Graphics card and stability

Music Manic · Post by **Music Manic** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 9:28 pm

I have the old matrox G450 which I like because of the fanless option.

Would like to know that If I have a card with more MB onboard would I benefit from better graphics performance when things start getting intensive,due to applications?

When I have Cubase and SFP running sometimes I can't,immediately get to SFP until Cubase has "let go".
I'm not sure if that;s what's exactly going on or if SFP has reached its limit and has become slugish with the CPU and graphics card.

Thanks

the19thbear · Post by **the19thbear** » Thu Nov 08, 2007 1:55 am

i used it for awhile, but found it was a little bit sluggish when switching to sfp.. but you might be able to tweak windows/ the craphics settings somehow to make it work better. I dont use it anymore cause it doesnt support widescreen mode... too bad! do you know a fix for that?

thanks...

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Thu Nov 08, 2007 4:17 am

I didn't try it with the Matrox, but Powerstrip made my NVidea6200 do 1680x1050 in Win98, which the native driver cannot do.
There's also a section dealing with PCI latency settings, but it may only work permanent with the registered version, e.g. the changes I made were lost after reboot. I didn't spend much time with that, tho.

cheers, Tom

the19thbear · Post by **the19thbear** » Thu Nov 08, 2007 4:35 am

yeah... i tried powerstrip as well, but it didnt work...
sorry for hijacking your thread

if you can help me out, let me know.. but...
back to the original topic!

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Thu Nov 08, 2007 7:06 am

Music Manic wrote: ...When I have Cubase and SFP running sometimes I can't,immediately get to SFP until Cubase has "let go"...

sorry, I forgot to add that to the prvious post...
if Cubase 'has to let go...' then Cubase is busy (with whatever stuff), which is completely unrelated to SFP.
Since I don't have Cubase I have no idea how smart it deals with the graphic engine - but it's hard to imagine they did specific optimizations as that in turn will almost certainly end with compatibility issues.

People have reported smoother SFP handling with certain graphic drivers, but (considering developement cycles in graphcards) that's already ages ago - and imho just a side effect.
Noone really cares about 2D performance anymore, as even the hardware of $50 cards is dozens of times 'faster' than you could perceive.

Reviews and comparisons are about shaders and 3-D reality engines which makes a finding a good '2D performer' a matter of chance - afaik only Matrox adresses 2D at all.
Looking at pure hardware specs of current (cheapo) graphcards the software implementation must be rather sh*tty - but well, that's no big news anyway, isn't it ?

bill3107 · Post by **bill3107** » Thu Nov 08, 2007 7:57 am

As soon as i have replaced my Matrox (i have a pcie Gigabyte 7600GT fanless now), i redescovered colors and the sharpness of my soniccore plugins even with extreme graphic resolution. Now i can display more stuff on my 16/9 screen and everything is sharp. You should find this kind of boards for cheap now ! Just my advice though

...

the19thbear · Post by **the19thbear** » Thu Nov 08, 2007 2:05 pm

well i might be getting a Geforce fx 5200, they are dirt cheap, and are fanless.... do you know anything good/bad about this carD? I'm only suing my pc for music, so i dont care about 3d stuff...

thanks!

Herr Voigt · Post by **Herr Voigt** » Thu Nov 08, 2007 3:45 pm

Well, the G450 is a little bit poor nowadays ...
In my DAW there is a G650. It's a PCI-e card and has more RAM. No problem with 2 19" monitors. The view of the stm 2448 is really great!