Reply 31860 of 52943, by dionb
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MKT_Gundam wrote on 2020-01-08, 02:30:So guys, i got the chance to buy a cheap Matrox G450.
I know, this is weak than G400 but will be a step-up than a g200 and maybe a tnt1/m64?
If you currently have a G200 it could boost performance a bit, but where a G400 about equal a TNT2 (and the G400Max can beat a TNT2-Ultra in some benchmarks), a G450 is probably on par with TNT2-M64. Not awful, but by no means a compelling gaming card. Also, OpenGL drivers were a bit of a thing, but that was the case with the G200 too, so it doesn't get worse.
Main reasons to want a G450 are the very, very good analog image quality on both outputs (the G400 has slightly better quality on the primary, but less on the secondary), far in excess of the vast majority of same-period nVidia/ATi designs. It's not just the RAMDAC that allows high resolutions, but also the filters. If you wanted to run a really high-res desktop (say 1600x1200) in those days, you would notice the difference. I bought one to use with my Sony w900 (24" widescreen CRT). Great for films & desktop work. And of course the dualhead thing - even on OSs without native multihead support you could run two screens in various configurations, which was pretty unique in 2000-ish.
These days those advantages are less relevant - any integrated VGA can do multihead, and even if they couldn't, modern OSs can. Also with digital video interfaces, analog filters aren't a thing anymore. Then again, the performance disadvantages also aren't so huge - a G450 is a perfectly valid pairing with any late P3, early P4/Athon, even if it can't outperform a GeForce or Radeon (or even a fast TNT2). You can even hook it up via two Voodoo2s for GLide (as I did at some point back in the day 😜 ).