Question about graphics-card "speed"

[jgg]

For some reason that I no longer remember, I became a big fan of Matrox graphics cards in the early 1990s. I'm quite sure I've owned one - or more - cards from every one of their consumer series over the years, including the wonderful (in its day) Parhelia 256.

Anyway, I've been bouncing along happily with an M9128 for the last couple of years, but I recently saw an offer for a C420 that I couldn't refuse, and I built it into my Lenovo ThinkStation S20 today.

It works fine, and the image on my NEC PA272W is crystal clear (I know it's overkill, but I only use the card to run the one monitor), as it was with the M9128.

The C420 has 2 GB GDDR 5 memory, whereas the M9128 only has 1 GB of DDR2 memory. The C420 is PCIe 3.0, but the slot on my mobo is only PCIe 2.0, so there's no win there, I guess.

Now my question: Where, if anywhere, should I see / experience the difference in the amount and speed of memory? So far, in about 5 hours of some normal "word processing" and surfing, I haven't seen any difference at all.

Thanks.

[jagabo]

Back in the early 90's I used mostly Matrox graphics cards too. But Matrox fell hopelessly behind Nvidia and ATI 20 years ago. Their only saving grace was their multi-monitor support. Even that is overpriced now unless you need 4 or more monitors. With one or two monitors any $50 card from Nvidia or AMD will run rings around Marox's cards now.

You might see better desktop performance with more memory when running four monitors with lots of stuff going on on all four monitors at the same time (like playing four videos, gaming on one and playing videos on the other, etc.). You should get better 3d gaming with more memory too.

[pandy]

Matrox had better analog lowpass filter on VGA - video was sharper and without ringing - filter was mandatory for EMC - other vendors usually simplified this filter so video was blurred in case of very high resolutions and sometimes with ringing. Nowadays where displays don't use analog signal all vendors offer same quality.
And as jagabo wrote - normal use case you probably don't need more than 64 - 128MB of video RAM - more video RAM is required to store textures (3D, Games etc), GPGPU (CUDA, OpenCL) etc.

[jgg]

My thanks to both people who've kindly taken the time to reply.

In "defending" my continued use of Matrox cards (though no one asked me to), in addition to "performance", I also like the passive cooling and availability of the Displayport connection that the Matrox cards offer.

Furthermore, and which I didn't mention originally, I also have another Matrox card (M9120) in my computer. It runs two NEC 2490WUXi monitors, one on each side of the PA272W. The Matrox software makes the setup a nobrainer, even for me.

I've found a couple of other cards (by Sapphire?) that have the passive cooling and Displayport, but most of them take up two slots and are even more expensive than the Matrox.

Last but not least, and this is purely subjective, I have yet to see a graphics card that "creates" text that is as sharp and clear as the Matrox cards. I have my PA272W connected to my other Lenovo ThinkStation S20 that still has its original card, an nVidia Quadro FX 1800 - also connected by Displayport. If you blindfolded me and then switched the inputs back and forth (uncovering my eyes so I could see the screen when ready), I'm 99.9% sure I could tell you whether the monitor was being run by the Matrox card or the nVidia.

For movies, I can't really see any difference. Both cards show BluRays crystal clear.

Anyway, thanks again for your replies.

[jagabo]

I have yet to see a graphics card that "creates" text that is as sharp and clear as the Matrox cards.

If the other graphics card is set up at the same resolution and also using a digital output (displayport, hdmi, dvi) the sharpness should be the same. You probably have cleartype enabled on one of the computers, not on the other. Or the graphics card is not set the the monitors native resolution.

[pandy]

Digital connection makes no difference for video quality - your text will be exactly same on any graphic board even embedded one (assumption is that typeface rendering is exactly same - i can imagine that different typeface rendering engine may give different results), software configuration is also no problem for other vendors - usually you don't need to do anything except installation.
I can imagine Matrox doesn't need extra cooling as it is mostly 2D type of card, also 2 slots are required by more fancy cooling system on modern 3D GPU. You can find passively cooled modern GPU, sometimes lowprofile and single slot too but if you are happy with Matrox and you don't need 3D then stay with Matrox - from my perspective it is too expensive when compared to offered functionality but if you are happy then don't change anything.

[jgg]

Again, my thanks to everyone for your insightful input.