I wouldn't mind seeing Phil retest these cards trying to match Anands settings as close as possible..... if I had to guess, it's probably a combination of drivers, settings, hardware variations, and possibly different early builds of the game that is causing these differences in performance.
I do know the G400 performs pretty well when it's got enough CPU behind it.... I ran mine for a good while on my old Duron 800Mhz rig, it handled pretty much anything I threw at it, including games that were beyond the system requirements...... years later I "upgraded" to a Geforce 6200, thinking there would be a difference of night and day.... and while the 6200 was definitely faster, the difference wasn't nearly as great as I thought it would be.

I'll agree with phil on this since I see the g400 getting 42 fps with those settings in the q3 demo in my high-end p3-equivalent build with the newest matrox drivers. My guess is possibly either different settings for anand and/or matrox catering to gamers at the time. You should probably test with older drivers if you're really interested. Mind you high settings = 32-bit color.

Yes but Phil's 800x600 32-bit benchmarks are roughly around Anand's 1024x768 benchmarks from 20 years ago on a slower CPU, it makes no sense.

Phil actually tested 1024x768 and miswrote it as 800x600 perhaps?

Anand's figures are incredibly impressive for the G400. 40+fps at 1024x768x32bit would make me pick it over most contemporaries.

Phil's setup shares notably more with mine than with anand's, making anand the outlier in that and in results also. It makes sense. But you'll need more data of course.

I don't see what is so different about the setups?

Anand used Matrox Millenium G400 5.25 with Beta TurboGL drivers, Phil used 6.83 (apparently) with a faster CPU - so are you saying that Matrox rolled back their OpenGL enhancements in further driver revisions?

EDIT: Well..

From driver v6.82 Changelog:

Version 6.82.016 Millennium G550, Millennium G450, Marvel G450 eTV, Millennium G400, Matrox G200 MMS, Millennium G200, Mystique […]
Show full quote

Version 6.82.016
Millennium G550, Millennium G450, Marvel G450 eTV, Millennium G400, Matrox G200 MMS, Millennium G200, Mystique G200 and MGA G200.

Powerdesk V. 6.82.016 for Win98 and WinME
-----------------------------------------

Supported Products
------------------
G200
G400
G450
G550

Description of release
----------------------
Supports Win98 and WinME only.
ICD included.
TurboGL not supported.

This is intriguing as, apparently the full OpenGL driver that replaced TurboGL is slower? I was considering going with a Radeon 7000 or Radeon 9250 in my Optiplex, but now I MUST use the G450 and try out the different driver versions.

G400 should be MUCH better then G450.

As far as I know, turbogl was something matrox pushed out to have at least something while they got their opengl act together. They probably prioritized fps over image quality too on that one since it was for gaming, but I don't know. I'd be interested in an image quality comparison between the older and newer drivers.

Yeah the TurboGL was a hot rod MiniGL for only G400, supporting a few games. It's probably highly tuned for Quake 3 in particular. That was what they needed to run fast at the time to sell cards.

Unfortunately on Matroxs site, 5.52 is the closest we can grab to Anands drivers. I actually run this set on my Windows 98 rig with a K6-2..... and though my CPU is obviously a bottleneck, the performance in OpenGL games(specifically Quake 2) is nothing at all to write home about..... ~28FPS or so, and the bottleneck is apparent because that doesn't change much at all across all resolutions and detail levels...... if you have your G400 in a stronger rig, you might give those drivers a try, and see how they work..... in all likeliness though, 5.52 isn't using the TurboGL driver, it's probably one of their early OpenGL driver packages.

Actually I think I found their TurboGL drivers https://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/dr … vious/display2/
scroll to bottom of page.
It seems to be the TurboGL driver alone though, no idea what the procedure for installation would be, do we simply install it ontop of our regular drivers and it overwrites the OpenGL driver? 😮

If I remember correctly the installer will search for installed games that TurboGL supports. I imagine it just installs a local OpenGL32.dll in the game directory. You would not want to use TurboGL as global system OpenGL because it won't work with most software.

swaaye wrote:

If I remember correctly the installer will search for installed games that TurboGL supports. I imagine it just installs a local OpenGL32.dll in the game directory. You would not want to use TurboGL as global system OpenGL because it won't work with most software.

Thanks... I'm gonna give it a try later tonight...... not sure how much good it would do with my CPU bottleneck though, 🤣 I guess I could throw it into my Athlon 1800+ system but the TurboGL driver is Win98 only and that machine is on XP.

Dirk Daring wrote:

Thanks... I'm gonna give it a try later tonight...... not sure how much good it would do with my CPU bottleneck though, 🤣 I guess I could throw it into my Athlon 1800+ system but the TurboGL driver is Win98 only and that machine is on XP.

Having gobs of CPU power might bring more speed at low resolutions.

The forum for all Matrox knowledge used to be MURC. Matrox Users Resource Center. http://www.murc.ws. That place is a treasure trove of info for all Matrox products back to G100/G200.

swaaye wrote:

The forum for all Matrox knowledge used to be MURC. Matrox Users Resource Center. http://www.murc.ws. That place is a treasure trove of info for all Matrox products back to G100/G200.

http://www.murc.ws

My mac says this website is infected and no safe browsing there.

dr.zeissler wrote:

swaaye wrote:

The forum for all Matrox knowledge used to be MURC. Matrox Users Resource Center. http://www.murc.ws. That place is a treasure trove of info for all Matrox products back to G100/G200.

http://www.murc.ws

My mac says this website is infected and no safe browsing there.

Yeah I got that too. Sorry, I should have mentioned it. I ignored it and nothing bad happened. The forum is there, active and searchable. My ancient account still works too.

This is their thread about it. They are trying to figure it out. Apparently rather slowly.
http://www.murc.ws/showthread.php?73555-Murc- … a-phishing-site

I suggest not creating an account and entering your email until they figure this out though.

I am very interested in getting infos about the older Matrox cards because they are insanly great!
I recently installed my Dos/w95 hybrid again. The machine has a G100A onboard 😀

swaaye wrote:

Dirk Daring wrote:

Thanks... I'm gonna give it a try later tonight...... not sure how much good it would do with my CPU bottleneck though, 🤣 I guess I could throw it into my Athlon 1800+ system but the TurboGL driver is Win98 only and that machine is on XP.

Having gobs of CPU power might bring more speed at low resolutions.

The forum for all Matrox knowledge used to be MURC. Matrox Users Resource Center. http://www.murc.ws. That place is a treasure trove of info for all Matrox products back to G100/G200.

Well, I get phishing red flags for this site on almost all modern browsers so it's a bit dodgy; I will set up a VM with a fake account to go in and inquire about the matter later. For now, I am keen on doing my own driver testing with a G450 PCI. I have downloaded Matrox's complete driver archive for Winx, Win2k and Win2kXp from their FTP. Some fun times ahead I guess.

In my tests G400 is doing very well in both Quake 2 and Q3A, GLQuake is bugged somehow. I guess it greatly depends on drivers as I learned later with Parhelia (it was very slow at first but quite ok once I found better drivers).

In this case Athlon XP was used (so no CPU limit) and Windows ME... XP might be slower. My notes say "Drivers 6.82.016.0 for all Matrox cards "... and that is all I can say about that unfortunately. The testing was done in 2009-2010 and that is really too long ago to remember any details.

http://hw-museum.cz/article/2/benchmark-vga-1 … 2011-edition-/6

Q3Test which is referenced on AnandTech is a public beta of Quake 3 with some levels, not the final game. I don't know if the Q3Test Demo1 benchmark is comparable to Q3A demo Demo1 benchmark. Maybe you should verify that first?