Bummer I always thought the g450 that I had was faster then the 400 max, I guess ill be keeping my eyes out for a 400 max then.

I do give matrox credit they make some pretty good stable cards and still keep their old drivers posted.

Funny I finally finished to build that win98 computer and had to "downgrade" the mobo from a VIA to an iNTEL one and so I lost the AGP expansion slot. I had to switch the matrox AGP G200 to a PCI G450. I intend to use that computer mainly to listen to the music cards on it so I dont really care about the video cards, as long as they support my large LCD, and with powerstrip, every windows cards seem to play along.

Have here some games that were bundled whit a Matrox card (think it was a Mystique), didn't test those jet. When I remember right also Toy Story. They were in a bundle whit "Dragons Lair" in the RealMagic version. Gonna test those sometimes. I own some Matrox cards here, maybe even a mystique, I don't know, have to look ... But I have the G450 eTV, that one whit the TV encoder on it, paid 775,- Dutch Gulden back in 2002 for it. Damn....

One thing I found better the G450 on the G400 (that alread was great) is the vga output signal, if we talk about native vga output is probably one of the best.

There is also the G550 😀

If I remember correctly, in OpenGL it shows an improvement, but otherwise it's not really improved compared to the G400. That card also has DVI, which is nice.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

There is also the G550 😀

If I remember correctly, in OpenGL it shows an improvement, but otherwise it's not really improved compared to the G400. That card also has DVI, which is nice.

When I had to test the combination of the G4xx and Dxr3/Hollywood+ I preferred the G450 cause the G550 if I remember correctly had a flat cable on the vga. Probably no differences but with any passthrough cable the decoder need, I think a real native output is better.

Roman78 wrote:

Have here some games that were bundled whit a Matrox card (think it was a Mystique), didn't test those jet. When I remember right also Toy Story. They were in a bundle whit "Dragons Lair" in the RealMagic version. Gonna test those sometimes. I own some Matrox cards here, maybe even a mystique, I don't know, have to look ... But I have the G450 eTV, that one whit the TV encoder on it, paid 775,- Dutch Gulden back in 2002 for it. Damn....

The Mystique 220 came with a special version of Moto Racer (motorbike racing game) and Toy Story like you mentioned.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

There is also the G550 😀

If I remember correctly, in OpenGL it shows an improvement, but otherwise it's not really improved compared to the G400. That card also has DVI, which is nice.

I thought the difference in OpenGL performance was due to the OpenGL ICD for the G400 wasn't finished until ages after the card was released, and kept improving for years. But since the G550 in essence is the same, except with minor changes, like on-chip RAMDAC and limited T&L, by the time it was released, it could use the G400 OpenGL ICD from launch. By the time the G550 came out, I wouldn't expect reviewers to rerun all tests on the older hardware?
My memory isn't in any way 100% though, so I'm happy to be told I'm wrong 😜

LunarG wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

There is also the G550 😀

If I remember correctly, in OpenGL it shows an improvement, but otherwise it's not really improved compared to the G400. That card also has DVI, which is nice.

I thought the difference in OpenGL performance was due to the OpenGL ICD for the G400 wasn't finished until ages after the card was released, and kept improving for years. But since the G550 in essence is the same, except with minor changes, like on-chip RAMDAC and limited T&L, by the time it was released, it could use the G400 OpenGL ICD from launch. By the time the G550 came out, I wouldn't expect reviewers to rerun all tests on the older hardware?
My memory isn't in any way 100% though, so I'm happy to be told I'm wrong 😜

I ran my own tests with the latest drivers available for the cards 😀

The benchmark results are on the first post of this thread. But really, the G550 is mostly quicker in Quake II. For Direct3D, and therefore all that Bump Mapping awesomeness, the G400 MAX is the fastest card.

obobskivich wrote:

Also, can you test something like 3DMark01 or something else that uses pixel shaders on the 550? I've read in some places that it supposedly can do DX8.1, but in others that it cannot - any info about that would be useful imho. 😊

It most certainly does not have any shader capability whatsoever.
Perhaps DX8.1 exposes some unique fixed-function pixel operations on the card though.
Similar things happened with various other DX7-level cards. In OpenGL they had some vendor-specific extensions for pixel operations. In later D3D versions they were also added as fixedfunction operations. Eg a GeForce2 or Radeon DDR can do more stuff in DX9 than it can in DX7.

Running DXCapsViewer on all the cards should tell us everything. It is included in the Windows SDK: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-US/windows … /windows-10-sdk
Or for older PCs/Windows, you may want to use the DirectX SDK (this was moved into the Windows SDK after the June 2010 release): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/deta … ls.aspx?id=6812

Phil: Could you add the exact matrox device notation of your boards? Maybe even the clocks / SDRAM or SGRAM version?
Also Matrox usually had some US version of the cards and some International.

elianda wrote:

Phil: Could you add the exact matrox device notation of your boards? Maybe even the clocks / SDRAM or SGRAM version?
Also Matrox usually had some US version of the cards and some International.

I can take photos, but that might be a while until I get around to reviewing the G450. I read that Matrox kept the clocks a secret, even the overclock tool works off percentages.

Thanks for the Matrox review Phil. Always loved my old G400 Max.

Can someone confirm that I'm not misremembering the following about the card? I recall that for low resolution output (~320x200) it would run the image through a bilinear filter and display it at 640x480 or some other higher resolution. I remember getting excited by DOSBox's filters back when I first tried it, as they let me re-experience what things looked like with my G400 Max.

I think that no matrox was ever userfull 🙁

Also since I installed a x300 I cannot login my server with 4k clients, I think I could with g450 using vga drivers.

ElBrunzy wrote:

I think that no matrox was ever userfull 🙁

Also since I installed a x300 I cannot login my server with 4k clients, I think I could with g450 using vga drivers.

If you want the fastest card with 100℅ DOS/Win9x support. Then yes. Then again, there is no such card. Matrox is by far useless. It might be lesser great than soemthing like TNT2-Ultra, on the other hand, they are way way way better than something like an Intel740. It all depends on the CPU and the software you are running. Least yet most importantly. A Matrox has way better vga signal strength than something like the cheapest cheaply build TNT2-Vanta. Wich sucks on a K6-2/P-III. Matrox combined with a V2-SLI is awesomme.

Yea it depends on what you're after.

For Direct3D games the Matrox is terrific. It also supports EMBM, a cool feature, sometimes only supported with Matrox cards 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Yea it depends on what you're after.

For Direct3D games the Matrox is terrific. It also supports EMBM, a cool feature, sometimes only supported with Matrox cards 😀

And for OpenGL, you need only to add a V2-SLI setup. For more power, go for V3-3000/3500, GF-2 or Quadro2-Pro.

yeah I was completely out of my mind when I wrote that. What I meant is that the matrox g450 pci appears as a "microsoft vga device" for windows server 2016. But there is a way to install ati x300 cards on this OS using legacy catalyst drivers. I was not surprised to see a matrox g200 on some latest ibm x3850 x6, that's a nice card for an RIB.

feipoa wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

feipoa wrote:

What is the reason why the G200 data is not included on the OpenGL results graph?

Doesn't support it.

What doesn't support the Matrox G200 in OpenGL mode? I was able to run Quake II in OpenGL without any noticeable problems. I used driver version 6.28 and Win98SE.

^This^ - Both the G200 and the G100 support openGL, but you have to work for it a bit 😀 I have a HP Vectra VL pentium III OEM box with an on board G200 - latest drivers off the HP website support openGL and it's surprisingly decent. For the G100, look for IBM drivers - openGL support is there, but performance is rather poor and it has quite a few graphical bugs.

For G100's GL I had to resort to a Techland D3D->GL ICD from Crime Cities. from there on I got Q3 to "work". Nothing blends and it looked completely ugly of course, but the speed was playable and the picture was sharp and I can see how sharp all those dithers are 😀

G100 gameplay can be a guilty pleasure for some (the worst artifact is the mip bias glitch), and it's a bit more tolerant for compatibility than PowerVR PCX2 when it comes to Direct3D games, even if the card is actually less capable, the robust driver makes up for it.