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Review: Matrox Millennium G450 DualHead (Page 6/9)


Posted: December 8, 2000
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

Drivers

Matrox uses unified drivers for the G450, which means that an MIS manager with 500 systems to manage can upgrade an entire fleet of PCs with a single driver, regardless of whether those PCs use the same Matrox card or a variety of Matrox cards. This is very much the same as the NVIDIA Detonators -- they can be installed on anything from a TNT to a GeForce2 Ultra.



Right from the first glance, you can tell that Matrox packs extensive options into the driver feature set. Here in the Information tab, you can view information on the make of the card and drivers it’s using.



Above we see the Options tab that is home to a host of options. Here you can tweak your card for maximum performance. Let’s take a look at some of the options.

Use polygon acceleration buffers geometry information to increase rendering and rasterizing performance. Use device bitmaps caching enables the card to store things such as tool bar buttons and icons in local memory so that windows and toolbars redraw faster. With Bus Mastering, the G450 is able to retrieve data in various locations in system memory for usage. Since data can be retrieved from almost anywhere in system RAM, it supposedly eliminates memory search times and increases performance. Use 32-bit Z-buffering allows more accurate draws of 3D scenes and objects. Lastly, the G450 supports a hardware mouse pointer, which uses onboard functions to operate the mouse for smoother movement. Some systems don’t support this, though.



Above you see the options tab for DualHead functionality. You can choose any available display combination and also chose secondary resolutions. You can see here that the G450 improves on available resolutions from the G400, which was limited to 1280x1024 on the secondary display.

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