It looks like you need a faster CPU. Those results are probably CPU bound. Either that, or the benchmarking program you used isn't sufficient to push those cards to the limit. I'm finding it hard to believe that G200 is no faster than a first generation Millenium or Mystique.

From this table I found, G200 should be substantially faster.

http://www.512bit.net/matrox.html

It is clocked 50% higher than the first generation Millenium/Mystique cards.

sliderider wrote:

It looks like you need a faster CPU. Those results are probably CPU bound. Either that, or the benchmarking program you used isn't sufficient to test those cards.

Think you're seeing it from the wrong perspective. Not trying to find the maximum speed these cards can go, just to see if there were any difference on a Pentium 100.

I want to create a Socket 5 & 7 motherboard/chipset benchmark comparison thread, and the Matrox cards are the best way to go about it for collecting results. Why Matrox? They are uniform. They didn't come in 10.000 different versions as the S3 Virge's, or other chipset which had several different manufactures. They are cheap and in good supply. Most members here on Vogons own one. By forcing Matrox cards from the Millennium II, Mystique and G200 groups you avoid graphic cards being a problem in the results.

Why Pentium 100? It is in good supply and works on all Socket 5 and Socket 7 boards. People can downclock their higher clocked Pentium's if they'd like (tested and makes no difference in results). It is also the comparison speed used by feipoa in his 486 benchmark.

From this table I found, G200 should be substantially faster.

It most likely is in Windows and 3D applications. But this is DOS VGA speed.

Are all the later chipsets using the same 2D core?

Inetersting, going from Millennium to Millennium 2 covers half the way from P100 to P133 in doom (I got 59 FPS on my 133 + Mill1/430FX)

vetz wrote:

Why Matrox? They are uniform. They didn't come in 10.000 different versions as the S3 Virge's, or other chipset which had several different manufactures.

Have Millenium cards with 2 revisions that differ by clocks - Rev.2 - 50,113MHz, Rev.3 - 59,99MHz (MGA-2064W / IS-STORM chips). Dont know if ever were done version R1 too, dont have any. So some cards could have different clocks. Your card is lower clocked rev2, thats maybe why it have -2fps compared to rest.

sliderider wrote:

From this table I found, G200 should be substantially faster.

Well they are on just a little faster cpu 😉 (Athlon XP 2200+)

Impression Plus - 3,3fps
Mystique, Millennium, Millennium II (PCI) - 161,5-165,1fps
G100 - 210,1fps
Millennium II (AGP) - 227,6fps
G200/G200A - 231,4fps
G450 - 238,9fps

Big difference seems to be agp bus, but with lower vga resolution there will be next to nothing

This is a good idea. A lot of people use the G200 PCI for benchmarks on non 3D stuff and I don't have one of these. But it seems that the Millennium II and Mystique cards are either pretty close or exactly as fast, meaning that we don't have to use just the G200.

Good idea vetz 😀

vetz wrote:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57506833/vogons/diverse/matrox_bench_pci.PNG […]
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I'm not the first to say so, but it looks like you're bottlenecked by the CPU when you use faster graphic cards. Even with similar 2D cores, the clocks are different.

vetz wrote:

They didn't come in 10.000 different versions

From vintage3d.org:

The real fight for 3d gamer begun with Mystique in 1996 and Matrox kept on releasing newer versions until summer 1997. The well known difference between early vanilla Mystiques with 170 MHz and later ones with 220 MHz RAMDAC is not the end of it. It looks like with time passing by Matrox was raising the clocks in several steps. The known variants of Mystique "170" are 50/75, 55/82,5 and 60/90 MHz. Mystique 220 had two choices of 60/90 and 66/99 MHz. That is up to 20% undisclosed clock variation among the boards, chip revisions do not correlate with it.

Nice comparison. I would be interested to see how these results translate into Windows-only games from, say, 1995-1998.

Just in case someone googles this: There is a driver bug in the Matrix drivers that can cause issues with Voodoo 2 systems. What happens is that when you want to view the display properties the machine comes to a crawl. I've seen this on two systems, one was a Slot 1 BX 440 machine and now use GeForce cards whenever I use a Voodoo 2 card.

The funny thing is that I did have it up and running once in another BX440 system. So I don't know what exactly triggers the issue, but worth knowing because it can be difficult do narrow down when you run into it.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Just in case someone googles this: There is a driver bug in the Matrix drivers that can cause issues with Voodoo 2 systems. What happens is that when you want to view the display properties the machine comes to a crawl. I've seen this on two systems, one was a Slot 1 BX 440 machine and now use GeForce cards whenever I use a Voodoo 2 card.

The funny thing is that I did have it up and running once in another BX440 system. So I don't know what exactly triggers the issue, but worth knowing because it can be difficult do narrow down when you run into it.

Never had this issue on all my machines and I use Matrox cards alot as the main graphics card, but I'll try and replicate it on my 440BX machine.

I'm not the first to say so, but it looks like you're bottlenecked by the CPU when you use faster graphic cards. Even with similar 2D cores, the clocks are different.

Read what I posted earlier in the thread. The results are most likely bottlenecked by the CPU, I don't disagree on that, but it was to show that on a Pentium 100 (and lower) it doesn't matter. Even on the Athlon XP2200+ the PCI cards are very similar in performance.

I don't remember that bug and back then I had a Mystique and a Voodoo 2...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Just in case someone googles this: There is a driver bug in the Matrix drivers that can cause issues with Voodoo 2 systems. What happens is that when you want to view the display properties the machine comes to a crawl. I've seen this on two systems, one was a Slot 1 BX 440 machine and now use GeForce cards whenever I use a Voodoo 2 card.

The funny thing is that I did have it up and running once in another BX440 system. So I don't know what exactly triggers the issue, but worth knowing because it can be difficult do narrow down when you run into it.

I have the issue on my 440BX PII-450 setup. When I call desktop properties, I wait for about 30 seconds before something happens. Everything else is fine, runs fast and reliable. Is that what you meant? The 2D videocard is Viper V770 (TNT2). Perhaps it's not Matrox-exclusive.

I'm sure I documented this issue on Vogons and someone else pointed me to the solution. It fixed the issue for me.

It's like the driver is stuck somehow. When you try to play a game while it's doing this you get an error message.