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?"

Comments

Well-documented over the years

[Ophidian P. Jones]

The money is in improving 3D quality. 2D isn't important to the average end-user any more.

Re:Well-documented over the years

[Brandybuck]

The average end-user is very concerned with 2D quality. Reading email, browsing the web, creating presentations, writing documentation, etc, etc. All are 2D applications.

The only people who care about 3D are gamers. They're a minority. A small minority. Much more significant are the non-gamer home users and businesses.

Monitor

[nempo]

Are you using the same monitor for both systems, I mean, not just the same model but physically the same monitor ?

"Pretty" Sells

[JonoPlop]

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.

Re:"Pretty" Sells

[ctr2sprt]

Er, no, it's not "simply because [3D] look[s] pretty." It's because 3D performance is what people want. I'm sure NVIDIA et al. could make cards that look better than that old Matrox, but I'm just as sure it would add $50 or so to the card's price. Most people, myself included, would just not be willing to pay for it. One solution would be to keep the card's cost constant by reducing 3D performance, shipping it with less RAM, etc., but I hope you can see why that wouldn't work.

This is not a case of graphics manufacturers tricking us helpless sheep via marketing. This is a case of gamers being the driving market for video cards, and 2D video quality is just not that important for gamers. The extensive marketing of 3D performance isn't the cause of the focus: the focus is the cause of the marketing.

DVI

[zsazsa]

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.

Re:Apple CRTs, for comparison

[Fluffy the Cat]

its just digital, digital, digital right up until the images hit your eyes...

Uh. How is a cathode ray being steered by a magnetic field digital?

Re:Use an LCD for crisp 2D. (laptop trends)

[Anonymous Coward]

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