Matrox G550 Announced

Why would you buy this?

Isn't 2D on their older cards good enough?

What kind of FPS can you get in Word with this?

This card plays 2d pac man the best.
Also with the vertex shader you can render buffy's ass in realtime.
Really though why is that item on the shack, this is clearly not for the gamer.

booyaka

Please understand, guys, that this is not a card for gamers. It's not intended for us. It's intended for the professional market that spends all day running Word, Excel, Photoshop, Powerpoint, etc. It's a $125 card, and the best you could hope for is to judge it against other cards in that price range (Radeon VE, GF2 MX).

The G550 chip is PIN COMPATIBLE with the G450. They still managed to pack in a hardware Vertex Shader engine that goes well beyond the DX8 spec, and they added a second texture unit to the two pixel pipelines. That's a pretty slick engineering feat.

I'm still not saying it'll be a good gaming card, even a budget one. We'll have to wait for 3rd party benchmarks for that, but I suspect with no fixed-function T&L pipeline and no texture compression, the GF2 MX and Radeon VE will outperform it.

Cut Matrox a little slack. They have some good tech--their dual-display stuff is still the best, they make killer professional video equipment, and if you think 2D acceleration isn't important anymore, just wait for Windows XP. They just don't compete in our space but once every two or three years, and the G550 isn't the one.

What is the Matrox?

nVidia all the way! Don't trust anything else!

This thread needs Marcus Whatsisname to tell us about Matrox's eternally shitty drivers.

The HeadCasting Engine uniquely accelerates high-resolution, life-like facial animations over low-bandwidth Internet connections through an extended hardware implementation of Microsoft’s® DirectX® 8 Vertex Shader.

Does that sound like total BS or what? They're dumping millions into VoIP when it hasn't even taken off yet, and shows no signs of doing so. Furthermore, it looks like once again, they haven't made ANY improvements to the 3D rendering system, which is already a laughing stock of the gaming community; the only video chipsets that are worse are integrated.

It seems that the only people who buy Matrox anymore are either CAD developers who want the DualHead, or moronic executives who live their lives gobbling up this kind of FUD.

Matrox = officially disappointing.

Don't buy Matrox, they'll fuX0r you.

See the "Matrox screws Win2k Users" story. Unfortunately the Shack didn't run the follow-up "Matrox screws Win98 Users" story, in which Matrox cancels development of their Win98 Video Tools despite numerous bugs, crashes, and hangs.

1st