G200 never really had an OpenGL ICD. I believe it uses a DX wrapper that translates from OGL. So G200 always had terrible OGL performance.

I have a G200 and installed the latest drivers from Matrox (still available online). I've not tried DoomGL, but I've tried GLQuake... and it's slower than a Banshee.

If it's for pure sharp 2d performance you want and you can't find a G200 but a G100, that'll be fine too.

DoomGL is crap. there really isn't a non-crappy gl doom port, doom's not something that can be trivially translated to polygons despite its looks

I believe that the G200 is better for DirectX games compared to OpenGL, though GLQuake does work with the latest drivers in Win9x and NT. If your are using a 486 CPU or a Cyrix 6x86 (pre-MX), the latest drivers still don't work with GLQuake.

G200 finally got a real OpenGL ICD around the same time as G400 got one. I think it was in early 2000. Prior to that it did indeed use a D3D-to-GL wrapper. G400 at least had a Quake 1/2/3-optimized miniGL for awhile (called TurboGL).

It could very well be slower than Banshee. They are in about the same weight class but 3dfx may have had faster OpenGL. Image quality might be better with G200 however.

You actually want to extract the G200 ICD out of the G400 driver package because it has fixes for some bugs in the last G200 driver package. Matrox never bothered to package a new G200 release. For example, Quake 2 will lack colored lighting.

Thx, Heretic2 has a special mini-open-gl driver directly for the G200 and it works better then the openGL of voodoo1 version.
I always used DoomGL and GLHexen and GLHheretic, because they run very good on lowend machines!

There is a small configure tool for every GL-Port. There are some issues like the destroyed textures when looking down in a sharp angle
and the flickering blood textures on the walls and Glhexen has an issue with the joystick support, but overall I loved that ports since 2000.

Are there any better alternatives that run performant on a lowend machine like mine in the signature?

Sadly there will be no updates for DoomGL in the future...but we will never know. Is that Michaël Ryssen (Kokak) the programmer of these ports?
Perhaps he has the source-code and someone is interested to fix it. Perhaps the issues are due to the 3dfx-opengl 2.1 beta, I simply don't know....

...I used these ports back with my Pentium200, later MMX and a Voodoo1 and later a Voodoo2.

Another thin is WolfGL, this only runs smooth with Voodoo3 opengl, they are really laggy on my Voodoo1. Perhaps I should search for something
different for Wolf3D and Spear3D.

swaaye wrote:

G200 finally got a real OpenGL ICD around the same time as G400 got one. I think it was in early 2000. Prior to that it did indeed use a D3D-to-GL wrapper. G400 at least had a Quake 1/2/3-optimized miniGL for awhile (called TurboGL).

It could very well be slower than Banshee. They are in about the same weight class but 3dfx may have had faster OpenGL. Image quality might be better with G200 however.

You actually want to extract the G200 ICD out of the G400 driver package because it has fixes for some bugs in the last G200 driver package. Matrox never bothered to package a new G200 release. For example, Quake 2 will lack colored lighting.

Interesting, one more thing on the todo list.

Off topic... but I never really understood why Matrox failed. G200 was ok. G400 was competitive with TNT2/Vodoo3 and released only 2-3 months after. It was strong in D3D, and Windows gaming increasingly moved that direction. Sure Parhelia came out, but that was a massive 4 year gap. Surely they could've produced a DX7 card inbetween?

I tested one of my g400 (marvel) against the my g200a (old layout), but I put the g200a back in the machine due to several reasons:

- The G200a (old layout) has the lightly better image-Quality and better colors!
- The G200a (old layout) has a centered image in textmode and lowres (320x200) !!!!!!!!!!
- The G200a (old layout) has the option to go for a DVD encoder Upgrade. The G400 marvel fails when decoding dvd content. Though it works, but it's not smooth with PII-233 (current frequency).
- The G400 (marvel) has a very low framerate in DoomGL, compared to the 3dfx-beta 2.1. The G200 openGL did not work at all, but I will test it due to the infos I got above (extracting the latestes bugfixed G200icd out of the latest G400 drivers)

Overall I like the G200 over the G400, mostly for the centered and colorfull image on tft, witch mostly none of my other cards have.

dexvx wrote:

Surely they could've produced a DX7 card inbetween?

Like G550?
Who knows if they have seen their future in gaming market, even after success of G400.

dexvx wrote:

swaaye wrote:

G200 finally got a real OpenGL ICD around the same time as G400 got one. I think it was in early 2000. Prior to that it did indeed use a D3D-to-GL wrapper. G400 at least had a Quake 1/2/3-optimized miniGL for awhile (called TurboGL).

It could very well be slower than Banshee. They are in about the same weight class but 3dfx may have had faster OpenGL. Image quality might be better with G200 however.

You actually want to extract the G200 ICD out of the G400 driver package because it has fixes for some bugs in the last G200 driver package. Matrox never bothered to package a new G200 release. For example, Quake 2 will lack colored lighting.

Interesting, one more thing on the todo list.

Off topic... but I never really understood why Matrox failed. G200 was ok. G400 was competitive with TNT2/Vodoo3 and released only 2-3 months after. It was strong in D3D, and Windows gaming increasingly moved that direction. Sure Parhelia came out, but that was a massive 4 year gap. Surely they could've produced a DX7 card inbetween?

Matrox didn't really fail, but they just ended up selecting to focus their efforts on their main market. They were as a company, always more focused on the professional end of the market. Multi-monitor video walls, medial imaging, video production etc. Gaming requires a ton of R&D to stay competitive, and it was difficult to please both camps. Matrox decided to buy 3rd party graphics chips and focus on making cards based on those instead. Their focus could stay on drivers, stability and support. Just look at how their own graphics chips weren't really what the mainstream market were after. I mean, firstly...dual monitor support back in the 90's? Few gamers needed that. Then triple monitor support shortly after? And most graphics cards back then implemented OpenGL support only to allow for running games, rather than a full implementation. To Matrox, this wasn't an option. They worked on it until they had a fully featured OpenGL implementation. Sure, it took longer, but their primary market needed full implementation, not just rudimentary for games to run. Nowadays all cards have full OpenGL support, but back then, this wasn't an obvious thing. So in the end, the cost of staying competitive in the gaming segment became higher than the profits of making gaming cards, so they just stopped designing gpu's and focus on other things.

Putas wrote:

dexvx wrote:

Surely they could've produced a DX7 card inbetween?

Like G550?
Who knows if they have seen their future in gaming market, even after success of G400.

The G550 is a dolled-up G400. It's not even particularly faster (maybe slightly so, especially the last revisions).

But otherwise, I'd agree - they just chose not to chase the gaming market. It was right around that same time that nVidia acquired a commanding lead, too: even ATi didn't have a real solid competitor until the Radeon 9800. The classic Radeon and Radeon 8500 were, at best, nipping at nVidia's heels, differentiating themselves on funky features and, to the extent that it mattered, somewhat better Linux support. I'm not at all surprised that Matrox wasn't interested in playing that particular game. They'd probably have augered in, if they did. The other players - 3dfx and S3 - did auger in, after all, and for a while there ATi hung on only by dint of being the only Other Guy and having Apple and Sun's favor.

I think I need some additional advice for the OpenGL support. I have installed the latest G200 driver. Now I downloaded the latest G400 driver.
What file should I copy to the Windows/System directory? I expanded the G200ICD.DL_ to G200ICD.DLL and I have overwritten the original one, but DoomGL does not recognize the G200openGL.
Even if I copy it the the directory to DoomGL and change the name to "opengl32.dll" it does not change anything. There is an "opengl32.dll" file in windows/system but it's from 1996, perhaps
the microsoft-implementation? I do have to test further.

It has been years since I used G200 but yes all you should need to do is expand that G200ICD.DLL and overwrite the old one installed on the system. If you search tthe forum you will find old threads with Info.

The system OpenGL32.DLL should be left as is.

One restart and it worked....that's..great. Performance is quite nice!
Do you know a working Win95 fraps-version that can do all three? (D3D, OpenGL and Glide)
None of my very old ones work with any 3D-api.

swaaye wrote:

It has been years since I used G200 but yes all you should need to do is expand that G200ICD.DLL and overwrite the old one installed on the system. If you search tthe forum you will find old threads with Info. The system OpenGL32.DLL should be left as is.

This works, but sometimes it does not find the opengl-subsystem. Could be a problem with the very old DoomGL-Port.

Another quite interesting thing:

Win95 installs an general plug&play monitor. I am not satisfied with it because it has resolutions and frequencies my eizo L367 does not support.
I downloaded the eizo-drivers an installed it. But the matrox-gfs-driver has it's own monitor-customization! The matrox driver does not support
my eizo L367, it has some other eizo monitors to choose from, but that does not help. I can configure every single mode manually for each colordepth
in the matrox driver, but sometimes this causes a crash for the cpl-file. I am a bit confused 🙁 I only want all possible resolutions to stay with 60hz.

The other thing is, that some programs require 320x240 instead of 320x200. I found a VESA-Tsr that upgrades the rom-vesa-2.0 support of my g200
and now a WIDE-RANGE of resolutions und colordepths are supported.

I installed the display-driver for my eizo l367. I can see the standard-resolutions 640x480/800x600/1024x768 with up to 76hz,
but the matrox dialog offers another control-panel with MUCH more resolutions from 320x200/320x240/320x360 and so on.
These resolutions are shown with 85hz for each color-depth 8bit/16bit/24bit=32bit, but that is more that the l367 can
display, so the screen gets dark. I cannot configure these resolution because the driver-dialog crashes and I must reboot.
I cannot choose the L367 driver in the matrox-monitor-configuration and there is no manual config-option, but it is possible
to import an "*.mpr" file. What is this? I cannot find anything about it.

Because I currently see a "dead end", I choose to test other stuff. I installed the so called "HZTOOL" and configured everything
to 60Hz, but this does not work either.

Where can I safely set EVERY resolution in EVERY colordepth to 60Hz ?