Drivers

    A key to the any success of any video card is its drivers, because without drivers, your fancy new expensive video card is rather useless.  The drivers used by Matrox are very different from those used for the G400.  Matrox used the new .NET framework for these drivers.  The drivers seem to use a large amount of system RAM as the image below shows.

    While the memory usage isn't really a big problem as it doesn't affect performance, and seems to release memory as it is needed, but it still seems like Microsoft's famous bloat has continued in .NET code.  One major sore point that is rather strange is that Matrox has dropped support for both Windows ME and 98(SE) for the Parhelia before they even released a driver for these OS's.  On a positive point Matrox has released basic 2D drivers for Linux, with support for TripleHead in Linux.  The latest drivers for Win2K and XP (1.01.00.080) fix many problems that people had with the previous drivers, such as Madden 2003 menus, Moto Racer GP Pixel Shader issues, as well as one major problem that kept me from using Jedi Knight II, Fraps and 16X FAA together.  They have also released an application for enabling/disabling TripleHead games very easily, called Appitimizer which I've found very, very useful.   Lets see what these drivers look like though.

     PowerdeskHF is a fairly nice program, as there are only about three levels of menus at the most, but in most cases it is only one click away from the main menu.

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