No idea. Never tried 3DMark99, but I had performance increase in Quake 3 after overclocking.

So far, I'm pretty disappointed with the Quake 2/3 results. They are horrific on the G450 with the PPRO-233. Well below the G200. But the Quake 1 results are VERY high, as if the driver has been tweaked for GLQuake but not Quake 2/3. I'm going to have to play with old driver versions, which are difficult to install because the Matrox installer does not find the card except for latest driver versions of 6.81/6.82/6.83, which have a G450.inf. I found that I can use this new inf file with the older driver packages. I edit the revision and date on the inf to that of the old drivers.

There're potentially quite a lot of problems with the PCI G450 performance, because it's using third-party PCI-to-PCI bridge. So not only it's a PCI video card, but it also needs to transfer data between two PCI buses.

Yeah, that's a good point. It has that HiNT chip on it. Why do they do that? I don't think its an AGP-to-PCI bridge, but something else. Does the AGP version of the G450 have the PCI bridge?

It's a PCI-to-PCI bridge, not an AGP-to-PCI bridge.

What purpose does it serve? Why don't most other PCI cards have this bridge?

It serves to connect one PCI bus to another PCI bus. Fairly common on PCI cards with multiple chips (designed for MMS). Also used on Voodoo 5 6000.

feipoa wrote:

So far, I'm pretty disappointed with the Quake 2/3 results. They are horrific on the G450 with the PPRO-233. Well below the G200. But the Quake 1 results are VERY high, as if the driver has been tweaked for GLQuake but not Quake 2/3. I'm going to have to play with old driver versions, which are difficult to install because the Matrox installer does not find the card except for latest driver versions of 6.81/6.82/6.83, which have a G450.inf. I found that I can use this new inf file with the older driver packages. I edit the revision and date on the inf to that of the old drivers.

Perhaps you can check if the BIOS of the card is up to date, they released quite some updates for their MGA cards. I don't know if it helps what looks like a PCI - PCI bridge bottleneck.

feipoa wrote:

So far, I'm pretty disappointed with the Quake 2/3 results. They are horrific on the G450 with the PPRO-233. Well below the G200. But the Quake 1 results are VERY high, as if the driver has been tweaked for GLQuake but not Quake 2/3. I'm going to have to play with old driver versions, which are difficult to install because the Matrox installer does not find the card except for latest driver versions of 6.81/6.82/6.83, which have a G450.inf. I found that I can use this new inf file with the older driver packages. I edit the revision and date on the inf to that of the old drivers.

I'm struggling with G450 PCI OpenGL issues, too.

Recently, I've aquired a Box of office scrap containing 7 (!) Matrox G450 32MB PCI cards. I've put one in my '96 classic socket 7 board (DataExpert 8661, 430VX, 64MB RAM) that has been modded with a switching VRM and some capacitors to run a K6-2@450. The only driver I've found that works out of the box with this card on 98 is the latest w9x_683.zip from philscomputerlab.com. On XP, I'm using some recent driver that still suports D3D/OpenGL.

Both on 98 and XP, I'm getting nice consistent 40-60 fps in all GLQuake timedemos. When I actually start a new game, everything seems smooth in the entry hall, certainly 30fps+. However, as soon as I walk through some gate into the episode selection area, I get like 2 or 3 fps. The fps drop strongly depends on the view. I suspect something in the view is causing the OpenGL driver to bug out with this card. With Quake2, its a similar thing: It looks like the fps drops extremely every time particle clouds (muzzle, blood spray) are being rendered. I have no issues with Direct3D at all. 3DMark 99/2000 run as expected without drops. With Scitech GLDirect I can get consistent fps in GLQuake without drops, however overall fps is like 30% compared to the regular driver.

My G450 cards have PCI subsys ID 0D43102B. No 98 drivers except the w9x_683.zip one have a PCI entry for this one. I've taken the older driver from the G450 driver CD here at vogons and added that subsys ID to the install.inf. It now installs and runs fine, but the GLQuake issue is still there. Maybe the 5.xx drivers also work by adding that ID.

I strongly believe that the stuttering is caused by some bug in the OpenGL ICD, maybe related to this "new" (?) revision of the card. If its a PCI issue, I'd expect Direct3D to show similar drops. But why the hell are there no noticable fps drops in GLQuake timedemos ?!

BTW: I had a consistent ~15fps drop caused by an USB2 PCI card and the G450 sharing the same IRQ. So switching PCI slots -does- make a difference.

Edit: I've just found out that the GLQuake fps drops are caused by dynamic lighting. If I start a new game and walk to the lava pool on the right hand side, everything is nice and smooth. The lava ball will have the glowing ball around it instead of acting as a dynamic light source (default GLQuake behaviour of gl_flashblend=1). Once I set gl_flashblend=0, the fps drop down to about zero when the lava ball appears. In Quake2, setting gl_dynamic=0 makes the drops go away.

I remebmber the issue with "2 fps" in glQuake. But i dont remember how i solved it and I dont remeber problems with Q2. My former system specs: Win98SE@ T2P4 + K6-2 400 + Maestro32.
For G450 i used the Driver Package w9x682, the TurboGL Package and the G400 ICD.

In general it looks like a ressource conflict. Maybe try to dismount and disable all other, not necessary components like sound cards, interfacees and HDD controller - keep only keyboard and Graphics card. Try to use a simple ISA-IDE controller instead of PCI-controller with DMA-support.

What speaks against keeping the (professional) G200 and add a Voodoo2? The PPro system is something high end and professional. And to piar it with a more low end (e.g. G450, GF-MX, ...) or a pure consumer card (e.g. S3 Savage) would take your machine this special touch. Ok, G200 + voodoo2 is a regular combination. But in my opinion it fits good in your concept and is more period correct.

If you want to be period correct there's not many choices, you kinda have to go with ATI 3D Rage II + DVD. 2D is good, but 3D is really bad, the card is very slow and the image quality is awful. I wouldn't recommend it for 3D games.

If you want good 3D quality and speed, but you also want to be period correct (not 100%, but a little), then go Riva TNT or Rage 128 Pro 16 MB. Both have good image quality and decent speed. Riva TNT is a bit slower than a Voodoo2, Rage 128 Pro is a bit faster, but Riva TNT has better drivers.

If you don't care about period correct and you want the fastest card, then PNY GeForce2 MX400 128-bit, GeForce 6200 or FX5500. I don't know which one will be the fastest, the CPU will bottleneck you hard. I think that 5500 might be fastest, but on slower CPUs I found that GF2 MX is a great card, so MX400 128 bit might be the faster card.

Rawit: Yes, I'm using the latest graphics BIOS - 1.4 b06

RaverX: Period correct isn't that important for me. I have 20 cases with custom system setups and try to use different hardware to increase diversity. I had really hoped for the Oxygen VX1, which either doesn't work well on this system, or has issues on its own. I will need to test that card in a PIII when I have time.

PC-Engineer: Ya, G200 + Voodoo2 is a great combination. I use that with my NexGen PF110 and IBM 5x86c-133 system. I was hoping to use a different graphics card for this build.

watz: In game, at the console, I typed gl_flashblend=0 and the Quake returned "unknown command". How do you set this?

I have the original CD-ROM which came with this G450 card. On that CD-ROM, it comes with driver version 6.03, which I think is the first to support the G450 PCI because I went back at the 5-series drivers and don't see the G450 mentioned in the install.inf files. Version 6.03 offers a tad better DirectX performance, but my tests show only around 1-2%. Driver version 6.81, 6.82, and 6.83 will detect and install with the G450 PCI installed. If you want to install older drivers, install 6.81-6.83, then go to the display properties, click on Adapter, and tell it to use drivers from disc - you can then pick any 6-series driver and it will install.

It is a little irritating how how Matrox compressed each file in the driver packages. Anyone know how to uncompress all of them? I tried the Windows built-in 'expand' and 'expand32' but it is wanting an *.cab file and won't uncompress the Matrox files with an underscore extension suffix. None-the-less, the method above to use older drivers seems to be able to expand the Matrox files. You can also use the G450.inf file from the 6.82 with some edits for the older driver packages.

You raised a good point about IRQ sharing. I have an NEC USB 2.0 card in this computer. The case has 2 front USB ports, so I wanted to connect this - hence the USB 2.0 card. Looking System Information, this damn NEC card is using THREE (3) different IRQ's. Why? Is there a way to tell the card just to use one IRQ? Could this mass IRQ sharing be causing OpenGL slow downs? The Savage 4 was also tested with the USB card installed but I didn't notice such extreme slow downs. I'm going to pull the USB card and checck again. Before pulling the USB card, I do notice some stuttering in GLQuake, even when walking in certain scenes.

edit: To answer my own question, in GLQuake, you'd type gl_flashblend "0" to turn it off. The game gets extremely slow when this is set to 0. Also, removing the USB 2.0 card didn't help with the stuttering. Just turning in a circle isn't as smooth as it should be.

edit2: Setting gl_dynamic "0" in Quake 2 makes the game fly. The frame rate doubles! Does this work for Quake 3 as well?

Interesting thread. May I ask how you're getting 70+ FPS in GlQuake? Over the last couple of months I've been setting up a PPro rig as well, and I get around 38 fps in Glquake (voodoo2 and 512k PPro 200 @ 233).

That's too slow. Pentium Pro can do better even in DOS Quake.

Not wanting to derail the thread but... in DOS quake I have 47.8fps (in 320x200). Is this in the normal range?

Yes.

For my system, the solution for the stuttering in GLQuake was to disable dynamic lighting, so r_dynamic "0". For the timedemo, this only increaes the framerate by 1 fps, or 2 fps if vsync is disabled.

For my system, the solution for stuttering in Quake2 was to disable dynamic lighting, so gl_dynamic "0". For the timedemo, this increased the results by about 15 fps.

For Quake 3, setting r_dynamiclight "0" or using didn't help at all. Using r_vertexLight "1" instead didn't help either. Perhaps the PPRO is just too slow for Quake III?

Is the conclusion that there is a bug with OpenGL drivers for the Matrox G450 w.r.t. dynamic lighting? Anyone know of a fix? From what I could discern, the last version of Matrox's TurboGL wrapper is from driver package 5.52, which does not support the Matrox G450 - only the G400.

I'm left with a conundrum for how to represent the G450 benchmark scores: with dynamic lighting off or on? To be fair, I think dynamic lighting should be left enabled.

Unless someone know of the solutions to the above, I'm ready to move onto another card.

Does anyone know which ATI drivers might be the fastest if I were to use the Radeon 7000 or Rage 128 Pro in this system?

The Quake 2 dynamic lighting bug people here have encountered are the same that I have encountered in the past. It sucks but I found no way around it other than disabling dynamic lighting either, which was a dealbreaker for me. I guess you could just pair the G450 with a Voodoo 2 card but what's the point really?

If you want to see my adventure with testing PCI graphics cards and settling on the Radeon 7000, you can check it here: Poor 3D performance with PCI graphics cards on i815 Compaq Deskpro

I read all those threads again just now and the OS and driver versions are all over the place. Win9x, NT, and W2K use different sequencing for their driver numbers. Right now, I'm testing the card on Win98SE. While there are fixes for Quake 1/2, is there not one for Quake 3 when using the Matrox G450 (Mine has DVI w/32 MB).

What was your final/optimised Radeon 7000 driver version?

At present, I'm leaning towards using the S3 Savage 4 Pro+ (Diamond S540), but I was unable to find Diamond drivers for this card for W2K. The built-in Windows drivers don't seem to do 3D acceleration. I only found Savage 2000 W2K drivers. Anyone have NT4/W2K Savage4 driver recommendations?

feipoa wrote:

I read all those threads again just now and the OS and driver versions are all over the place. Win9x, NT, and W2K use different sequencing for their driver numbers. Right now, I'm testing the card on Win98SE. While there are fixes for Quake 1/2, is there not one for Quake 3 when using the Matrox G450 (Mine has DVI w/32 MB).

What was your final/optimised Radeon 7000 driver version?

At present, I'm leaning towards using the S3 Savage 4 Pro+ (Diamond S540), but I was unable to find Diamond drivers for this card for W2K. The built-in Windows drivers don't seem to do 3D acceleration. I only found Savage 2000 W2K drivers. Anyone have NT4/W2K Savage4 driver recommendations?

I believe I ran the final legacy driver you can still download from http://www.amd.com

Savage4 PCI is also an awesome card and if I had one I would stick it into my K6-2 build RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

Savage4 PCI and Voodoo3 PCI are the only two PCI cards that I still want.