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Matrox's New Three-Head Video Card
This Anonymous Coward was one of many readers to point to sites with information on Matrox's upcoming Parhelia-512 graphics card: "It appears that some foreign hardware sites have violated NDA and posted some very juicy details on Matrox's next generation hardware. iXBT's review can be found here(1), and a MURC posting with some other pics from China can be found here (2).
It looks like the real deal. Will Matrox wake up from their long slumber in the 3D gaming market, or will this card be another stopgap like the G550 was?" Update: 05/12 14:07 GMT by T : Alexander Medvedev of ixbt.com points to the English version now online as well, and notes : "Please note, we can't violate NDA becouse we _do _not _sign _anything
with Matrox Graphics. And never receive any info from Matrox."
It should be noted that the very act of taking a screenshot can stall the system.
try taking a screenshot of 3dmark using a utility that writes it to disk immediately, most likely the system will stutter, and it's DURING that stutter that the image is actually captured (hence the low fps readout)
the phenomenon occurs with Quake engined games as well. probably others...
L33t haxx0r: Notice the on-topic first post above.
Matrox Driver Problems: We are experiencing major driver difficulties with Matrox products under Windows XP. All of these are with the most recent Intel motherboards and Matrox G400, G450, and G550 adapters. We are using the latest Matrox drivers from the Matrox website. We have also tried the Microsoft certified drivers, which are much worse. We have tested with clean installations of Windows XP, as well as upgrades from Windows SE.
Our Win XP clean install test machine takes 18 seconds to display 97 items when doing a DIR directory listing. This appears to be caused by bad interactions between the Matrox drivers (with a new Matrox G550 adapter) and Windows XP. We are testing with a 2 GHz Pentium 4 and a new Intel motherboard.
We often see artifacts in DOS windows. Little colored vertical bars are left on the screen after some operations.
When we reported these things by telephone, the technical support representative, Bob Alionis, was very reluctant to deal with any matter that could not be solved quickly. He told us to try a video adapter from another manufacturer. This was difficult for us, since we have been building computers only with Matrox cards. Also, if an adapter from another manufacturer worked well, why would we go back to Matrox?
We tried an ATI Radeon card, and it worked better. We would be reluctant to switch to selling ATI cards because of our perception that ATI often has driver problems.
We haven't tried nVidia yet. Do nVidia chipset cards display business applications crisply? None of our customers run games, so sharpness at 1600 x 1200 resolution on 19" monitors is the most important criteria.
There is apparently no e-mail address for Matrox technical support. Matrox did not respond to e-mail sent to sales. Matrox did not respond to e-mail about technical problems sent to the RMA department.
Things have changed at Matrox. They are apparently trying to keep the number of tech support calls down by making it complicated to report a problem. The paragraph below is an exact quote from a message sent by a Matrox RMA department representative. The phone number mentioned is in Canada. Apparently Matrox does not have a U.S. number.
Jump through hoops RMA procedure:
"You can obtain an RMA for your board through Tech Support. Just make sure that you have registered your Matrox board on our web site http://www.matrox.com/mga/registration/home.cfm and have selected the option 'Obtain your tech support client id number...' at the Registration Menu. Once you obtain the client id number, just call 514-685-0270, then select option 1, followed by option 4, and then finally option 1 to reach the Tech Support queue to speak to a technician. For additional information on the RMA procedure, e-mail rma@matrox.com or call 514-822-6000 and ask for the RMA Department."
We wonder if Matrox is unable to fix its driver problems, and they are trying to avoid taking calls about them.