I have Matrox G550 in storage with its "authentic dual cable" and Matrox's own proprietary connector.
Never got it to work probably because its special dual cable or card itself is broken.

Long ago bought MSI 5900XT AGP (mfg.2004) as a very high end Win98SE graphic card.
Otherwise I have:
- Geforce FX 5500 PCI (mfg.2004) Chinese used to sell these as new old stock.
- Voodoo 3000 PCI (mfg.1999)
- Diamond Viper V550 NVIDIA RIVA TNT PCI (mfg.1998)

user33331 wrote on 2023-10-31, 10:52:

special dual cable

Unless they pulled some stupid trick (...like they did for VGA to composite/s-video cable that apparentlynnever worked on my G450, although to be fair they're not standard anyway), isn't that blurry thing just a DMS-59 socket?

...cables for which seem to exist in way too many varieties for it to be anything close to universal 😀 🙁

The G550 PCI needed one of those cables, the AGP version just had DVI-I and VGA on the bracket so 'just worked'.

Now, as for the question of how good it is for retro gaming, the question is what 'gaming' and how 'retro' exactly.

The G550 was never designed for gaming and although it supports D3D and OpenGL and offers EMBM, its performance is hardly any better than Matrox' 1999 G400 cards (slightly surpassing the G400Max in OpenGL but lagging behind the regular G400 in DirectX 6). The G400 in turn was comparable to an nVidia TNT2, a G400Max to a TNT2 Ultra (in DirectX; in OpenGL the nVidia chips were significantly faster - Matrox always struggled with their OpenGL drivers), so despite being a 2001 card, this is late 1999 high-end performance.

So, is late 1999 high-end performance enough for the games you want to play? Doom 2 is a 1994 game so no problem in terms of performance, it's so old that Matrox' poor SVGA VESA support didn't matter. Q3A and HL1 will run happily with it. HL2 is a 2004 DirectX 8.1 game. No way will that run smoothly or indeed even looking as intended on a G550. A Matrox Parhelia could at least run it looking the way it should, but to play HL2 well needs a GF4 or Radeon 9800 or faster - and comparable 2004-era CPU.

Not sure if W98 drivers are concerned but i think that some XP drivers does not contain the 3D acceleration part.
You might need to try several versions

It's not a good gaming card. It's basically a G450. Probably around TNT2 Ultra performance.

If you already have it just give it a go!
Comparing it with a TNT2 is about right, so not amazing but may be enough for what you need and saves you buying another card.

PCI version is a pretty good option for systems lacking AGP, so worst case you can probably sell it easy enough to fund a faster card.

dionb wrote on 2023-10-31, 14:28:

The G550 was never designed for gaming

The underlying design is for gaming though and if you froze time the G550 would probably have sold as a gaming card, some variant of the G400 with native DVI.

vvbee wrote on 2023-11-03, 09:26:

dionb wrote on 2023-10-31, 14:28:

The G550 was never designed for gaming

The underlying design is for gaming though and if you froze time the G550 would probably have sold as a gaming card, some variant of the G400 with native DVI.

The G400 was a bold attempt at booting a business desktop-oriented card into the gaming segment, and in terms of sheer performance and features it succeeded, at least in DirectX. Sadly Matrox priced the card out of the market and bad OpenGL support at launch (constant Matrox issue) tarnished its reputation. G550 was consciously a lower end design (I would say 'budget', but whereas the design philosophy was the same as the GeForce2MX200, the price was not), in particular it had a 64b memory bus where the G400 had had a full 128b bus. This was cost-cutting and rightly so as higher memory bandwidth would not have benefited the target market for the card.

The G400 was a top performer and in hindsight one of the most compatible D3D cards of the time. Since the G550 is an iteration of the G400, its drivers come in the same bundle even, you can start suspecting that talk of office use is contemporary marketing in a shifting landscape. It's a negative frame that reviewers of the time had to live in but we don't, we can freely pretend it's a card of the G400 era and start the comparison from there. It should become very obvious in practice if it's an office card in this context.

I have a G450 running in my 486 computer.
The reason is to have a card with native DVI output in that machine.
Funny fact is that this 486 now has an AGP bus due to the PCI-to-AGP brigde chip.

Capture of late 1990s games with the G550 (DVI): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YCrlutsQSg. Ran with a K6-2 300 for convenience reasons, so it's an image quality reference rather than a performance benchmark.

Some capture I've done of the G400 (VGA) on an Athlon XP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxkBWIlDIyE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFXDCsVCmMA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPaMFmW8VfU.

The G550 and G400 render the same image as far as I can see. For example the visual glitches in Formula 1 '97 are the same, there's the same slightly underdetailed textures in Homeworld (though this isn't specific to Matrox, I know the Voodoo3 does it too but not the GeForce2), and as a slight rarity they both render Colin McRae Rally's UI correctly (in 640 x 480 anyway, the G550 screws it up somewhat in 800 x 600, but I've never tested it there on the G400 to know whether that's normal). There's small occasional UI glitches in FF7 with the G550 that I don't see with the G400, but maybe that's digital vs analog even.

The two cards look to have comparable compatibility, none of the games I tested failed to run and there were at most small visual glitches. One difference was the G550 renders GLQuake well while I've seen the G400 produce some flickering in the UI, even though they both use the G400 ICD.

Its not a card I would use for gaming at all. The only game I know well enough to comment in that list is DooM II and yes it will play that.
You will be able to play some old games on it yes, but it was designed to support multiple monitors first and foremost, and it does that really well.

vvbee wrote on 2023-11-03, 17:52:

The G400 was a top performer and in hindsight one of the most compatible D3D cards of the time. Since the G550 is an iteration of the G400, its drivers come in the same bundle even, you can start suspecting that talk of office use is contemporary marketing in a shifting landscape. It's a negative frame that reviewers of the time had to live in but we don't, we can freely pretend it's a card of the G400 era and start the comparison from there. It should become very obvious in practice if it's an office card in this context.

Nerfing memory bandwidth from 128b to 64b is hardly 'marketing', that's a conscious design choice. It's no coincidence that the Parhelia which was aimed at gaming (even if it was too little too late too expensive) went for a 256b bus, that was the biggest handicap of the G550.

Comparison of the G400 and the G550 on an Athlon 64 in Windows 98: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68qVuem7zco. By my estimate the G400 is on average 5% faster here. Render quality and game compatibility appear virtually identical. The G550 has digital output and is cheaper to buy.

Consumer hardware is about balancing compromises. If the size of the memory bus isn't to be compromised for you then the comparison is quicker to make.

So for a 2 years younger card to 'only' be 5% slower isn't just a tiny indicator of perhaps not being aimed at gaming? A contemporary Geforce2MX400 cost half as much and ran rings around it, even a bottom-dwelling MX200 with similar cost-cut 64b memory bus easily outperforms it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Matrox fan, have a G400Max and Parhelia now and back in the day had a G450 (which was truly slow) in my daily driver because I needed good dual head. A G550 is certainly also a decent way to get DVI on an otherwise 1999 gaming build. But none of that detracts from the fact that Matrox' focus and design choices in 2000-2001 (G450 and 550) were clearly away from gaming as the G400 had been a commercial failure and the markets in which it had succeeded did not require high 3D performance. Instead the cards were cost-cut (smaller die, half the RAM bandwidth, integrated RAMDAC) and focus went to the bits that were relevant to the people who actually bought the cards, which were then productivity users who needed multiple high-res displays with excellent (analog) image quality. They loved it, Matrox actually sold more cards and was more profitable doing so.

You're looking at release dates, I'm looking at generations. We can agree that the TNT2/Voodoo3/G400 generation is a gaming generation, and that any GeForce runs rings around it but doesn't have the same compatibility. The G550 clearly doesn't belong in the GeForce/Radeon generation, no point forcing it, but fits well into the TNT2/Voodoo3/G400 generation, Matrox working at it while others moved on.