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Ultimate 2D Graphics Card?
[Zander] asks:
"Graphics cards seem to be racing for better and better
3D performance. But, what about 2D? What is considdered to
be the ultimate card for 2D Graphics professionals?
People still use Gimp / Photoshop you know!"
I own an ATI Xpert@Play, and just recently upgraded to a Guillemot Xentor (TNT2 based). The image quality of the ATI was very good, and I was pleased with it's 2D performance, even under Xfree86. ATI's graphics drivers suck POO, though (Thanks, South Park Movie!). The Direct3D was broken w/ many popular games (Couldn't play Grim Fandango w/ acceleration, it took ages to get an even half-decent OpenGL driver under windows, and the card would often lockup the display (blank screen) until the more recent drivers (which were more incompatible than the previous ones).
I learned my lesson and avoided ATI after that. But the board had good potential, worked well under Linux (for 2D), and the AGP seemed to work fine w/ an LX-based motherboard (which I cannot say for my new Xentor; had to upgrade to a BX board, which I had planned anyway)
Ewww, ATI? Slower than hell frozen over for 2D. I still can't get over that they have patched their Mach64CT chip onto an AGP card? Why bother? ISA is almost faster than that thing (I own a PCI Mach64 board, and when moving a full screen app /w contents, you could WATCH it redraw... once...). The refresh rates are pathetic... 1024x768 runs only at 60hz on my ATI Mach64CT card. Clean signal, but cheesy speed and HELLISH flicker. If you run at too high a refresh rate, the screen just tears up when you do anything! :-(
My Matrox G200 (which costs the same price as those "similar" lameo ATI boards now), is fast, clean signal, better than 100 hz at 1024x768 and seems to co-operate with overclocked systems better... And some free 3D support to boot! AND you can even coax it to work with Fixed Freq. monitors! Woooooo!
With 2D fill rates in the gigapixel and up range, today's 2D cards can handle pixels faster than today's monitors, so the whole issue is irrelevant. For a 1600x1200 resolution screen running at the absurdly fast 100 frames per second, the 2D card only needs to handle 192 megapixels per second (1600*1200*100). Today's cards can handle gigapixels per second.
Now certain 2D operations might require overwriting a few pixels for each frame (say for a pull-down menu,) but no window system is so poorly coded that it overwrites every pixel on the screen ten times over. So the extra speed is irrelevant, and has been since about 1995. Faster CPUs can make the benchmarks run faster, but you aren't seeing visually useful faster 2D.
Note that this same type of argument (that the requirements of 2D are limited and have been saturated by hardware) could be applied to 3D, but it doesn't make sense to do so yet because 3D operations are based on Z-buffer algorithms where one pixel can be overwritten numerous times in the course of displaying a single frame. Plus texture bandwidth requirements could probably expand into the multi-GB/sec range. And 3D chips have to do vertex operations conceivably for several vertices (polygons) per pixel. Still, for today's display devices, 3D graphics speeds will eventually outpace the display characteristics, making 3D hardware differences irrelevant within 2-5 years, IMHO. 3D card makers will need some leaps in scalable (higher resolution) display technologies or their prices and value will go to zero.
I'd agree with other posters that Matrox is probably the safest bet. I'd caveat that 3dfx's 2D core is the most seriously overengineered one I've seen and may have a performance edge for some operations. But again, the differences in speed are irrelevant and generally not noticeable to the human eye.
--G
So that looks like your choice.
--
Interesting question. 2D is kinda dead for the most part. No one is putting out the 2D performance numbers anymore. With good reason, the ultimate in 2D has pretty much been reached.
There are plenty of cards out there that do fantastic 2D still.
My personal preference is matrox. Millenia II for PCI and a G200 for AGP. They have fantastic color ranges, supported under linux and windows and have really high 2D resolution (HDTV 1920x1200) at nice high refresh rates.
I have a suspicion that there is more then just one vendor with very good 2D performance though.
Speed is not an issue any longer. 2D is already about as fast as you're going to get. There are other issues, though.
Support for Multi-Headed: Matroxes do this for sure. Mandrake and Rasterman have posted screenshots of multiheaded X running with Matroxen. I'm pretty sure S3 968 chips do, too. XFree86 should have support for this is the release schedualed for this month.
Color Depth Overlays: Some cards will be able to have an 8 bit buffer running within a 16 or 32 bit buffer. I don't know of any that do, but a little research should find some. This is really useful for using those programs that only run in 8-bit or 16-bit on a 32-bit screen.
Driver Support: Not only X, but SVGALib, GGI, etc.
I'm sure there are more issues, but these are the ones I could come up with off the top of my head.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
If in doubt, buy a Matrox. The boards are top notch and will take anything you throw at them. Also, they are often the first ones supported...on anything: Linux, *BSD, BeOS, Windows 95/98/NT, etc.
Another thing is that they produce good image quality(yeah, I know, that's subjective...) and the signal stregnth from the card is or is close to the strongest in the industry. No more worrying about EMI. =)
Never let your fears overcome your dreams.
Check out the official BeOS compatibility list
Never let your fears overcome your dreams.
For 2-d stuff, as I recall, the Millenium II's were just about the best 2d cards out there for a good amount of time. You could probably get a PCI version fairly cheap, and AGP probably isn't going to do much for you 2d/wise, anyways.
:)
Matrox is also generally very, very nice about giving out driver information, too, which I have to give them a few bonus points for.
Someone mentioned the signal strength out of the Matrox cards was excellent, too. I run mine through a 12-meg Voodoo2 card, and there's _no_ loss of image quality at 1600x1200. (Sigh. At least there _wasn't_ before my 19" monitor died a premature death.)
How about ATI boards? In my opinion, ATI boards yield crisp images and accurate colors as Matrox products do. What problem do Ati boards have compared to Matrox ones? Persoanlly I use an antique ATI mach64 board with 2Mb ram onboard and Matrox Millenium II with 8Mb ram onboard. I think both are very good products, but for crisp images I prefer ATI. (in 1024x768x16M color mode, 72Hz refresh rate case)
Thanks in advance.
All the boards are effectively identical in terms of raw 2D power; some of them (the Matrox boards) are better supported in the accelerated X servers than others. After checking driver support (which shouldn't matter all that much for performance), the only thing that's left is image quality, which is usually a personal preference, once you've gotten to a decent RAMDAC speed. (So you can run at the high graphics professional resolutions like 1600x1200 or whatever at >72 Hz vertical refresh rate.)
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
My 8Mb Matrox Millenium G200 SGRAM makes my Acerview 79g 17" monitor look almost as sharp as a nice LCD.
RAMDAC speed is not everything, quality that gives great sharpness is more important to me, especially when my MGAG200's 250MHz RAMDAC never gets used at that speed anyway.
Each pixel at my prefered 1152x864 true colour is rendered sharply as square'ish and not blurred into each other.
RAMDAC quality is just as important as monitor quality and Matrox do a fantastic job of their RAMDAC's.
In contrast, my Number9 card gives a slightly unfocused display on the same monitor.
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