feipoa wrote:

Thanks for the test results. It seems like the G200 is just that much slower than the Voodoo2 in Quake II.

To me the interesting aspect of the G450 was the PCI version because it contained a DVI port. It seems like not a lot of consumer-class graphics cards at the time of production had a DVI port.

Yeah they could either be configured with two VGA, one VGA/DVI, or two DVI (which is why they have unusual 'long' VGA connectors to compensate for either port).
Another thing that is rarely brought up is the fact they have windows 7 drivers. Curiously enough I couldn't find the windows 9x driver on Matrox's site (maybe I didn't look hard enough), but I got the G450 driver disc which has the drivers. Extremely versatile card.

Needless to say, they make a great basic card for windows 7, or if you need a DVI jack in windows 9x.

The PCI voodoo 5500s have a DVI port solder pads (along with the necessary logic and ICs, even), but the connector just wasn't soldered on.

There is a legacy driver section 😀

feipoa wrote:

Thanks for the test results. It seems like the G200 is just that much slower than the Voodoo2 in Quake II.

To me the interesting aspect of the G450 was the PCI version because it contained a DVI port. It seems like not a lot of consumer-class graphics cards at the time of production had a DVI port.

The G400 had the option of a DVI-D daughter card. I have one on my Marvel G400TV that I got on closeout on ebay.

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/media/pdf/supp … als/en_fpg4.pdf

Ok, more messing around today. I stopped by a couple of local computer shops, and one of them gave me a couple of sticks of 64mb, 100mhz SDRAM for free. Can't argue with that. So, I throw it in to see if it's a cache tag issue. No dice, exactly the same frame rate of 32.2. So, mad, I go into the bios and switch everything that looks questionable. The video bios and system bios were shadowed, so I disabled those, as well as a couple of other things, and voila! The next Quake 2 timedemo was 45.2 FPS, damn near 50% increase. Unreal Tournament is much faster now, as well. Not exactly sure what I did, but the results speak for themselves!

On a different note, I tried installing a copy of Quake III I just realized was sitting around. After the installation, the main Windows screen looks very bright and washed out, but when I load games, everything is fine. Not sure what's going on there... maybe an onboard video driver issue? I don't care as much right now.

I just got Mechwarrior 2 and the GBL expansion in the mail. Next effort is to figure out how to get them working with 3DFX.

Thanks for all the help guys!

digitaldrifter wrote:

Ok, more messing around today. I stopped by a couple of local computer shops, and one of them gave me a couple of sticks of 64mb […]
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Ok, more messing around today. I stopped by a couple of local computer shops, and one of them gave me a couple of sticks of 64mb, 100mhz SDRAM for free. Can't argue with that. So, I throw it in to see if it's a cache tag issue. No dice, exactly the same frame rate of 32.2. So, mad, I go into the bios and switch everything that looks questionable. The video bios and system bios were shadowed, so I disabled those, as well as a couple of other things, and voila! The next Quake 2 timedemo was 45.2 FPS, damn near 50% increase. Unreal Tournament is much faster now, as well. Not exactly sure what I did, but the results speak for themselves!

On a different note, I tried installing a copy of Quake III I just realized was sitting around. After the installation, the main Windows screen looks very bright and washed out, but when I load games, everything is fine. Not sure what's going on there... maybe an onboard video driver issue? I don't care as much right now.

I just got Mechwarrior 2 and the GBL expansion in the mail. Next effort is to figure out how to get them working with 3DFX.

Thanks for all the help guys!

take photos of each page of your bios, i am sure everyone would teach you what the optimum setting is.
and if you have quake3 installed, why not try my quake3 benchmark demo here? you would need to update to newest quake3 v1.32 though.
introducing my quake3 benchmark demo

I'm sure many will find interesting what bios settings can cripple performance by that much. I will, too 😀
So yeah, some screenshots before-after would be nice to have.