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2D vs 3D Performance in Today's Video Cards?
CliffH asks: "Has anyone else noticed a serious decline in 2D quality versus 3D quality in video cards? I routinely work on older systems right beside newer systems on the same monitor (Dell P1110) and it becomes blaringly obvious to me that 2D quality is starting to take a backseat to 3D quality. For example, my main system is a dual-boot Shuttle XPC SS51G with an added GeForce2MX 400 card in for the times I do want to play some games. A little, nasty, ready to be thrown away system I have on my bench at the moment is a K62-500 with my favorite card of all time, a Matrox Millenium II 4MB job in it. The 2D quality between the two is just shocking. Where the Matrox is nice, crisp, extremely easy to read at 1280x1024, the GeForce2 is kind of blurry, not as well defined, and the colors aren't as vibrant. I would be skeptical if this were the only newer card I have seen with the results, but it has gone through the GeForce line (last one I tested was an MSI branded 5900 Ultra) and a small handful of ATI Radeons with similar results. So, the question stands. Am I going nuts or has there been a definate tradeoff between 2D and 3D quality in recent years?"
The money is in improving 3D quality. 2D isn't important to the average end-user any more.
Are you using the same monitor for both systems, I mean, not just the same model but physically the same monitor ?
--- No, english is not my mother tongue.
Am I going nuts or has there been a definate tradeoff between 2D and 3D quality in recent years?"
;-)
No, you are just nuts
I reject your reality
Unfortunately, 3D is now the main consideration. People benchmark by 3D scores. Graphics card boxes show pictures of 3D games, and the company demos 3D applications of the card. This is simply because they look pretty; imagine showing a picture of a normal desktop on a 3D card, or just showing normal desktop 2D usage at a trade show demo - it wouldn't draw any attention.
I have the impression that within the last 12 or 18 months, 2D image quality has become a priority (maybe a prerequisite) among enthusiasts again. In any case, I recently got an nVidia FX 5200 card (I think the vendor is eVGA) and the quality is superb on my 19" Sony Trinitron--better than the Matrox G400 I used to use.
You're not crazy. If you buy a Matrox Parhelia, it'll look a lot better on a CRT than a GeForce. GeForce boards' analog sections are made to lower quality specifications than Matroxes, hence the cheaper price. If you want crisp 2D on a CRT, you're going to have to pay, just like how you paid for your old Matrox -- I'm sure it wasn't cheap when it was new.
If you want crispness with GeForces (or Radeons), go DVI with an LCD monitor. Since it's all digital, there'll be no degradation.
To a large extent, 2D quality will depend on the quality of the digital/analog conversion on the graphics card. Traditionally, Matroxes were very good in this respect - I've no idea if this is still true, but given their target market I'd guess so. Nowadays, with large numbers of different companies making basically identical cards, one avenue for cost reduction (and so seeming more appealing than your competitors) is to use cheaper parts in this area, with corresponding reduction in quality. As a result, it's quite possible that one Radeon may have dreadful 2D quality while an almost identical looking card using the same chipset from another manufacturer may have decent 2D quality.
Of course, this all becomes much less of an issue once you start using DVI or some other purely digital connection (in laptops, the limiting factor in 2D quality is generally the screen)
The newer cards that you mentioned are mainly geared towards 3D performance because their biggest market (the gamers) want the utmost 3D performace they can get. If you want good 2D performance, you'd probably be better off buying the cards that are geared towards the workstation market (like nVidia's Quadro NVS line) instead of the gaming market. Also, as has been mentioned, DVI-capable cards and an LCD will give an improvement.
I've got a server and a couple of clients running through a KVM switch to a 21" Hitachi
:) and on the win2kPro/Redhat client an AMD 450 with a geForce MX 400 w/ 32MB. Under windows the backgrounds and images actually tend to have a modestly richer color on the GeForce (which is to be expected) websites look basically the same. But I would tend to agree that the Millenium is somewhat sharper.
On the server PIII850 and Matrox Millenium II 4MB
It sounds more like the problem is not 2D but basic signal quality. 2D refers to drawing boxes on screen without the coordinate transforms and shading involved in 3D. Clarity of text is more an issue with signal quailty between the video card and the display with the possible exception of some anti aliasing that helps smooth 3D graphics but blurs text. Quality of the analog drivers, using the correct signal levels, sheilded cables so that parts of the green signal don't become part of the red (or which ever combination) and termination on the signal many times severe ghosting can be seen with copies of images or text a few inches to the right of the image. There is no reason other than anti alias filtering that text will look any more blurry from a 3D card as compared to 2D. As clock rates get faster the quaility of the signal becomes a bigger issue and the standard connectors and cables should be improved but have basicly remained the same since the 80's. Is your monitor really capable of the refresh rates? Newer cards have improved update rates but those higher speeds are near the limits of older monitors.
Switch to LCD and DVI. The monitor cable you use to connect to your card, if analog, can also make quite a big difference.
Also, "definite" is not spelled with an 'a.' Think, "finite."
if DVI LCDs are the way to go, then apple had it right even when they were making CRTs...
seriously, go find someone that still has an older G4 tower and a real apple CRT with the apple digital connection thingy...
the image quality on these things is outstanding, mainly because its just digital, digital, digital right up until the images hit your eyes...
mike
==
apostrophes...right...
Actually you are running into a (not so quite) well known issue with the GeForce cards that has been addressed here :
How to fix a fuzzy GeForce card
Get out your soldering iron and you can get a crystal clear display on your GF2 while voiding the warranty and pissing off the FCC at the same time.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Does anyone even review 2D quality any more? Personally, 2D matters to me a lot more than 3D, but I can't find anywhere that reviews 2D quality. The only places that seriously review cards are gaming sites. They're mostly concerned about how many frames-per-second you get in the first-person-shooter du jour.
I've taken to visiting people and looking at their video quality. It works okay, but there are a lot of holes in my information. I don't know what a Parhelia looks like because I don't know anyone who owns one. Matrox has made good cards in the past, but...
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
when i bought a vid card for my last system, i wasn't really interested in playing games. Most of my stuff just relies on 2D. So I dropped 125$ on a Matrox G550. That card had decent 3D and unbelievable 2D. I have since sold that system and the recipient has the same results. Matrox makes fantastic 2D .. and I hope they continue. Perhaps they should even enter the mobile market and make some great looking laptops.
"The 2D quality between the two is just shocking. Where the Matrox is nice, crisp, extremely easy to read at 1280x1024, the GeForce2 is kind of blurry, not as well defined, and the colors aren't as vibrant."
Geforce 2 cards were known for having cheap-o filters that weakened the analog signal to the monitor. It has nothing to do with 2d vs 3d quality, you bought a card with cheap parts in it. (I did too, that's why I know this.)
Recent Geforce Cards are a lot better. I have dual monitors running at 1600 by 1200, quite clear and readable.
"Derp de derp."
Your observations are quite correct. Today's videocards are total crap when it comes to picture quality.
There is only one manufacturer with very good picture quality and bearable price -- Matrox. But they are either very slow when it comes to 3D graphics (g400/450/550) or quite expensive (Parhelia). And not too fast either.
ATI (the ATI brand, not the OEM products like powercolor etc) is a little bit worse, but still bearable.
All NVidia cards are total crap, no matter if you chose several years old or top of the line for $400.
I think the consumers are guilty, because they buy more FPS ignoring actual picture quality. Vendors just give people what they want.
Robert
PS. I still use Matrox G400DH because I spend >12h/d in front of the monitor. I swaped Matrox G450 for it because it has better supported tvout under Linux, so my workstation doubles as multimedia center connected to my tv-set.
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
...unless you get a dedicated card for the task, like the ATI Radeon 9500 ASC.
When I was last shopping for video cards, I decided to go for an nvidia gf4 ti4400. I managed to find a review of several different manufacturers of them (PNY, ASUS, gainward, etc) that was mostly comparing fan noise and vga signal quality (since the 3d was all within like .5% of each other since they're all basically copies of the reference design). Evidently the RAMDAC (the guy who makes an analog signal) can vary pretty significantly from vendor to vendor. Something to look out for.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Newer video cards have upped the RAMDAC speed to around 350MHz. That Matrox card probably only supports 200MHz or so. So the question is: what whas the refresh rate at 1280x1024? Decreasing the refresh rate often increases the sharpness. Also, as noted elsewhere, a lot of the GeForce line is pretty bad for 2D quality.
Dan
Is to always use opengl. You can use OpenGL to draw 2d things. Lots of old console emulators do it all the time. I really the the future of the GUI is vector graphics like svg on top of OpenGL with new video cards. It would make everything super fast and awesome.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Not if you are a Dell laptop customer.
They only offer DVI out on their WXGA/WUXGA laptops aimed at the Dmedia and gaming crowd. On their machines that use industry standard 4:3 monitors (like 1600x1200 I've used for 4+years), you are hung out to dry -- the laptops
(some of which have higher specs -- faster bus, memory, threaded P4), they
botched it and provide no DVI output -- VGA only. If you want DVI out, you
have to find a new LCD that supports the ~1600x1024 res (no, you can't program the video chip to put out 1600x1200 image -- they hard-wired the chip to prevent that).
So throw away your existing monitors and LCDs, and search for a Dell-special
size LCD (which they don't sell). The LCD's I saw that did support that res cost as much or more than the laptop. Continued letters to dell for the past 18 months have had no effect. One sales/support drone said Dell would never support 1600x1200 DVI out on their Inspiron line. It would dig in too deep to their 'bread-n-butter' business lattitude line which they charge 500-1000 more just for the name change.
I pushed to find out who makes the design decisions at Dell...was told they were driven by customer demand. I asked who measured that and how I could give them feedback. I raised it to the equivalent of a Director level and no one could answer my question. No one knew who made the design decisions or how they were made or how customers might have input into the design process -- even though they were supposedly driven by 'customer demand'. How can you have a process driven by customer demand when you don't allow customer input?
They lost at least one sale -- while the wider screen might be great for watching DVD's, um, GUESS WHAT? I have a DVD player and 36" screen for that in my living room with a cheap 5.1 sound system (it doesn't take alot of
cash these days to set up a fair 5.1 or DTS system). Heck -- one of my
DVD players has the 5.1 and DTS decoding in the player and only ran $400 (it is a Sony), and it does Dolby 5.1 audio recreation over standard earphones if I don't want to wake the housemates). Why would I want to watch a DVD on a tiny little 17" with inferior sound when I can have a much nicer system for 1/2 the cost? Oh, you think I need portability? Yeah, so I can go to the park to watch Rugrats in Paris. On a plane? The last time I flew I was rewriting presentations and doing linux kernel development(running linux
on laptop with presentation devel running in a VMware-Win98 combo. Quite nice to test my assertions or look at current code while writing presentations (was before open-office/lindows...was running SuSE (another company that's gone down hill when it comes to customer support)). Am I supposed to watch the movie at a hotel? Why wouldn't I go out and explore my new surroundings or find where the next day's presentations were going to be held? I'm not even tempted by the stupid movies on in-room rentals....gimme the car and I'll go explore the nightclubs or any late-open anythings...or, oh my gawd...read
a book. But to watch a *RERUN* movie on a tiny laptop -- to have laptops
designed around that purpose? That's ludicrous. I can see me going to
a romantic B&B with a honey and spending the evening in front of a 16-16"
computer monitor watching a DVD you've both seen before. How romantic!
Idiots!
I actually do turn my monitor 90 degrees and use the Pivot software included
with my monitor because I do like looking at a full size page of a document
now and then -- of course, I'd prefer a 2000x1600 to see to talk vertial
docs....
But among all of this -- laptops included -- the speed to move opjects around
the screen with 'alpha blending turned on, (semi-transparent objects), or
even opaque objects -- the ability to repaint -- how fast does text scroll
in a text window -- those are things that are important to me -- since I don't
have much time for games and 3-D effects, other than providing alphablending
for movi
The GeForce 2 MX is hardly a new or high-end card. It's a budget card, and hence they put budget components in it. A better comparison would be a GeForce 2 and some crappy Trident VGA card, not a Matrox. The newer video cards are better about 2D quality.
is that VC Manufacturers are biasing their 2D circuitry to work with LCD displays (since they are "precise sharp" so to speak...
There's also the issue of monitor configuration. Different cards may require diferent settings...
Just my 2 cents.
how long until
I have a Belkin 2-port KVM switch and I noticed the degradation with my old Matrox G400. Same for my Leadtek GeForce4 Ti4200 and ATI Radeon 9800 AIW cards.
Are there any higher-end KVM switches that are low in price to mantain the clarity?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
If you want crisp 2D on a CRT, you're going to have to pay, just like how you paid for your old Matrox -- I'm sure it wasn't cheap when it was new.
The Matrox products are horrendously expensive. The lowest-price 128MB Parhelia I found was CAN$465 (OEM) versus CAN$97 for the lowest-price 128MB GeForce FX. Sure, the Matrox can do triple display, has specialized support/plugins for various software and undoubtedly better 2D performance but is that worth a few extra hundred bucks? For some, I guess it is.
18 months ago I went from a 32MB G400 to a 128MB GeForce4 on higher-end Misubishi CRTs and didn't notice any 2D quality degradation. I originally wanted to stay loyal to Matrox since they "build" their cards in my home town[1], but I just couldn't justify the extra cost.
[1] Anyone know the details of manufacturing at Matrox? I.E. % of home-grown chips/components.
FYI, ATI branded cards are made by Sapphire Technology, and are pretty much identical to the Sapphire branded cards. The ATI ones just get a different (inferior) cooler, and get put in a different box with a different software bundle.
My nVidia MX440 cards are as good as the Matrox G400 cards. I had problems with the Matrox cards dying. Two are sitting on my desk now.
This looks like the best 2D video card deal now: eVGA.com MX440. I use the same chipset from other nVidia manufacturers, but I'm getting ready to order eVGA.
The key issue is RAMDAC speed, which is 350 MHz for the MX440. That's high enough for crisp 1600 x 1200.
Matrox vs Nvidia is pretty obvious, i've heard Nvidia scrimps on everything but 3d, but how is 3DFX compaire on image quality?
I'm still working on a 3DFX Banshee here (voodoo 2.5) My only other cards are voodoo3's, and a card so old that its unsupported in linux(but not win98(!?)).
Matrox G100, G200 and G400 has problems with bios, which sometimes has to be restored. See: relevant Matrox support files. But I still think they are awesome.