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Hardware

Ultimate 2D Graphics Card? 15

Posted by Cliff from the it-isn't-dead-yet dept.
[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!"
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Ultimate 2D Graphics Card? More

Ultimate 2D Graphics Card?

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  • Xi Graphics [xig.com], the makers of Accelerated X, give rave reviews to the new Matrox G400:


    Double WOW! We just posted the benchmark numbers for the Matrox Millennium G400 with the 300MHz RAMDAC. It is the first card we have tested to break 50 Xmarks on the x11perf tests. In TrueColor, it racks up 40.1 Xmarks. See the Riva TNT2 below. It almost gets there, and it is a hot chip, too. At this time, XFree86 servers do not support the G400.


    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.
  • 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. =)
  • Check out the official BeOS compatibility list [be.com]
  • 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.
  • I've got a G200 and Linux and Windows both run really well -- even with intense 3D games like Quake 3. This is an excellent card. I'm looking at trying Be, does anybody know if Be 4.5 has support for the Millenium G200? That'd rock!
  • I just got a used G200 for $70 and I also like its Linux performance. (I don't have Windows, so I can't comment on that.)

    However, it's made my old DOS game, Comanche, too fast to play. It's kinda interesting, 'cause you can get an idea of what it's good at and how the game graphics work. The rate of apparent motion seems to increase when doing things like panning from side to side - it looks like the game accomplishes this by simply moving a bitmap around and that the card does that really fast!

    I may have to underclock my Celeron 333 to be able to play this thing.

  • 2D (Score:1)

    by _Quinn ( 44979 )
    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
  • I don't know what ATI board you're thinking of, but your figures just don't tally. Here's my modeline:


    Modeline "1600x1200" 202.50 1600 1664 1856 2160 1200 1201 1204 1250 +hsync +vsync
    This comes out at 75Hz.
    I don't know or care how well it performs under Windoze, and since the original poster mentioned the Gimp, I suppose he doesn't either.
  • 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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