Ultimate 2D Graphics Card? 15
[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!"
Matrox G400 (Score:1)
So that looks like your choice.
--
2D long forgotten (Score:1)
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.
More issues than speed (Score:1)
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.
I love my Matrox (Score:1)
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. =)
BeOS support (Score:1)
Matrox (Score:1)
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? (Score:1)
Thanks in advance.
Re:I love my Matrox (Score:1)
Re:I love my Matrox (Score:1)
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)
-_Quinn
Re:How about ATI boards? (Score:1)
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.
Matrox's high quality RAMDAC's, not just fast ones (Score:1)
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.