Is a Matrox card (dualhead) worth the extra trouble?

[TheGroove]

Hi,

First of all, I appreciate the effort of supporting Matrox cards even though Matrox doesn't seem to be the most cooperative company, so I should start with a "thank you".
I recently bought a few Matrox cards, G450's, at a price at which I couldn't let them pass.
I currently run a Xinerama setup on an NVidia GeForce 5200FX (using NVidia's binary drivers). This is by all means an entry-level card. I use it to drive 2 Sun GDM20E20 screens.
Now, Matrox historically has a reputation for offering the best image quality, so in an effort to improve my analog setup to the maximum, I figured I'd use a dualhead G450 instead of the Nvidia. It's only after buying the cards that I started reading about the "caveats" involved. So, here's my real question: will running the same setup on a G450 improve my situation, or will I be making sacrifices in terms of video overlay support, hardware acceleration and possibly, driver quirks?

I should make clear that I have no interest in gaming or any other kind of 3D graphics, so that's not an issue (I realize Matrox isn't the best choice for that anyway).

I use mplayer for most of my videos, the mplayer mga driver is still being maintained so I guess that gives me a slight advantage.

[wallhall]

I've used a g550 for about 10 years, running in dual-head mode.
This card is ok, but, since my monitors grow, the card was to slow.

So, because I like the matrox hardware, I got a P650 from a friend (before reading here )
the card is ok, but the drivers are not. I am also not a gamer, but a few apps need opengl,
and that is a horror with the matrox drivers. At last, it runs here in 16 bit depth, but
the opengl implementation is too old. so most apps wont compile.

Now, I bought an old FX 5200 ), run the nvidia installation, and it works.
The quality is ok for me, I cant see any difference.

Sad to say, but I think, for linux matrox is not a good choice anymore.