Video Cards issue..............

[RAMWolff44]

Hi, inspiration from Sharone's post about monitors.

I have complained in the past about the program crashing and certian brushes crashing the program, and even though I have an
XP ready system with all the newest (well, WAS the newest) hardware, I am wondering if a different video card would improve the perfomance.

I have an NVIDIA TNT II Model 64 Pro. I love NVIDIA but from all the talk about the monitor, it occurs to me that the monitor is only as good at the video card and it's drivers. So I am asking you all to come forward and tell us what video cards you have installed on your systems. Preferably folks that have quick re draw, no crashes and can use all the brushes.

I had a problem again last night. I was working with the freehand tool. Is it normal for it to slow the whole program down if you have allot of lines going??? I also imported an '.ai' file (to extract a part of it for the design to go on the goblet, looks really good!!) and it really slowed down the program.

So I am curious if my vidio card needs to be changed to a different maker.

Come one, come all. Tell us your card types and your experience with it. Much appreciated.

RAMWolff [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

PS: FYI, I have a Pentium III, 1 Ghz speed and 524 Mgs of RAM.

[rheaton]

RAMWolff, I have a 5 yr old HP 4C at work and a 4 yr. old one at home. Not the higest resolution for print jobs, both have been very dependable. 9 times out of 10 I use the twain out of PSP for scanning. Works flawlessly.

[Klaus Nordby]

Matrox G550 Dual head here too - razor sharp. And before that I had a Matrox G200, also excellent. I've had several ATIs too, but they're not nearly as sharp as the Matrox ones. Matrox rules 2D! I hate all games and all 3D apps, so Matrox is all I need!

K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara

[gidgit]

Though I have seen my buddies Matrox in action, on his monitor it didn't look much if at all better than my own display with which I use a 16meg/128 bit ATI card.

No problems at all with my ATI, great color and games perform at good quality and speeds as well.

I have heard that Matrox cards are very good with the right monitors, and to this I have to wonder...who see's the difference? Those who have them of course, but for the higher majority of users out there who would view say some nice graphics done up with a matrox based system, wouldn't they be missing the end rewards by not having said card and the complimenting monitor?

[This message was edited by gidgit on February 18, 2002 at 03:40.]

[RAMWolff44]

I just ordered my new Matrox G550, didn't get the dual head, I don't have 2 monitors (that's ALL I'd need, I'd never go to sleep) but the G550 and the G550 Dual seemed very similar. I watched the demo and looked over the tech stuff, looks wonderful. Bummer that Gateway doesn't carry any of the Matrox stuff. So it won't be covered by them, that kinda sucks, but I am after performance and quality here. AND the price, WOW!! I've seen cards that are in the $200.00 range and I can't believe that it was under $150.00 and that includes the S&H. Can't wait to rip the NVIDIA out of the AGP slot and really see what I can do here.

Thanks again, keep your fingers and toes crossed that it's the solution.

RAMWolff [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[Khazi]

I use an ATI Radeon 8500 here - very fast, very stable and, well, pretty good all round, really.

64 Mb on board ram, and supports up to 2408 x 1526.

Generally very pleased with it.

Monitor is an Iiyama Vision Master Pro510 (22")

Chris

[Dan Huff]

My last computer had a Matrox Millennium G200 and no Xara crashes, Windows 98 and then 2000. My new machine I built 7 months ago(Win2000) has an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon, 32MB, and NO problems with any brushes that have been posted so far, although I do notice a slowdown with some of them.

The monitor is just a few year old CTX 19", same for both machines.

Danny Huff
http://www.asherrocks.com
(I'm the guy who USED to have a lot of excess hair)

[gwpriester]

RW

Congrats on getting your Matrox card.

RE: Custom Brushes crashing your system. This may not be a function of your graphics card as much as it has to do with system resources (the first half of your forum nickname--RAM).

Brushes, especially when the brush shape is complex and the spacing is very tight, can put a strain on your systems resources and Windows 9X has never been very good at managing system resources. I used to get crashes all the time when I was creating and working with brushes even though I had adequate RAM and was not running other applications.

I experimented this morning (I'm running Windows XP now on a new machine with 256MB RAM) and I did a ton of complex stuff that did not kill the machine. So I can only assume that Windows XP manages system resources a bit better and more reliably.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://www.gwpriester.com">
www.gwpriester.com </a>


XaraXone

[glenngosack]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by RAMWolff:

I still hear to many complaints from folks about WinXP so I will stick with my Win2000 for the time being.

RAMWolff [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I am using XP pro and XaraX, Xara3D, Office XP pro, Quicken, PSP v7, PowerDVD, and a few other titles, with an Nvidia Gforce 3 and ViewSonic 19" monitor @ 1152x864x32bit. Rock solid and no video problems.

Glenn

[paulferz]

Running NT Sp6a on Gateway 550/256m, Hitachi 19" monitor with Oxygen VX1 32MB/OpenGL/1600x1200/75hz.

I don't recall crashes using brushes but the brushes do slow things down a lot, especially when lines exceed 100 or so.

The slowdown isn't as much as using a lot of named colros, however, which seems weird. Could be a classic NT stupid resource management problem.

[This message was edited by Paul Ferzoco on February 22, 2002 at 13:05.]