I've got two workstations KVMed together to share dual monitors, one box runs a Matrox G450 and the other an older Appian dual-head. If I ever half-switch, it's unbelieveabe how terrible the Appian is next to the G450. It really pays to evaluate your boards next to others now and again (as with monitors), to make sure you're not straining your eyes more than you need to. We all do a metric ton of reading on the web every day - it is not a bad idea at all to take your old box and throw a G450 in there for surfing and chatting, KVMs are fairly cheap, a few bucks and your eyes will thank you. That is unless Matrox has a 3D winner here and they get the price down... or their success pressures the other two board makers into upping their display quality for the high end 3D boards.

AG24: Of course the cards are the limitation. I've had my 19" monitor running at 1600x1200@85Hz for 4 years now and I am yet to find a card that would deliver reasonable framerates at that resolution when rendering 3D.

[q]You haven't been paying attention to the LCD market. LCD monitor shipments are projected to pass CRTs in 2004 (http://www.cosmiverse.com/news/tech/tech05300202.html).[/q]

Yeah, but most of that is likely in the business sector. LCD screens take up less space and are better for text - which make them ideal for routine business use. They're still a long way off from being good for gaming.

[q]Graphic professionals will hang on to their CRTs for some time, because LCD color fidelity and range is still inferior.[/q]

Understatement. LCD is nowhere near CRT in this area.

[q]LCD response time has recently become appropriate for gaming, and will continue to improve (eg. <20ms panels, feed-forward driving).[/q]

Appropriate isn't the same as good.

[q]For brightness and contrast, newer LCDs eat CRTs for breakfast.[/q]

Not really. They're brighter and have more contrast, but the colors just don't translate well. Color transitions are not nearly as good as on CRT, and that makes things like lighting and so forth look less realistic.

[q]There is still a price penalty with larger panels, but as the shipment data indicates, the "problem" is receding.[/q]

Sure, it's receding. But that's a far cry from saying it's not still a problem, and there is nothing to indicate that LCD is going to overtake the CRT in the gamers market.

My SGI flatpanel runs w/ DVI @ 1600x1024 so this is all blah blah blah for me :)

I've got and older 21" Dell Trinitron at work that I just set to 2048x1536. The text is still readable (this is on a Matrox G450, BTW) but the monitor can only do 60Hz at this res. I forsee a headache if I leave it this way... ;-)

As a fanboy of high resolutions, I'll say that 1280x1024 doesn't leave me alot of space for standard applications. It's like having a desk with only enough room for a single sheet of paper. Solution? Multiple monitors! But they'll only take you so far, I still want to turn them up higher. Anyone got some of those 2048x1536 monitors that I can "test out" for a couple decades? :)

Out of 4 computers that I use regularly, I have 5 monitors. But two of the computers are never connected to any monitor. (thank you Matrox and 3DLabs)

IntelMole wrote:
"LCDs will never really find a place in the gamer's heart, because you run Windows at one resolution and play games in quite another...On a 19' screen you might find yourself using 1280x1024, yet you wouldn't dream (at the moment anyway) of using anything over 1024x768 at the moment for most new games..."

If by "never" you mean "within the next 6 months" then I'd agree. But the relative minority who already own a Ti4600 know that not only is 1280x1024 usable in nearly all new games, you can often also kick in 2x antialiasing and still get good performance. Since, as everyone knows, the fastest moving segment in the computer industry is video rendering... by year's end this capability will be available to a large percentage of gamers.

IMHO, the big barrier to adoption of LCDs as gaming displays was the pool of popular, fixed-resolution 2D games like StarCraft and Diablo 2. But their day has passed, and all new games are employing 3D scalable renderers (eg. Warcraft 3).

[i]...the real goal should be resolutions like 2048x1536. Some of these cards might be able to produce an image at that resolution, but most of them wouldn't provide a very pleasant image in 2D or 3D.[/i]

The cards are not really the limitation, the monitors are.

AFAIK, most/all cards produced in the last year or two can manage 2048x1536. Certainly my last 3 cards could - a Matrox G400, an ATI (original) Radeon, and an nVidia reference QuadroDCC. I ran them all regularly at 2048x1280, since I use a Sony GW900 (24" CRT, 16:10 aspect), though I sometimes needed PowerStrip to push the refresh rate up high enough.
Incidentally, I was not displeased with the 2D quality of any of them. The QuadroDCC produces a very clear image, not super-duper-crisp at that rez, but slightly better than the G400 (which did have a slower RAMDAC). That convinced me that whatever people's complaints about nVidia's 2D quality were, it was not the fault of the nVidia chip or PCB design.

In any case, any card with a 300+ MHz RAMDAC should have no particular trouble reaching 2048x1536 @ 70+ Hz - so long as a suitably fast 21" CRT monitor is used. Well, IBM do make a 2K LCD, but it's $9000 up here in Canada. And of course there's that QUWXGA LCD they do for a mere $13000 - gorgeously crisp, superb viewing angles, and appallingly slow to update.

The problem is that high-rez monitors are simply still far too expensive for mere mortals. The technology is improving, but at a rate that's as much slower than Moore's Law as graphics cards are faster. Until that changes, the only alternative is to pursue better/faster antialiasing techniques.

absinthe, what crt do you use? I've got a syncmaster 900ift on a matrox g450 @1280x1024@ 85hz and have never noticed eyestrain.

Originally Posted by Dj Easy Dick
Now I click \"Favorites\" and then \"add to favorites\"

and my next videocard purchase may just be the most informed one!

Money, burning, hole, in.... pocket!

(and my watch died, fux0r)

Originally Posted by absinthe
#20: The other nice advantage is less eye strain. I stare at a CRT all day running at 100Hz, and my eyes still hurt afterward. It\'s just too bad I use my PC for games and 3D graphics work, or I\'d look into getting an LCD.

And, on a more relevant note, it appears there really is a difference between cards made by different manufacturers; it just doesn\'t show up in benchmarks. Glad I read this.

LCDs will never really find a place in the gamer's heart, because you run Windows at one resolution and play games in quite another...On a 19' screen you might find yourself using 1280x1024, yet you wouldn't dream (at the moment anyway) of using anything over 1024x768 at the moment for most new games...

LCDs can interpolate blah blah blah, but they aren't as good with multiple resolutions as CRTs...

LCDs are becoming more popular for two major reasons...

1) They're stylish - Go in to a internet cafe and you see row upon row of LCDs, if they were CRTs you wouldn't bat an eyelid.

2) They're space saving - Have you seen the amount of office space you get in Hong Kong etc.? It's about as wide as 1 1/2 desks and you get just enough space to get in and out of your chair. Hence space saving in this environment means greater employee density. Repeat to a lesser extent for rest of the world.

Granted, they produce sharper output (usually), and use less power, but I'll never buy an LCD in the forseeable future...,
IntelMole

IntelMole:

You haven't been paying attention to the LCD market. LCD monitor shipments are projected to pass CRTs in 2004 (http://www.cosmiverse.com/news/tech/tech05300202.html).

Graphic professionals will hang on to their CRTs for some time, because LCD color fidelity and range is still inferior. LCD response time has recently become appropriate for gaming, and will continue to improve (eg. <20ms panels, feed-forward driving). For brightness and contrast, newer LCDs eat CRTs for breakfast.

There is still a price penalty with larger panels, but as the shipment data indicates, the "problem" is receding.

Since when, AG#16?

I didn't notice that graphics designers or gamers preferred the lower contrast and constricting resolutions of LCDs?

Nor did I know that the end-user appreciated the higher prices...

Show us the beef,
IntelMole

ag15, I thought the ATI radeon board held it's own fairly well, as did the Leadtek Ti4400

the Parhelia did kinda deliver the smackdown though :)

Since LCD panels are slowly but surely taking over, analog output quality is becoming less and less interesting.

The 2D quality of GeForce4 is really poor

The 2D quality of GeForce4 and Radeon is similar

ergo

The 2D quality of Radeon is really poor

Have you ever seen your own brain...
--------
No, have you seen yours?

[Q]I can :) I'll deny everything if my eyes can't see it. [/Q]
Have you ever seen your own brain...

You can't deny Matrox's superiority when it comes to build quality, component choices, etc.
------------
I can :) I'll deny everything if my eyes can't see it.

You can't deny Matrox's superiority when it comes to build quality, component choices, etc. No skimping there...
Been the same way since the millenium. I'm not anyone's 'fan boy', but it's sure nice to have them Canucks up there setting the mark in this respect, giving them something the compitition apparently still can't touch...It's good for Matrox and good for those who care about picture quality above every other aspect.

I hope they stick around for a long time :-)

hmmm

- danny e.
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my return is imminent
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uhhhhh didnt you return earlier?
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yeah but this time i am really gonna be back.

Is there any other blind test of video signal quality? The "DOS/V power report" had done that once without specific reference card, and they found that higher priced card does not necessarily flatter the witnesses more.

With us spending an hour on this in IRC on Friday I was hoping it would become more of a news item. Thank you Ryu for the post.

[q]Looks great, but TecChannel came to the opposite conclusion:[/q]

tecChannel was centering on the rise and fall times and that's not the proper thing to do.

[q][i]. But the rise- and fall times are worse, and the signal is forming something like a sinus wave, not a square wave like it should.[/q][/i]

The fact is that the VSIS standard states that rise and fall times should be as balanced as possible.

Longer rise and fall times are indicative of limited video bandwidth and may cause loss of spatial resolution. The lack of video bandwidth due to the unbalanced rise and fall times also explain the ringing seen in the rise and fall of it's signal (with regard to the G550).

Consequently the G550 is unable to hit 700mV. That will cause contrast and sharpness difficulties as it can't effectively swing from white to black.

Sorry, but I think tecChannel call that one wrong.

[quote]The G550 puts out a solid signal (especially considering its low price) ... The Parhelia, on the other hand, is very impressive. Its waveform looks almost pristine.[/quote]

Looks great, but TecChannel came to the opposite conclusion:

'[i]With exception of the signal amplitude the Parhelia-512 has worse values than its predecessor model G550.[/i]'

http://translate.google.com/translate_t

i'd like to see more of this in the future. it's high time the video card reviews include more than just frame rates in a handful of games.

That really is impressive, I have been disappointed, to say the least, with the benchmarks done with Parhelia, but that waveform is absolutely amazing. I wish my audio equipment had the same accuracy...

Do you understand graph? ;-)

i dont understand german....BTW :(