The G100A carries a lot of Mystique-esque limitations (with the exception of added bilinear filtering) and unfortunately doesn't support MSI 🙁
Like the PowerVR PCX1/2 it cannot use any other blending function but alpha; and when it alphas, it's through blending by an ordered dither.
UNLIKE the PowerVR PCX1/2 its Direct3D HAL driver is more polished and compatible with more games, if you don't mind them looking crap. 😀
Also like every old pre-Riva 3d card ever, there's no OpenGL ICD. You'll have to find a preference for MiniGLs that wrap to Direct3D

Some fun ideas with G100A include:

- relatively fast Final Reality scores
- Trying the Techland Direct3D GL wrapper (from Crime Cities) with id Tech 2/3 games 😀
- watching Keen4 jerk around
- learning to love the dithered alpha blend and the screwed up mipmap bias artifacts
- a very sharp 2D image still, very good choice if you can't bother with an actual Millenium or better Matrox card and you plan a PCX2 and/or Voodoo1/2 combo system.

My G100 was AGP1x/2X only, I wouldn't dare trust it in a P4 machine. It's a nice match for a P2 though

Ooops, missed this reply. Thanks for the suggestions, will dig this box out again later on and give it a go. The SIS P4 board is fine with the old 3.3volt 1x/2x cards, only reason I saved the board. Yet to try the Trident 3D Image card but i'm guessing that will make the G100 look like a gaming power house!

I have a Trident 3D Image 975, as well as a Blade 3D (9880 and 9885) 8MB SGRAM clocked at 143MHz. The 975 is surprisingly fast for such a meager card - I expected S3 Trio 3D performance, and got over to four times better. It's only problem is the small frame buffer and frame buffer management. It also supports rudimentary openGL - Quake II runs decently at 640x480 my test K6-II.

The Blade 3D is another story. Tested Quake II and Quake III arena - both run very well on it - and so does Unreal. In fact, it and my G450 are the only cards that can run Unreal in Direct3D w/o crashing and freezing. It makes me wonder why Trident didn't make other 3D cards - even if they are quite a bit slower than the competition, trident cards were so cheap it didn't matter. I had an on board Trident Blade 3D on my MVP4 and it did most games really well (even tough I used my voodoo 2 most of the time).

Both cards are great in dos - keen, jazz and supaplex, even god of thunder and golden axe run perfectly on them regardless of how slow or fast the CPU is. Image quality is superb on the 975, and good on the Blade 3D

kanecvr wrote:

The 975 is surprisingly fast for such a meager card - I expected S3 Trio 3D performance, and got over to four times better.

In which tests? For me those two were about the same speed.

kanecvr wrote:

It's only problem is the small frame buffer and frame buffer management. It also supports rudimentary openGL - Quake II runs decently at 640x480 my test K6-II.

That would be great news, what driver did you use?

kanecvr wrote:

It makes me wonder why Trident didn't make other 3D cards

They did, but by that time nobody had any trust in them. With exception of laptops perhaps, where 3d was not much of concern.

Used latest driver for the 975. It also enables opengl support, witch the trio 3d doesn't have. As for other games, I'm talking about 97-early 98 direct3d games.

Interesting, I will istall the card now and have a play around.
Best,
Chris

I see what you mean about the stippling on the Matrox G100, it's horrible, final reality looks dreadful! 9.35 reality marks and that is on a P4 2.53!!!! Gonna give the Trident 975 a whirl now.

Trident is not playing nice, get bios displayed, windows splash, then plain dark screen. Will come back to this later. For comparison, installed a S3 Trio3D/2x 8MB AGP, using the engineering sample drivers from vintage 3D, Final reality looks much nicer than on the Matrox G100 and even produced a far better score, 9.55 reality marks.

Well sadly I can't get the Trident 3D Image 975 card to work. Displays in the BIOS, splah screen, then blanks, monitor still in range, it's doing something, but I can't see it! Possible it's the motherboard, or perhaps the LCD monitor I'm using, so I will try it again in the old P3(just hate moving the voodoo5 about). Have run a bunch of benchmarks,Final Reality, 3Dmark 99max, 2000, 2001SE, xl-r8r on the Matrox G100 AGP, S3D/2X 8 meg AGP and a SiS 6326 8mb PCI, surprisingly the Sis is the clear winner, faster, much, much better image quality than any of the others, the matrox is by far the worst, horrid dithering on most tests, also dropped a load of textures. The S3 in comparison is pretty good, image quality is far better than the G100, textures are far clearer and sharper, speed is about equal, but it looks far nicer and drops far less textures than the G100. The SiS 6326 despite being a PCI against the AGP cards is great, looks really good, fastest of the 3 and dropped no textures at all, Reality marks of 9.53 too, much better than the other two. I plan to run my Diamond Permedia 2 8Meg AGP too, plus a couple of ATi Rage XL AGP cards I had forgotten i even owned. But i get the feeling the SiS 6326 will be the winner. forgotten 3D chip of it'd generation perhaps? It is clearly far better than the few internet entries around would suggest, although my 2D scores on an old skt7 233mmx weren't that great with (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lvF9n … wpNU/edit#gid=0)Phils ultimate VGA benchmark on two PCI SiS 6326 cards, the 4Meg was faster than the 8meg in those tests BTW. Despite that, out of the budget cards of the era, the 6326 seems a good choice.

Check to see if you installed the correct driver - I had the exact same issue - "Imput not supported". Tested 2-3 drivers before I found one that works with my card. This is because there are quite a few versions around - gpu clocks differ from card to card (as low as 80 and as high as 143!) and so do ram types. Some cards use SGRAM, others use SDRAM, I've even seen an EDO version...

kanecvr wrote:

Used latest driver for the 975. It also enables opengl support, witch the trio 3d doesn't have.

Well, which one is it? Version 5424 we have here does not have OpenGL.

I use version 5432f. Got it off driverguide. 5424 doesn't work for me.

Don't you mean 5423f? But that one has no OpenGL either.

Do you have a link or could you upload those drivers here please?

Interesting read, Thx! I am currently testing my sni-pro-c6 (G100 onboard)
but I put an additional voodoo2 card in it.

Do you have any ideas what was fixed in the bios-version 3.51?

Are there any techdemos for the g100 ?

Here are some other interesting things about the g100 http://vintage3d.org/mga3.php#sthash.pJ3vZubL.dpbs

I have to admit, that the matrox g100 does not work in windows 3.11 if I load the matrox-vesa-driver via autoexec.bat before starting windows 3.11.
Even if there is a vesa-driver for that matrox g100, lot of demoscene productions do not work or show corrupt screens. that's a bit bad, but regardless that onboard g100 has a very nice and sharp image und is fast in 2d. some d3d features are also implemented.

I have swapped out the v2 and downgraded to a voodoo1 with a celeron300. this gives me descent performance, compatibility and also lot's of working dosgames as well. the faster celerons 333/366/400/433 do not offer that dos-compatibilty and also generate problems with the voodoo1.

For me, a really good solution. (Btw. Voodoo3-PCI get's extremly hot (5V) and needs lot's of cooling in such a machine; so I decided to use the onboard-gfx (g100) instead.)