
AnandTech

while this is nice ..

[josepha48]

.. this may be a little off topic, but not really. I hear alot about video cards and gamers these days. But what about video editing under Linux? No one has mentioned anything about video editing in a while (if at all) and this topic has hit the linux kernel mailing list a few times. I am interested in setting up a new system to do full screen video in from a video camera.

What is the best card to do video camera in to computer capturing? The idea is that I can take a video camera around and get some movie clips. Then I can take those video tapes and get them on my computer as avi or mpeg. Next I'd take them and burn them on cdrom. Or make video email from them. This all can be done under windows and Mac. Any idea if any of this is being done under Linux?

I've tried webcams and they are okay but not as good quality as I am looking for.

More importatnly if I were going to spend less than $2000 on a new system what would I need (MB, CPU, memory, video card, HD, and video camera. I have cdrom and burner)

I am posting here cause slashdot would never post this question (or anything else I have posted) as slashdot hates my posts.

I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!

Re:while this is nice ..

[Dr. Manhattan]

Well, the cameras are kinda pricey, but Firewire/i-Link/IEEE1394 video is pretty cool. The native DV standard is 720x480@29.97fps(NTSC) or 720x560@25fps (I think) (PAL).

I've got a Sony TRV-310 (~US$800 last Christmas) and and an ADS Pyro Firewire card (US$70 a couple months ago). The nice thing about the camera is it can play and digitize even old 8mm camcorder tapes.

See the DVgrab links page for info on exactly what software and hardware are needed/available.

There's one open-source video editing app (Broadcast2000) and one commercial (MainActor) for Linux that I know of.

Note that such camcorders store and transmit using the DV standard, which is compressed to ~3.7MB/sec. There are also raw video cameras available, though I don't know if they are supported yet. For scientific work you may need a raw camera, for personal or broadcast work DV is ample.

Re:while this is nice ..

[be-fan]

Don't delude yourself. If you're going to spend good money on a video workstation, use NT. Linux might eventually be great for video, but right now, the platform is just too immature and the programs aren't quite there yet. Your experience in NT will be a lot more stable, and you'll have a much more flexible environment (in terms of programs and all.) Any CPU in the 450MHz+ range ought to do it, memory should be 256MB at least, and you need a fast harddrive. (A fast Ultra66 drive like IBM or Maxtor will be fine.) You'll need a firewire card (maybe $150-$200 for a decent one) and around $700-800 on a good camera. (The Canon ZR10's are pretty good. If you can afford it, get a Sony. They're quirky (like 20minute minidiscs as storge and has an ethernet interface instead of firewire) and they're hideously expensive (2.5K) but has unbelievable image quality.

Re:one BIG xinerama question

[twilight]

Yes Xinerama can handle that.

However, the response from people on the mailing list (can't remember if it was XFree's Xpert list or the DRI list) was that it works much better at the same resolution.

The same bitdepth is a requirement though. That can be tricky because some cards work at 24 bpp while others do 32 bpp and some run at 15 bpp while others run at 16bpp.

Jeff Brubaker
Linux Tech Writer
AnandTech

Re:Are the MATROX drivers open source as well?

[SquadBoy]

/me dons fireproof suit. The AC writes "won't use what works just because you can't look at the source" Of course I would not use it because I can not look at the source. It comes down to who controls my business my box and stuff. Me or someone else. If I have the source and I notice a bug or want a feature I can fix it or add it. If I can I can do it myself if not I can always hire someone to do it. This means I control it. This is why I will not use something that is closed source on any mission critical box. Now granted graphics don't fall into that very often but sometimes they do. And in any case I *really* don't like having to depend on a vendor for fixes. That having been said I do use a TNT2 that I bought back when it looked like nivida would open the drivers and I do like it very much. But I won't buy another one.

Re:A Question of Quality

[be-fan]

The GeForce2 will kicks the G400's ass all over the place in terms of performance. The G400 (don't buy the 450 if you can afford the G400MAX, the 450 is lower performance) has better image quality, but it really isn't noticible unless your running 1280x1024+. Also, unless you've got a really good monitor you won't notice it that much at all. However, if you're not going to use 3D, G400 is the way to go (unless your running Linux, then GForce2 seems to be faster/less flaky.) G400MAX also tends to have better color quality in both normal running and 3D rendering. However, if performance is at all important, then buy a GeForce2. You won't be dissapointed with rendering quality or image quality. It's not as good as Matrox's, but is easily a solid second, and the card offers a much better performance/quality ratio that the G400MAX.

Re:No contest.

[be-fan]

If you use entirely free software, you're an idiot. Stand up for something important. Save the environment, feed the poor. Software is software. Supporting it will just help people who have good jobs anway, whether or not they get paid for it. If you're going to give up so much more performance just for the sake of free software, than OSS is screwed. If OSS doesn't have to be held to the same standards of quality as everyone else, then OSS programs will suck. Use the best hardware in your price range and screw the open/closed-ness of the drivers. Look at it pragmatically, without religious frevor. Linux is an important platform for SGI/NVIDIA. They will support it for the forseeable future. Given that, the open-ness of the drivers shouldn't matter.