appiah4 wrote:

Matrox's Driver site lists G450 drivers for Win 3.1 as "none planned": https://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/dr … atest/pre […]
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Matrox's Driver site lists G450 drivers for Win 3.1 as "none planned": https://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/dr … atest/previous/

However, there is a Win3.1 driver for G400: http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/dri … es/w31x_161.php

Considering the two cards use essentially the same chip with very slight improvements and a 64-bit memory bus, and considering they pretty much share the same driver package for all legacy OSs, I was wondering whether this driver worked for the G450.

Has anyone tried this and can confirm?

I remember reading here on Vogons that it doesn't work. I thought it was unfortunate at the time, as the G450 is easier to find than a G200 in PCI.

Aww schucks, that's quite the bummer.. I suppose I'll have to make do with the generic SVGA driver 🙁 It's amazing that I can find an OS/2 Warp driver for a card from Matrox but no Win3.1 driver. I didn't even think to check, automatically assumed it would be available.

If you have the card you can always try it. I wonder myself why it doesn't work. I did notice that the Matrox BIOS update packs are the same, they group 200/400 together, but the G450 uses different files. So I guess the chips do differ more than we think.

There's a similar issue with using the G550 in Windows NT 4.0. No driver exists although it would have been trivial to produce one.

If you ever get a chance to run it, The Matrox G400 driver for Windows 3.1x is one of the best out there. On-the-fly resolution and color depth switching via PowerDesk and it has full DCI video acceleration.

That's interesting. Thought the G450 is a capped G400-chip but I did not have tested the win3x-driver on my g450 agp yet.
If this will be true that it's not working, then I will skip dos/win3x on that setup but I will go for OS/2, WIN9X, WIN2K, Linux, Amithlon.

OS/2 is a better DOS than DOS anyway. 😁

Beside that, the G450 is a really good card. I like the image quality. I have ordered the G550 too.
Would be interesting how they compare in terms of driver-support, featureset, performance. image quality should be top notch so no complains here.

I got a G450 PCI running in a 486 after several BIOS patches by mkarcher.
Matrox G450 (with DVI outout) working on a HOT433 main board (UMC 8881)
It is not yet stable at 40 MHz FSB, but I will try to find a cooler for the AGP/PCI bridge chip.
Who else has a working DVI port on in a 486 computer?

I try to avoid DVI where possible because in some cirmustances I need 720x400@70hz for smooth scrolling in dos.