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Damn NVidia 2D

mithrandir2001

Diamond Member
I thought my Dell P1130 21" FD Trinitron was bad. When I set my GF2 GTS to 1600x1200@85Hz my monitor looks like crap. The image looks somewhat out of focus and there are convergence problems. When I scale down to 1280x960@85Hz the monitor looks nice and crisp. Sheesh, I want 1600x1200 on a 21" but stupid NVidia cut corners. Yea, there's supposed to be that soldering fix but I'm not sure I want to bother. Are the GF3 and GF4 plagued with the same 2D image quality problems? The GF2's image quality at high resolutions is not acceptable!
 
I just cranked my ti4200 to 16x12 and it's not awful. Not as sharp as my Radeon was, but probably acceptable to most people. Except that my monitor can't do better than 60Hz at this size. Ugh.
 
Do you have a low quality or longer than normal VGA cable? The extra bandwidth required by the higher resolution may look bad because of your cable not being able to hold that signal well enough. Just a suggestion as 2d should be fine as long as you dont have a 4 year old card.
 
It used to be that all Nvidia cards (like GF2 and before) had sucky 2D image quality. Now, some (GF4) do still have the sucky 2D IQ, but it's not as bad as the sucky 2D IQ of the GF2s; others are better. It depends on who makes the card. ATI's latest Radeons still have slightly better IQ, according to some who have compared them side-by-side. Matrox's Parhelia has by far the best IQ, but it's expensive and comparitively slow in modern 3D graphics rendering.

For the record, my several-year-old ATI Radeon SDR PCI has very sharp and clear IQ on a Philips 109B (19 inch) at 1600x1200 @ 75Hz.
 
The sharpness of my Geforce 4 Ti is acceptable. IMHO, the Radeon has sharper 2D but the Geforce 4 has more vibrant colors.
 
Yeah, because Nvidia is responsible for the filters other companies put on their boards.

Anyways, I know there's information on things you can do to improve the image quality, but they're a bit risky for my blood.
 
I have the same monitor and the same issues. Bloody GF2MX in my dell won't let me run the nice monitor at 16x12

One thing to remember, you will face the same issue with all those "powered by ATI" cards. It's up to the OEM what quality RAMDAC they end up using.
 
I just checked 1600X1200 on my GF3, (orginal non-Ti) Visiontek.
On my Sony G420, looks nice but too small for these old eyes. 🙂
I'm using the 30.82 driver though.
 
The video card is a Visiontek Xtasy 5632. I thought about going to a Matrox card since I am not heavily into 3D but I'm afraid my ancient motherboard won't cooperate with all AGP 2.0 cards (why I still run this rig is beyond me).

It's strange that 1280x960 can look so close to perfect yet 1600x1200 just falls into the crapper.
 
All GeForce2 (and TNT, TNT2) cards are known to have horrible "2-D" quality. I run dual monitor (my 19" Samsung 900NF running off of an ATI Rage128 Pro card and my 21" Sony G520 on a GeForce3) and don't notice that the GeForce3 produces better "2-D" than the ATI does; however, when I was running a GeForce2 Ultra along with the ATI, the "2-D" was horrible.
 
Originally posted by: tart666
I have the same monitor and the same issues. Bloody GF2MX in my dell won't let me run the nice monitor at 16x12

One thing to remember, you will face the same issue with all those "powered by ATI" cards. It's up to the OEM what quality RAMDAC they end up using.
Right. I bought one of those Powered-by-ATI cards some time ago, and will never repeat that mistake again! Horrible, blurry, 2D even at 800x600 unless you run it at a low refresh such as 60Hz. :disgust:

From now on it's only genuine ATI video cards for me. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: tart666
I have the same monitor and the same issues. Bloody GF2MX in my dell won't let me run the nice monitor at 16x12

One thing to remember, you will face the same issue with all those "powered by ATI" cards. It's up to the OEM what quality RAMDAC they end up using.
All of the "powered by ATi" cards are simply exact copies of ATi's own card, except for Tyan's Radeon 9700 Pro (which is outstanding as it is). You don't have anything to worry about with any ATi card.
 
It's not the chip it's the card the it's shitty filters, blame the manufacturer not the supplier.

Thorin
 
Originally posted by: Daovonnaex
Originally posted by: tart666
I have the same monitor and the same issues. Bloody GF2MX in my dell won't let me run the nice monitor at 16x12

One thing to remember, you will face the same issue with all those "powered by ATI" cards. It's up to the OEM what quality RAMDAC they end up using.
All of the "powered by ATi" cards are simply exact copies of ATi's own card, except for Tyan's Radeon 9700 Pro (which is outstanding as it is). You don't have anything to worry about with any ATi card.
The "powered by ATi" Radeon VE card that I got sure isn't an exact copy of ATi's own Radeon VE. The text quality is the absolute worst I've ever seen. You can even notice the difference between it (very crappy) and the integrated SiS 630 chipset on my server (still crappy, but much better than the Radeon VE) on my old crappy 15 inch monitor. 😱
I have no complaints at all, however, about the "built by ATi" cards I have used.
 
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