Garrett W wrote on 2020-04-09, 22:20:

Feature wise it's actually pretty clear. Matrox G400/G400 MAX/G450/G550 cards are DX6.1 capable. They all lack HW T&L AFAIK (the G550 apparently has one but I've never seen it exploited, akin to Savage2000) which means they are do not have feature parity with DX7, let alone DX8. The G550's extra features/capabilities were only ever exploited through very specific software such as the Headcasting demo that swaaye mentioned which I believe was intended for video conferencing. In fact, I can't think of any other application that used them. It's fair to say it is an odd chip.

The Parhelia is as much a DX9 chip as the G550 is a DX8 chip. It ain't, despite rumours and claims prior to release. As far as OpenGL goes, the G450 should have a full OpenGL ICD as the G400 cards got one in the latest drivers, so I don't see how Matrox would drop it on this card in particular.
Performance has been shown countless times by this point and you can find graphs and numbers in contemporary reviews and more modern ones such as Havli's excellent rundown for which the site seems down at the moment, unfortunately, so here's an archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200104235925/ht … 2011-edition-/1

Thanks for the summary. I was just referring to the fact that there were six posts with conflicting answers to the same question. I just found it funny. 😄

Thats easy, if you look at Matrox G550 chip specification.... http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/matrox/g550specs.pdf
There are many words like

DirectX 8.0 Matrix Palette Skinning with up to 32 matrices
· Compliance
- DirectX 8.0 and lower

And many reviewers just took some PR from Matrox and deduct that card has DX8. But its only PR way of telling customers that your card can work with DX8 installed
and in some cases that your card have one small part of required technologies to be DX8 capable. They can't tell customers, that they selling them DX6 card, when
everyone else have DX7 and going for DX8.

Another problem is, that as far i know theres not single software available, that will show you technologies required by various directx versions, if theyre available
on you card. When i asked at at beyond3d forums what is difference between DX5 and 6 compliance, guys just guessed. So in some cases its even almost impossible
to find any good info. Thats why i have onsite DX3/5 support together, because i don't know if for example s3 virge and other early chips are DX3 or 5.

Aida shows some list of supported DX technologies, but don't sort them by DX versions, so you had to know what is required. G400/450/550 don't have hardware
transform and lightning required by DX7, so we know for sure that these are DX6 chips.
Seen some other software, that showed too many dx flags, but no chance to get clear results from it.

It seems that Direct3D was evolving so rapidly that the version numbers back then probably shouldn't be taken very literally. New features were almost always optional and games needed fallbacks if they wanted to support hardware features that might be limited in marketshare.

DX6/7 in particular was a very fluid transition and I know of few DX7 gamed that wont run on DX6 hardware. DX8 was a different beast.

The whole "supports DX#" is a semantics mess when there's capabilities checking, API compatibility in drivers, and hardware features all being different. Some might believe Voodoo2's actually a DX7 card after their last drivers for example, and there's already been plenty of important Scali posts on this very subject since it's often a debate with enthusiasts in denial.

it seems like derSammler is confusing G200 in this too

Sure, no argument there. But I feel like from DX8 and onwards, it was enforced quite a bit. What did D3D 6.0 even define that wasn't in D3D 5? Multitexturing?

So yeah, D3D5 and D3D6 can be a toss up and even D3D7 hardware could get away with a lot, but very very roughly:

D3D7 - HW T&L and forgive me if I'm wrong here, Nvidia's cube mapping technique?
D3D8.0 - Shader Model 1.0 (and 1.4 with DX8.1)
D3D9 - Shader Model 2.0 (with DX9b - Shader Model 2.0b and Shader Model 3 with DX9c)

And then the waters kind of muddled which I feel is a necessity due to hardware lasting longer in the sense that people tend to not upgrade as often, so developers may want to offer support for wide range of hardware.

I know you already know this leileilol, but just for the sake of anyone reading this that may not, Voodoo2 is not a D3D7 card, it's a D3D6 card, despite it having drivers that are DirectX 7 compatible. This means that if you apply said drivers, games will detect the Voodoo2 properly. This is important, because there are other things besides features that can aid in development and it can make sense to use a newer API even if you are not taking advantage of new features (such as HW T&L in the case of DX7). Not to mention, Direct3D is just a part of DirectX. I understand that this can and is very often a lot more complex, but I tried to give a rough estimation.

Somewhat offtopic, but what was the G800 project going to be like? Did it evolve into the Parhelia? Was a successor to Parhelia ever designed or at least have there ever been any design leaks/suggestions/ideas as to what they could/would have done with one?

From what I've been able to find in some old articles, Direct3D 6 has multitexturing, bump mapping, 3DNow support (in the geometry & lighting engine that nobody used at the time ?), SLI support, and "automatic texture management" (more info).

Regarding G800, https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/901/

Nice, thanks for the info!

Do anyone have more info about G800 story?

Also another question, I've seen in the above link that the G450 with 16MB SGRAM and 32MB SDRAM had much different frequencies, are those right? I've both I've never thought about this difference. Also I didn't remember that the core clock were lower than the G400.

Was there ever a comparison of featuresets on early 3d-acceleratrors?

Afaik Gxxx do not support 8bit-pal-textures or table-fog. Also no texture-compression like s3tc did. But they support EMBM which is really nice and the g400-demo has fantastic water-reflections that looks like DX8.x shaders. Don't know how they did it, but it looks really nice. TnL can be done by the cpu, there is not so much performance-gains on the early TnL cards as far as I remember that.

I love those matrox cards, they are excellent build, they are small and mostly passively cooled.

Lately I tested again the G550 32MB DDR card and it sure was a well built card with a very good VGA output quality signal. On the speed side is a bit faster than the G450, of course I'd say for Directx6/7 level games it was enough good while not oriented to games anymore it still had a very good compatibility.

Man I love the matrox cards, but I have to admit, that the Rage128pro in my G4-Cube has much better colors and more detailled textures on games like unreal, rune, etc. (rave). Man I love those colors.

Tested the G550 again and it has buy far the best image quality in 16Bit!
But I have to check some things:
- why is HL1/gunman not smooth, scrolling is broken. perhaps vsync problem?
- gamma does not work in opengl

Update:
vsync issue in HL1/gunman still present in D3D and OGL, seems to be a strange problem.

- Bilinear does not look so good, G550 should be able to use anisotrop-filtering, but where can the be activated? no option in the driver, no option in the tweaker.
- table-fog is supported by G550 so shadows-of-the-empire is looking great, performance is outstanding though.
- UT99 lightsources look fantastic in 16bit, reference! as same as on V3 in 16Bit.
- before I switch to TNT2 or GF2/4 MX in AGP-Lowprofile I would love to checkout everything on the g550.

Please check Quake 2 OpenGL and see if hw dynamic lighting is broken like on G450. On G450 it really cripples performance. If G550 fares better I may seek and grab one.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-08-03, 07:42:

Please check Quake 2 OpenGL and see if hw dynamic lighting is broken like on G450. On G450 it really cripples performance. If G550 fares better I may seek and grab one.

Dynamic lighting as in when something like blaster fire illuminates the nearby walls and floors while it travels?

I can't speak for the G450, but that works fine on my G400 with v5.52.015 drivers. In my experience, newer drivers (versions 6.xx.xxx) aren't quite as compatible with Win9x games.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-08-03, 08:10:

appiah4 wrote on 2022-08-03, 07:42:

Please check Quake 2 OpenGL and see if hw dynamic lighting is broken like on G450. On G450 it really cripples performance. If G550 fares better I may seek and grab one.

Dynamic lighting as in when something like blaster fire illuminates the nearby walls and floors while it travels?

I can't speak for the G450, but that works fine on my G400 with v5.52.015 drivers. In my experience, newer drivers (versions 6.xx.xxx) aren't quite as compatible with Win9x games.

Yes, that exactly. It works on G450 as well, but it causes a huge hit to performance. See discussion here: Re: Poor 3D performance with PCI graphics cards on i815 Compaq Deskpro

There is something with the PCI bridgechip. My G550 PCI in my 1400 tualatin has massive framedrops, the AGP LP Version does not suffer from this.
So I went for the P4 AGP-LP machine (scenic-S2), instead of the P3-PCI machine (Scenic-XS). I have to check that light-issue.

The texturefiltering in 16bit on the G450/550 is escellent, but AF would be very nice on G550 even 2x would be a great upgrade to defend that smearing.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2022-08-03, 09:13:

There is something with the PCI bridgechip. My G550 PCI in my 1400 tualatin has massive framedrops, the AGP LP Version does not suffer from this.
So I went for the P4 AGP-LP machine (scenic-S2), instead of the P3-PCI machine (Scenic-XS). I have to check that light-issue.

Interesting, if you can check out G450/550 PCI vs AGP wrt this issue that would be awesome.

where is your location? Perhaps I can sent you my G550-pci?
Beside that it would be nice to summarize optimization for G550 an games/demos.

Here is the perhaps almost full list of supported EMBM-Games:
EMBM-List

Ace of Angels™
Aquarius™
Battlezone II: Combat Commander™
Battle Isle: The Andosia war
BITM
Carmageddon®: TDR 2000™
Colin McRae Rally 2
Descent 3™
Descent 3™: Mercenary
Destroyer Command™
Drakan™
Dungeon Keeper™ 2
Echelon®
Echelon®: Wind Warriors
Expendable™
F1 World Grand Prix
Far Gate
Fur Fighters
Hard Truck II™
Hired Team™ Gold
Hired Team™: Trial
Incoming Forces
Parkan: Iron Strategy™
Ka-52 Team Alligator™
Kyodai
Off Road: Redneck Racing
Offshore2000: Pro Surf Tour
Planet Heat
PowerRender™ engine V 3.0*
Private Wars™
Rollcage® Stage II
Silent Hunter II
Silent Space (cancelled)
Silex engine
Slave Zero™
Speed Busters™
Spirit of Speed 1937
Sub Command
Jugular® Street Luge Racing
Totaled™
Warm Up
Wild Metal Country™*