[Leaplist] so, dead nv part?

[Kevin Korb]

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Yeah, I have seen some of those many-headed cards.  I also saw that Matrox
even  made a PCIe 1x version of the old G550 which was my favorite
non-gaming card for a long time.

I never said the GeForce 4 MX 4000 was a good chipset.  I liked it because
it was one of the first cards on the market with flawless NTSC display
capabilities.  In fact I preferred the Matrox G550 for talking to a
monitor or a much better GeForce for playing games.  You would think it
wouldn't take much of a card to handle plain video at only 640x480 using a
different output but it sure took a long time for the manufacturers to get
it right.

Before the GeForce 4 MX came out the best way to get really good NTSC
output on a Linux box was to put Linux on an XBox.  I went through 2 of
those back in those days and was very happy when nVidia finally put out a
card that could do the job on a standard PC system.

Before I got an XBox I had tried 2 other PC solutions.  The first was from
Matrox.  They failed to mention that the TV output was not accelerated at
all plus it had a significant green tint to it that would not go away.
Then I tried one from ATI but could never get it to work reliably.

The XBoxes worked pretty well with GentooX at least until they fried.  The
GeForce 4 MX (I had 1 PCI and 1 AGP) both worked perfectly until I
replaced one with something HD capable and the other had to be replaced
when the driver no longer supported the chipset.

On Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:20:45 -0800 (PST)
"Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith at ieee.org> wrote:

> The biggest reason for PCI video cards were multi-head, beyond
> just older disk usage.  This has now been replaced by PCIe.
> There are quad-output PCIe x1 (yes, _x1_) cards for this now.
> But since it's so easy to bridge, there are still lower-end GeForce
> cards with the PCI option through the 8000 and 9000 series (100
> as well?).
> 
> The GeForce 4 MX was the ultimate mark-up GPU.  nVidia took it's
> 3-year old GeForce 2 MX (NV11) core and created the NV17 (and,
> later, NV18) by fusing the old GeForce2 core with a few GeForce4
> add-ons -- namely the generic VIVO (video-in, video-out) and motion
> compensation.  But for all intents and purposes, it was always slower
> than an NV20 (GeForce 3), and nearly all NV10 (GeForce 2 GTS)
> cards -- let alone the NV25 (GeForce 4Ti) was nothing like it (but
> an improved NV20 that already destroyed the GeForce 2/4 MX).
> 
> Using the cheap NV11 core meant it cost pennies in fabrication space,
> and getting the retailers on-board meant you could get $99-139 for a
> card not even worth $39 anymore.  It artificially kept video card prices
> up at the retail shelves, even as you could get newer cards with much
> better performance in mail order at half the price (or less).
> 
> But it was available in a PCI flavor.  ;)
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Kevin Korb <kmk at sanitarium.net>
> 
> Interesting.  I never even considered looking for newer video chipsets in
> PCI.
> 
> IIRC the last PCI video card I bought was a GeForce MX 4000 which was a
> favorite for NTSC video output.  At least until they dropped driver
> support for it.
> 




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	Kevin Korb			Phone:    (407) 252-6853
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