RE: Graphics card for PC (was: Monitor Choice Poll)

[Chip Louie <chip@thelouie.org>]

Hey There,

Whoa!  Obviously people DO buy products that don't do, or include what they
thought the box said!  Gary bought a G200 expecting that there would be Open
GL drivers for the G200.  Now why would he buy this product if he needed
Open GL drivers for his application unless the box or Matrox said they would
have Open GL drivers for the G200?  Maybe he didn't check and assumed that
Open GL was supported, maybe the box said it supported Open GL or Matrox
said Open GL was supported.  After he found out otherwise if he kept the
G200 it's HIS problem not Matrox's.  I'd guess that he kept the G200 and
this is why he's whining so much about this obsolete card.

I buy, specify and recommend to my customers Matrox and nVida chipset based
cards all the time and choose to pass on the G200 because it offered no real
improvement in 2D performance or support of additional graphics standards at
the time of its introduction.  The Mil II cards were working just fine.  At
the time of the introduction of the G200 Open GL was just emerging and
emerging standards are at best tenuous.  I think that if a new standard
catches on in the marketplace AND there are applications that display a
marked advantage when using these new standards that they may be worth
buying if an application I need to use can take advantage of these new
standards.  Other wise it's better to wait and see what the market is going
to do with it.

Matrox or for that matter any other company that make PC components has
never screwed me because I do my homework first and don't rush out and buy
or recommend products that I have not tried and used for the intended
applications.  On the rare occasions that I have come across products that
don't do what they claimed they would I have had no problems returning them.

So because the half life a the typical PC product today is a year (this is
optimistic IMO), 5 years of experience is all you would require of the
persons or company you or your company are going to spend thousands if not
tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars with?

Hmmm...   sounds like you may be headed the same way as our poor Gary.


Regards,

Chip Louie

>
>
> Nobody buys items that are obviously not meeting the product
> specifications
> on the box. Other than usenet, how does one know the manufacturer is lying
> like a rug? So don't dismiss these so called rumors, but rather
> investigate
> them carefully. Certainly there are fewer repeat customers for
> Matrox based
> on the number of customers they screwed.
>
> In the PC business, 5 years of experience are all you need,
> because the half
> life of most items is a year. [A person fiddling with PCs for 5 years has
> experienced win95, win98, winnt, win2k and winxp. OK, so they don't know
> WFW, and never ran XTree, but who cares.]  Sure it is fun to talk about
> programming 6502s, but the relevance is weak at best, though people who
> built uP systems have a better understanding of interrupts.
>
>

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