2D unimportant??

[Guest]

I'm currently trying to replace our Mac's but cant find much information on 2D speeds of modern graphic adapters. Bought some GTS 32sdr, wise choice?. Doing DTP at hires.

 

[machow]

2D <i>was</i> important long time ago, and now since all 2D apps are optimized with the highest speed practically, it stopped to improve as uch as 3D, since 3D has so much more room to grow and it is more breath taking than 2D graphics. Sure, 2D speed are important, but what's the differents of a monitor displaying at 85Hz and 150Hz? The results are the same.


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[Guest]

Thanks for the insight, but I feel there are moret to the point. 85 or 150Hz sure Ramdac's ar fast enough on most cards. But .. ever tried moving a full color selection on a image at high resolution? This still takes time, It cant all be cputime.

 

[machow]

Well what I meant current 2D graphics is that when you compared to GeForce (king of 3D) and Matrox (former? king of 2D). Those would have the same 2D performance, although quality would vary.


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[Guest]

When it comes to 2D most modern video cards do very well. If you are talking about just pasting pixels on the screen a video card with a refresh rate above 85mhz at the resolution and color you want will be sufficient. Video cards are limited by their bus speed but with PCI and AGP that is not really a problem anymore. A 128-bit 2D card should have 4 megs of memory otherwise the memory could be a limitation. The matrox millenium series are good professional cards.

 

[uncoando]

GTS 32 SDR? DDR, right? These are incredible cards.

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[Diablo]

If a Gforce 2 GTS isn't powerfull enough for you, I suggest looking into some small superpc system like the ones from cray systems (<A HREF="http://www.cray.com" target="_new">http://www.cray.com</A>). By the way, powerfull graphic cards need powerfull systems to feed those cards...

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[Guest]

2D image quality may have been an important issue back in the old days when 32-bit color wasn't common. Matrox had the best 2D by far. Now, though, just about all video cards have 350 MHZ RAMDACS that allow for way faster then needed refresh rates and much higher resolutions. Viewing things on a desktop won't matter between any of the major video brands, though things such as gaming and video playback are what should be really considered. All the 2D is almost exactly the same now.

 

[Guest]

Hi,
sorry people, but i have to disagree. Even tough i don't have the money to buy a geforce, i have met some nvidia cards (and their drivers-noatbly TNT, TNT2 and so on). What you guys are talkin is pure RAMDAC speed, who the hell cares about ramdac speed nowadays when every card has a 250+ MHz ramdac. and by the way which of u guyz has a monitor that has a 250 MHz+ bandwidth... The highest end diamondtron mons. that cost above 1000 bucks have such video siganl bandwidth specs. I'd say 2D is underestimated nowadays. I also would like to point out, that in my opinion Matrox is still the king here. Their 3D is pretty bad, but the 2D is great. Why? Not because of the speed, speed was an issue long ago as u already pointed out. It's image quality. nVidia has seen features added and then removed from their drivers such as advanced filters, several types of DX overlays and such. I got pretty fed up with my TNT that way. (no filtering in 16bit, 32 bit only with driver XXXX i don't remember anymore) Watch an MPEG-4 (DivX) movie on a Matrox with correct filtering and you'll know the difference. Especially on a low quality video source (bad old asf vhs rip and such) i think the difference is recognizable. So i think speed is not everything. I hope i did't hurt anybodys feeling with my comments...

 

[Guest]

as soon as the desktop appeared after i had installed the radeon 32ddr i knew it would take absolute unacceptable 3d performance to make me take it out of my machine.
i have never seen text look so crisp.
graphics chips / cards i have personal experience with include in no particular order:
verite 2100
stb velocity
banshee
matrox g200
savage 4
permedia 2

i do not know how the radeon would fare in a professional graphics layout situation, i do not see how it could fail though

Regards,
Chas