Appian Video Cards good for games?

[jsmith]

I was thinking about building a new trading system.
The Appian Video cards are very appealing with their quad monitor support.
My questions is that you people who are using either the AppianX or the other 4-monitor card ever try playing
games such as Quake?
If I wanted great game playing video card, I would get a GeForce 2. But I want to get a good multi-monitor card which I can play games once in a while for leisure at a decent framerate.
So how does the Appian cards perform for games?

 

[p2]

I have a Matrox Quad card and I sometimes play Unreal Tournament on it. It's definately a slower card for games but it's usable. But I'm not a serious gamer.

 

[yk]

Good day,

The appian is not really for gaming, but it can keep up quite well. But if your a frequent game player you may want to get another card to accomodate your game play.

Now days mulitple graphics cards can be installed in a machine and provide you with great game play and great multi-monitor support.
I believe the Nvidia Geforce 200 series offer dual displays on top of the geforce chipset.

But in most cases you will not be able to get the best of both worlds. One will lack, ultimately.

If gaming is not a significant priority I would go with the Appian, since they produce the best multi-monitor cards (that is all they make).

Good luck.

yk | nyc

 

[Eastboy]

Hmmm...if you are looking to play 3D games with good fps, you have to get a multi-monitor card that has a chipset catering to 3D opengl or direct3d support. The appian card that I know that specialises in 3D opengl performance is the appian jeronimo 2000. It uses the 3DLabs permedia3 chip. But caveat is the 3D opengl drivers derive hardware-acceleration when used only on Win NT 4.0 (for W2k not sure if appian's finished develping and optimising the drivers)

I myself am using the appian Jeronimo2000 but its currently slotted in a machine using win98. But am going to migrate 'em over to a WinNT4.0 machine. I play Counterstike to chill out on Fri evenings after the week's trading. So I hope I will finish the migration soon and I could report to you the results.

 

[shyhh]

the Geforce 2 MX card can support upto 2 monitors runing at high resolution. It good for games and good value for your money.

 

[Eastboy]

The win2000 drivers as of date for Jeronimo2000 card is really slip-shod work and they have not updated its driver for at least a year.

If you are looking to use win2000 or intend to in near future, i suggest very strongly to stay away from this card.

The win2000 driver for jeronimo 2000 cannot possibly play any 3D games at all. It is extremely slow to the extent of being unusable.

I have ditched the Jeroninmo2000 card and bought the Matrox G400Max card for a mere fraction of the cost of the appian card.

And the Matrox card's drivers for all OSes are all very well-developed. I am using the win2000 driver currently. 2D quality as in sharpness of text and quality/uniformity of color is simply breath-taking and 3D quality game playing is decent, esp if augmented with a PIII866 which I am using to play games like CounterStrike.

OpenGL support on this latest Matrox card drivers are well-written and do not have any stability issues. Only caveat is 3D performance is not on par with the latest GF3 card.

Sorry for this very late posting. Have been up to my neck with work recently.

 

[Baron]

According to the manufacturer, the reason why the Jeronimo 2000 is slower on video and games than other cards is because it is a "precision" product that excels when used with programs that require ultra-precise calculations, like CAD applications. Every calculation that the Jeronimo 2000 makes is taken out to 10 places behind the decimal point. Most mainstream cards take calculations out to two places. So with each calculation, the Jeronimo 2000 is doing five times more work, but the result is much more precise. It is this "precision overhead" that is the root of the problem.

In applications like video or games, you don't need precision because the display is changing at least 24 times per second. As long as the image and detail are somewhat accurate, that's good enough. Therefore, the Jeronimo 2000 does not perform as well as other cards in the areas of full-motion multimedia because its trying to do precise, CPU-intensive calculations when it really doesn't need to. It's for this very reason that companies like Nvidia have two distinct product lines: one that caters to video/gaming markets (GeForce) and a totally separate line that has products designed to meet the needs of the engineering/professional market (Quadro).