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.

Well, good news! My PCI G450 actually works in Windows 3.11, at all resolutions including 1600x1200 but not at all bit depths, just at @24 (and probably 32).

You can see this Matrox G450 in action at the end of this video about the all new VBESVGA driver, which is probably the best thing that happened to Windows 3.1 in the recent years. Btw, it's detected as a G400.

At lower bit depths Windows will load just fine but the screen gets scrambled on my capture card. On a monitor it will just go out of range so probably that's why until now it was seen as incompatible. So you should install it with 24bit bpp in the first place. Anyway if you want to do some testing and it gets ugly, to get back on the 24 bit bpp- you'll have to modify the settings inside system.ini [mga.drv] "bpp=24".

To me, it seems more like a screen refresh issue during boot. It might be getting some invalid settings from somewhere, because when I test it with its own test tool, it displays all resolutions and bit depths just fine.

There is a working Win3x driver within the OS/2 drivers (winos2). It works with G450 and G550 for all resolutions and color depths.

@OMORES Do you use DVI or VGA with this card? I'm curious how it behaves under Windows and DOS through DVI. Only 60 Hz supported?