[rescue] Video card reco

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 06:02:49PM -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > cheap.  Crappy 3D performance but wonderful 2D performance.
> 
> Err, Neither the Millenium or the Millenium II had any 3d hardware.
> 2d performance on new cards is no better than these.

Initially, the very first Milleniums (not to be confused with the
Mystiques) claimed to have 3D acceleration.  Or was that the Matrox
Ultima card...  Well, I can find references to the Ultimas and
Impressions being 3D cards, but it also appears that they weren't PCI
cards, and I know I saw a PCI Matrox card doing 3D before the Mystique.
Grr.  I wish people would show more care in documenting old hardware.

And I'm really getting tired of having so many pages be returned to me
in russian when trying to search for docs on old PC related hardware.

Ahh, here is onf of the articles I remebered:
http://www.byte.com/art/9412/sec4/art8.htm

So, the impression plus is a 3D card.  I wonder if that means I'm
mistaken about the Millium.  A game called Sento was shipped with the
Impression, and me a friends were blown away because it looked better
than virtua fighter, which we understood to be a $10k game, and the
Impression clearly wasn't $10k.
 
> There are also some PCI GeForce2 cards, but if you're willing to ebay,
> then the Matrox cards are clearly better.

Heck, there are surplus dealers off ebay that have great prices on
Milleniums.  And, I'd probably also look for ATI before I'd go super
cheap nvidia (sure nvidia cards are fast, but the cheap ones in my
experience produce an inferior image.  For instance, the picture was
noticebly sharper with my Elsa TNT2 card than what it is with my generic
Geforce3 (which I only put up with because I needed the speed for this
class, but an seriously tempted to move back afterwards).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd