Notes, problems, and limitations
- For more information on your Matrox display driver and Matrox PowerDesk software, see the help included with this software.
- To install your Matrox display driver and Matrox PowerDesk software, run the setup program included with this software.
- For Matrox software updates that may fix problems listed here, see the Matrox Web site (www.matrox.com/mga).
- To use Matrox PowerDesk-HF software, Microsoft .NET Framework software needs to be installed in your system. This software is included on the installation CD-ROM included with Matrox products and is automatically installed by the main setup program on the CD-ROM. The latest .NET software is also available from the Microsoft Web site (www.microsoft.com).
- To get the most of your Matrox product, we recommend using the highest color palette setting (a 32-bit color palette) for all your displays. An 8-bit color palette may be unavailable or certain features may be unavailable while using an 8-bit color palette.
- The PixelTOUCH feature is unavailable with multiple displays in stretched mode or with a TV used to view your Windows desktop.
- Under certain conditions the Matrox GigaColor feature (over 1 billion simultaneous colors) may not be used even though the feature may be enabled in the software interface. This may happen if:
- Multiple displays are used in stretched mode.
- Multiple displays are used in independent mode and a high display resolution is selected. For example, if you have a 128 MB graphics card and you select a display resolution higher than 1600 x 1200 for your secondary display.
- Matrox PowerDesk-HF is configured to use 3 displays at a time.
- Windows XP -- With the Windows Fast User Switching feature, PowerDesk-HF is unavailable if another user is already logged on to Windows. To keep PowerDesk-HF available, users can log off from Windows normally and shouldn't use the Windows Switch User control. For more information on Fast User Switching, see Windows documentation.
- The game Soldier of Fortune II may not properly detect Matrox Parhelia graphics cards. As a result, this game may use unoptimized default settings that result in low frame rates with these cards. For better frame rates with Parhelia cards, make sure texture compression is enabled from the main menu of this game: click Options > Video Settings > Advanced Options > Image Format, then select DXT1 Compressed.
- Full-screen programs (typically games) designed for versions of DirectX earlier than 8.0 may not support horizontal display resolutions higher than 2048. While using multiple displays in stretched mode, the horizontal resolution of each display is combined (for example, a combined TripleHead resolution could be as high as 3840 x 1024). As a result, the stretched mode resolutions you can use with such programs may be limited to resolutions lower than what your graphics hardware and display driver can support. Selecting an unsupported resolution within a program may cause the program to quit unexpectedly.
- With Discreet 3ds max software, dialog boxes may take more time to appear if one or more controls in Matrox PowerDesk Desktop Management are enabled. If you experience this problem, try disabling all Desktop Management controls.