Posted: September 15, 1999
Written by: David "Spunk" Grampa Estimated retail price: $199.99
Matrox has already taken its place in the budget line of computer graphics. Standing their ground against such opposition as ATI, they offered that high-end solution to everyone's business/gaming needs. Today, with the arrival of the Millennium G400, Matrox enters a new arena of high-speed 2D/3D video acceleration. How does it perform pitted against such competitors as the Voodoo3 and TNT2? That's exactly what I set out to find...
Features/Specifications
Between the three flavors of G400 enabled boards (G400 16MB, G400 32MB, and G400 Max 32MB), the G400 32megger has the most fluid balance in terms of hardware speculation, price, and performance. But don't just take it from me, see for yourself:
Key Features
0.25 micron processor
256-bit DualBus architecture
True 128-bit external bus to video memory
Full AGP 2X/4X device with Multi-threaded Bus Mastering
8MB to 32MB frame buffer configurations supported
True Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
Vibrant Color Qualtiy 2 (VCQ2) Rendering
32-bit internal precision specially enhanced for multi-texturing
Matrox DualHead Display technology
32-bit Z-buffer including 8-bit stencil buffer
Symmetric Rendering Architecture
DirectX 6, PC 98/99, Broadcast PC, DirectShow, OpenGL compatibility
High-speed integrated RAMDAC (up to 300MHZ)
Display up to 2056x1536 @ 32bpp
Industry leading 3D feature set and performance
Bilinear, Trilinear, and Anistropic filtering
2D Drawing Engine
UltraSharp RAMDAC technology
Full acceleration of all GDI and DirectDraw functions
Linear frame buffer
Programmable, transparent BLTter
Linear packed pixel frame buffer
32-bit ultra-fast VGA core
3D Rendering Engine
3D Rendering Array Processor (three times speed of MGA-G200)
Floating Point 3D Setup Engine with dynamically re-allocatable resources
Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
Single cycle multi-texturing
Vertex and table fog
Specular highlighting (any color)
True color ARGB Flat and Gouraud Shading
Installation
Installation, of many such products, was simple enough... The Matrox G400 slid into the AGP slot with ease. (A good paragraph for this section, eh? :)
Driver installation, was even more of a stroll in the park. But once I got it all in there, was I impressed? Move on and we'll see...
