Author Topic: Highest display resolution supported on ATI X850 PE card & SNAP drivers?  (Read 16328 times)

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Highest display resolution supported on ATI X850 PE card & SNAP drivers?
« Reply #15 on: January 02, 2016, 03:24:31 pm »
Dave and Martin,

Probably Lewis would be best, lgrosenthal at 2rosenthals dot com

Exchanged a couple of emails with Lewis, he is going to follow-up with Steve. For those of you who reviewed the SNAP 2015 video there is some on-going work, I just hope we can narrow the scope down to a workable range of hardware and optimize that. Anyways, my input in that project can only be limitted to the driver <=> monitor interface as I have no video driver development skills.

Appreciate the right pointer to the correct contact point!

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Highest display resolution supported on ATI X850 PE card & SNAP drivers?
« Reply #16 on: January 02, 2016, 05:37:33 pm »
Olafur and Andi,

For what it's worth, here is a personal experience of mine when it comes to the CRT style displays.

I have always invested heavily into the displays, primarily because given today's way of "human computer interface" the display is really how we gather much of the information. This is slowly starting to change, tablets and mobile computing in general are a good indicator of this, however, we are not quite there yet.

So...in my previous high-res setups I have used Mitsubishi displays (yeah, the price tag was somewhat astronomical, even by today's standards)...specifically, the last model prior to switching to the LCD panel (Samsung 214T) was the DiamondPro 1010. This 21" CRT was fully capable of displaying 1800 x 1440/76 Hz NI resolution providing a pretty decent 0.26 mm aperture grille pitch. While my Matrox cards had no problem driving the monitor, especially since I was using heavily shielded BNC cabling (each cable carrying separate RBG signals), the attempts to use 1800x1440 resolution on a 21" CRT panel (remember the darn CRT geometry problems??? even with a high-end aperture grille displays like the 1010 you always fought the converegence issue - separate beams not quite aligning on the surface of the display thus causing a drift and fuzziness). The end result was that the 21" CRT (which really was a 19.7" diagonal display size) was far too small of a format for this high of a resolution unless you were doing pure CAD/graphics work. The text, especially smaller fonts was simply hard to deal with. I ended up running 1600x1200 on that display and was extremely happy with it for quite a number of years.

I've attached the monitor spec file if you are interested in the details.

Now, once I upgraded to my Samsung 214T LCD, boy, all geometry issues went away...yeah, the colour was never the same, but how could it when compared to an extremely high end CRT display like the 1010? I accepted that because for me geometry rendering was far more important. Moving on to the 245T display simply carried on with the display resolution progression, that gave me 1920x1200 but required me to move to a DVI connector video adapter, which was the ATI X850, top-of-the-line in SNAP supported video chipsets at that time.

Andi B.

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Re: Highest display resolution supported on ATI X850 PE card & SNAP drivers?
« Reply #17 on: January 02, 2016, 08:20:24 pm »
Quote
This 21" CRT was fully capable of displaying 1800 x 1440/76 Hz NI resolution providing a pretty decent 0.26 mm aperture grille pitch.
Doing a bit math with your stated 19.7" and the 0.26mm mask you'll see this CRT is able to display about 1540 pixel horizontally. If you stretch the image to max out the tube best you can display will be 1600 pixels per line. But you talked about it - who will ever accept the convergence problems again these days?

1800x1440 was way to much for this tube and you never could see that much pixels. Simply cause there were not that much stripes in the grill. You can't cheat physics. Btw. that's one reason why your text was hardly readable with such high resolutions.



Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Highest display resolution supported on ATI X850 PE card & SNAP drivers?
« Reply #18 on: January 02, 2016, 10:13:28 pm »
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This 21" CRT was fully capable of displaying 1800 x 1440/76 Hz NI resolution providing a pretty decent 0.26 mm aperture grille pitch.
...1800x1440 was way to much for this tube and you never could see that much pixels. Simply cause there were not that much stripes in the grill. You can't cheat physics...

Completely agree with all you stated...however, you are leaving out the intended use of the hardware. So while I may have been focused on text quality, the person doing CAD work on this display would certainly be able to take advantage of the higher addressable resolution. In other words, the monitor electornics had the ability to physically address (turn on/off) some 1800 locations on the X-axis...this very much translates to having a functionality where the display can choose from 1800 different points, even though not each of these 1800 points was a unique physical screen location, sort of an interpolation solution I suppose.

For me anyways it all boils down to the functionality one indends to utilize. Image/graphics work on displays is very different then text work. Today's hardware, where the RGB gamut is wholly covered (near 100%) will still fetch a good price at the cash register...and if one is willing to spend that money I can only assume it's because he/she is not focused on text only.

If anyone reading the post is looking at a pretty good review of panel capabilities head on over to http://www.tftcentral.co.uk, these guys do a great mix of usability and tech analysis.

Daniel

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Re: Highest display resolution supported on ATI X850 PE card & SNAP drivers?
« Reply #19 on: January 03, 2016, 02:49:47 am »
Quite a while back I decided to update my old computer:
Works fine with a cpu that came out after the bios was written. It just says "AMD processor model unknown". New wireless card etc. And now for the video...

So I searched around for what I figured was the fastest video card for eComStation. I ended up with the Radeon X850 XT, a PCI Express card with two DVI ports and supported by SNAP. They were being sold off as new OEM for $17. Bought one and a spare.

Since I am only driving a TV (and only one of them) I have no problem with 1920x1080 being too fast. My problem is that they never finished the DOS & Win 3.1 compatibility. I have to run several old CAD programs that use their own drivers. VVGA.SYS or VSVGA.SYS with every /pcitrap option I could find just gives me full screen DOS. Windowed anything or WIN3 gives a "wait, loading" forever or a hang.

It would seem that this would be something that could be fixed without too much difficulty. It was done for all previous cards and just wasn't done because the project got stopped...  He stated hopefully.