I swapped out the Matrox G550 PCIe card, going back to the nVidia FX5200 PCI card. Main reason would be it is significantly faster and I’ve been spoiled with starting with nVidia cards when I first began working with Amithlon. The nVidia cards seem to have the highest level of hardware accelerated features, besting the Matrox in SysSpeed’s graphics test sometimes 12x faster. Typically it’s 1.x to 2.x faster overall, a few 3x and higher. The Matrox did win a few, I would assume from running on the PCIe bus. The second reason would be Matrox cards are limited to 4mb for Picasso96 while the nVidia card presents 16 mb. This allows higher resolution/higher color depth screen modes.
I am generating SysSpeed “modules” for the cards I’m testing, running 800×600 in 8/16/32 bit color screenmodes. I’ll post the modules soon, adding my A4000T with CyberVision 64/3D as a comparison base.
I’ve used nVidia FX5200 64mb, FX5200 128mb, FX5200 256mb and a FX5500 256mb cards, the 256mb FX5200 showing the fastest results. The 128mb card failed to initialize the framebuffer once loadlin was run (open framebuffer…..no such device) and surprisingly the FX5500 was much slower than the FX5200.