philscomputerlab wrote:

G200's biggest problem was its OpenGL support. Throughout most of its life G200 had to get by, in popular games such as Quake II, with a slow OpenGL-to-Direct3D wrapper driver. This was a layer that translated OpenGL to run on the Direct3D driver. This hurt G200's performance dramatically in these games and caused a lot of controversy over continuing delays and promises from Matrox. [4] In fact, it would not be until well into the life of G200's successor, G400, that the OpenGL driver would finally be mature and fast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_G200

Reading this I didn't bother testing it.

Why?

Don't forget the G100a, even if it's just in name only it still performed well despite its Mystiquesque shortcomings and would be fair to be included in the comparison.

philscomputerlab wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_G200

Reading this I didn't bother testing it.

The later driver versions were functional with OpenGL.

G200 indeed had poor OpenGL until around 2000. Matrox didn't realize the work involved with OpenGL support. G400 and G200 OpenGL support progressed in parallel. Matrox rushed a miniGL called TurboGL for G400 that was used with the popular Quake based games until the full ICD was stable and fast. G200 was stuck with the D3D wrapper until the ICD was finished IIRC. I'm fuzzy on the G200 timeline since I switched to G400 in 1999.

By the way that Wikipedia wisdom was written by myself. 🤣

The quirk with G200 OpenGL is you need to use the G400 driver package instead of the last G200 download. Or just swap the ICD dlls. The OpenGL driver in the last G200 package has a bug that breaks transparency so, for example, Quake 2 has opaque water.

Millennium G400 Max has about 3.6x the raw fillrate and memory bandwidth of Millennium G200.

G100 had no OpenGL support period, though it can work with the Techland Direct3D driver to play Quake2 😁

leileilol wrote:

G100 had no OpenGL support period, though it can work with the Techland Direct3D driver to play Quake2 😁

G100 seems like an offshoot of MGA 1064/2064/2164. Something in between those and G200's fully functional 3D.

I have a 32mb PCI G450, tried it with the latest drivers on XP with a P4 and it wouldn't run games at all! What am i doing wrong?

From what I understood back in those day (please correct me if that is wrong) was that most graphics cards came with "basic" or call it limited OpenGL support. Meaning, they supported enough of the standard to get games to run, but not necessarily enough to be used for OpenGL CAD, 3D design and so on, whereas Matrox was working on offering complete OpenGL support instead, which is why the OpenGL support for the G* series ended up being so delayed.

Yes, initially some of the gaming cards that were capable of supporting OpenGL only supported a subset for the Quake engines. This was called MiniGL. Matrox called it TurboGL.

Some companies were well ahead of others. 3DLabs, Rendition, NVidia and ATI were ahead of 3dfx, S3 and Matrox for releasing full OpenGL support. If I recall correctly. Of course everyone had their bugs. Matrox didn't have solid full support until early 2000.

BSA Starfire wrote:

I have a 32mb PCI G450, tried it with the latest drivers on XP with a P4 and it wouldn't run games at all! What am i doing wrong?

Could you be more specific? Which games did you try? Do you get any error messages? G450 is a DirectX 6 card so I would try games from `98/`99 first.
Which DirectX version do you have installed?
What does dxdiag say? Which DDI-Version is displayed? Do the integrated demos/tests work?

Matrox pulled D3D support out of later G450 drivers.
Matrox G450 XP drivers 3D support test

In retrospect, did Matrox make a mistake by not staying in the PC market strictly? No.

They still produce videocards, and as I understand it, at an incredibly high markup, mainly to hospitals and other niche markets.

If I was an engineer at either one of the many graphics cards companies in the 1990s and I could foresee the future, I would overwhelmingly choose to stay at Matrox and not work for AMD/nVidia, considering how cutthroat their sector is.

The lesson from Matrox is: Bigger is not always better.

I'm not sure if the engineers suffer or benefit from the frenzy. Seems like it would just make them more sought after. Matrox sued Nvidia years ago when a bunch of their engineers left (perhaps for more money).

By the way, Matrox is apparently going to sell AMD cards with custom software.
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/press/relea … hics_cards/amd/

I love my 32mb G400 dualhead.
Never lets me down. And the only card that I have wich have run stable in all my board/builds, despite it's lack of muscles compared to other brands. And that picture quality! Ohhh my goodness. So good for 2D apps. Simply love it, and passive cooled is a big plus in my book.

swaaye wrote:

I'm not sure if the engineers suffer or benefit from the frenzy. Seems like it would just make them more sought after. Matrox sued Nvidia years ago when a bunch of their engineers left (perhaps for more money).

They suffer... nVidia had a catastrophic episode after their chipsets and GPUs suffered huge failure rates because of manufacturer defects. ATI's team seems to have been kept on in its core by AMD. The've always been somewhat rag-tag. I've always imagined it to be a nightmare working for either company, or for the Taiwanese FABs that keep having to produce their successive generation of products (And replacing their multi-million dollar equipment every year).

By the way, Matrox is apparently going to sell AMD cards with custom software.
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/press/relea … hics_cards/amd/

Smart. Cut costs by eliminating production of their own ICs. Their end-user clientelle won't be able to tell the difference.

swaaye wrote:

By the way, Matrox is apparently going to sell AMD cards with custom software.
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/press/relea … hics_cards/amd/

They're here:
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gr … cards/c-series/

Pricing is substantially better than their in-house designs (C680 is around a quarter of the price of the previous top card, the M9188), and performance is probably improved too (featureset is, at least).

Matrox is better off using somebody elses chips and doing their custom niche designs and software. The last decent gaming card they made was the G400 Mac. I have a couple of the G500 series because they made them in PCI and 1x PCIE (oddball stuff) with newer drivers for Win7.

mockingbird wrote:

They suffer... (...) I've always imagined it to be a nightmare (...) replacing their multi-million dollar equipment every year...

That sounds super fun to me 😁

I have a strange problem with the Matrox G550 PCI graphics card, playing in the quake ii, mostly it's going 40-50fps but only when it comes to explosions fps drops dramatically to about 1-2fps.
No matter what resolution, the effect is the same.
Never seen anything like this. I had a few years earlier G400 AGP and I never had such a problem.
Compaq pw5100 2xPII 300MHz 256MB EDO. Win2000 Sp4, HDD SCSI 36GB 15k, matrox driver 5.93. G400icd.dll ver 1.2.1.0 (2.60.072)

Is some incompatible gl_extension can do this?

Edit:
I found, it's a gl extension:
set gl_dynamic ; dynamic lights.

the matrux have got me so happy! of course it was that via chipset that drive me crazy all around. I'm so happy I replaced it with a 430bx or so chipboard