On Mon, 7 Jan 2002, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:
> > I'm considering buying a G450 for dualhead on my machine, but I want to know
> > if I can hook up a 19" (primary) monitor and a 15" (satellite) monitor with
> > few problems, at different resolutions.
> yep. been there, done that, no worries. had a 21" at 1440x1080@81Hz,
> and a 14" at 640x480.
>
> > I've heard that matrox has
> > antialiasing problems with their drivers though. Is that still true?
> dunno. maybe I'm just dense but I generally never notice
> antialiasing problems.
>
> > Does
> > anyone have specifics? Can I run it in Xinerama, with one big desktop, at
> > different resolutions?
> yep. been there, done that, see above.
> they just have to be run at the same color depth.
>
> > Do I have to, or can I have two separate desktops
> > running, just sacrificing the ability to move windows from one screen to the
> > other?
> yes you can. some actually like working this way; but it really
> bothered me.
>
> > In short, why would I NOT want to buy this card?
> DRI with mine causes X to lock up after a few (3-20) minutes of
> playing some games. not all 3D stuff causes it (FlightGear flight sim,
> atlantis, and glxgears don't cause any problems); but the FPS games
> (Half-Life, Rune, Quake3 Arena) cause it to hang the framebuffer after some
> time.
>
> I've got a 'revision 82' G450. dunno exactly what that means. maybe
> those people who have it working fine, have a different revision. based on
> my browsing through the driver source, the only difference between a G400
> and a G450 is that the revision # is >80.
>
> the other problem with the G450 is that when running with 2 heads,
> the memory isn't split 50/50; it's split 75/25. the second head only gets
> 8MB of video ram. ~~;(
Have you tried either
Option "Crtc2Half" # [<bool>]
or
Option "Crtc2Ram" # <i>
? Without either of these options crtc2 is limited to 8MB, since it
is more limited in the resolutions and refresh rates that it supports.
The limits aren't as severe for the G450 as the G400, so perhaps people
could suggest a more appropriate default limit ?
> does anyone know if the dual-head Radeons do anything similarly stupid?
I understand that the Radeon driver drives the 2 heads in a completely
different way from the Matrox driver; the XFree86 code for the MGAs takes
the easy way out and pretends that there are two independant frame buffers,
while the Radeon driver has two windows into one large frame buffer,
so this problem shouldn't arise.
> what about the G550?
Same drivers as the G400 and G450. Don't know how the Matrox provided
driver works on any of these cards.
> also keep in mind that you'll need to turn up the AGP speed on the
> second head in order to get a decent dotclock limit. otherwise your max
> refresh rates will *suck*.
Is the driver using the G400 limits, where the second head was very
limited ?
--
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna
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