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Talking with Matrox
SystemLogic writes " SystemLogic.net has posted an interview with Matrox. They cover many topics, especially based around the G550 which was recently announced. Other things include the reason for leaving the 3D performance market, Linux support, future technologies, company economics, Athlon MP support, and more."
Matrox has hung a (previously very loyal) segment of their market out to dry by promising, then not releasing functional drivers for their MJPEG video-capture cards. When the date of the driver release arrived, they announced that they were dropping support for the MJPEG recording features of the cards, essentially turning a $200-$300 compressed-stream capture card into the equivalent of a $29 TV tuner.
The Matrox Droid does mention that "It is usually better to release less updates that are robust with a lot of bug fixes than a lot of frequent updates that resolve less issues and have not been QA'd extensively". In my experience, Matrox has trumpeted features of their cards, and operating systems that they will (eventually) run under, but then has given up because it would be too difficult to make the drivers work correctly.
I would highly recommend that anyone who might be considering buying a Matrox product steer clear of them.
That interview had too many graphics acronyms for my taste. I know plenty about computers, but keeping up with all the latest Graphics acronyms is too much for me.
Matrox has some decent graphics boards, and I think they're going the right direction by leaning away from the gaming 3d market.. However my most frequent interaction with Matrox is through their capture boards. Our Computer Vision and Robotics Lab uses a lot of their Video Capture cards (MeteorII) and I sure would like to have had a couple questions asked about that as well, but then I guess not many people care about video capture in this audience.
If you're in the know, the new MIL licensing scheme seems absolutely ridiculous and appears to be getting worse - the prices for their vision libraries are through the roof ($2000 and up!). I can't imagine it being worthwhile for anyone to spend the thousands required to purchase a license for the new full MIL version! Especially when good and free libraries like the Intel IPL and OpenCV and Microsoft Vision SDK are available for free.
Brett
UCSD Computer Vision and Robotics Laboratory
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you should download the latest win2k drivers ;)
.. it took some time, but its worth ! :)
g400 dual head working as 2 cards flawless here under 2k
Frankly, I think that the G550's head-casting system is not nearly as important an improvement as their solution to the dual-display problems that were plaguing G400's and G450's. The problem has been that Windows NT and subsequent evolutions (namely, 2000) would not allow for true independent dual displays on a single card without multiple video card processors. I don't know how they got around Microsoft's software limitations with the new G550, but they should be lauded for their achievements. As far as I know, Matrox is the only single-processor card manufacturer that has been able to solve this problem.
On the other hand, headcasting technology seems to be a pretty bad diversionary tactic to the onslaught of far superiour 3D boards (namely nVidia). "Oh yeah, we do 3D, too. But it's business 3D." Sure, whatever guys.
It is rather impressive to think that they've done all this without IPO millions (as they're still a privately owned company).
And second of all, Matrox support the Direct Rendering Open Source project which makes an open source DRI drivers for XFree 4 for Matrox cards (and others):
http://dri.sourceforge.net/
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
SystemLogic has their preview of the G550 posted at http://www.systemlogic.net/articles/01/6/g550previ ew