Matrox Millenium G400

MANUFACTURER : Matrox
PRICE :

• G400 16 meg: $140

• G400 32 meg: $199 <---tested

• G400MAX 32 meg: $249

• G400MX TV 32 meg: $299

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Even as recently as a couple of years ago, 3d-acceleration was not for the faint of heart.  The plug-and-pray promise of PCI never really panned out to the level that the marketing departments hoped, and graphics cards were commonly one of the tweakiest things to mess with.  (I mean, if your sound card is hosed, you simply get no sound.  If your graphics adapter goes in the drink, you've got a doorstop until you find at least a cheapo VGA board to use while you diagnose the problem.)

The previous generation of 3d-accel cards were fast, no question.  But in all but a few instances they were add-on cards, taking up an additional slot, necessitating a pass through cable and extra heat inside your case. 

Thankfully those days are gone for good.  The Matrox Millenium G400 series of cards have killed them, meanwhile raising the bar for the entire 3d-acceleration industry in the process.  I freely admit that I'm not a hardware junkie, overclocking components with a giant motherboard and cooling tower on my desk.  I want the best performance, the lowest price, and utterly trouble free operation - no problem, right? 

I'm amazed to say that apparently for Matrox, it wasn't.  I've read a lot of literature on the pluses and minuses of the various cards, and had braced myself for the consequences of installing a cutting-edge technology: mediocre (or worse) drivers, spotty compatibility problems, and a generally "unfinished" feel.  Nothing could be further from my experience with the Matrox Millenium G400 32meg 3D card.

My former 3d-accelerator was a Creative Labs Voodoo2 8 meg card.  When I bought it, it was the best available but it's beginning to show its age, as you'll see in the benchmarks.  Installing that was not the easiest project, with frequent visits to the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (including a novel blank BSoD with a lighter, almost Prussian blue that I'd never before seen).   The installation of the G400, on the other hand, was a complete breeze.  I'd been a little concerned, since the Soyo 5EHM motherboard has reportedly had some AGP teething issues, but I was desperate to free up the 2 precious PCI slots the Voodoo and it's sister 2d card have been occupying.  So I updated my AGP bios, rebooted to make sure I had no immediate issues with THAT, and pulled the old cards.

As an aside, I'd like to propose a corollary to Moore's Law (where processor capacity doubles every 18 months): every time you get a new graphics adapter, it will be smaller than the previous card.  Always.  Damn, I remember the ancient Hercules cards.  I bet most people don't even realize WHAT those slots inside their case are for - dinosaur footprints of the computer age.  (If you are too young to understand what I'm talking about, look in your computer.  Odds are there are slots/rails in the plastic housing behind the front of your case - these were to support the front edge of the full-length video cards.  Yes, they WERE 18" long and stretched all the way across the case...man, I feel old.)

The Millenium G400 sat into the AGP slot without trouble, and I fired it up, bracing for strange beeps or worse, nothing at all.  But I was surprised when Win95 found the new device, installed the drivers, and everything worked.  Maybe I'm a total cynic, but that was unexpected. 

I started playing with the new features and was amazed.  Below, you'll find the list of features from the Matrox pimp-list (and my explanation of what they really mean for the user):

• 3D rendering array processor, advanced AGP support: this is the processor and technology that makes it handle 3d rendering so fast.

• DualHead bus technology: means there are two data streams from the processor, not one.  Specifically, you can - without any trouble - hook up a second monitor, TV-out, or whatever and use it for mirroring what's going on the main monitor, zooming a portion of the view (i.e. if you're working on graphics), or maintaining a distinct screen (in games that have it enabled).   The only example I've seen of this enabled is MS Flight Sims - you can have all your cockpit controls on your crummy 14" monitor, and leave every square inch of your beautiful hi resolution new 20" monitor on the front window view.  More than just a convenience, this feature would be especially welcome to strategy gamers who can use this to maximize the game map viewable on their main monitor, and leave the buttons and tools on the "other" one.  I predict suddenly it might not be so easy to come by those 12" monitors currently gathering dust in closets everywhere, now that they may have a new lease on life.... And lest you think that the Dualhead imposes a significant penalty on performance, it's not true.  I don't know  exactly how they do it, but I ran one test EMBM scene with Dualhead and without.  The performance difference?   Less than 2% at the WORST.  Wow.

• Vibrant Color Quality: if I understand it correctly, the card actually renders the colors to theoretical perfection, and then translates this with extra color passes.  Anyway, the net result is a better rendition of the texture (especially at 32-bit color depth) the game's artist originally intended you to see.

• Ultrasharp DAC: 300MHz (tested) or 360MHz - you know how your monitor is refreshing at 60, 72, or 85 Hz?   Let's just say your monitor will have a fresh redraw every time it can accept one (including at unbelievable resolutions like 2048 x 1536 and 32-bit color).  Forget screen flicker in your peripheral vision, or headaches from fuzzy microtext.

• Stencil Buffering: basically like a 3d-rendering "template", telling the card to update the pixels in certain fields of the view, and not others.  For example, if you have increasing fog on the far left, if nothing else changes the card will only re-render that affected area.   This effectively leverages the performance of the rendering chips.

• Environmentally Mapped Bump Mapping: one of the neatest and most immediately obvious features, this has gotten a lot of play in the reviews of the card - it's justified.  Essentially, what the card does is that it accepts an (invisible) heightmap texture for everything you can see (it's a grayscale image in which the shadings of gray tell the computer the height of the object at that specific point).  This is overlaid on the visible textures, and used for shading.  This may not sound like a big deal, but let's look at a ripple in water for example.  In Quake-engine games (and all others, AFAIK) if you want to put a ripple on a smooth water surface, this means you have to actually put a ripple shaped brush (polygon) into the scene.  First, these are static.  They just sit there.  Second, to represent water with hundreds of ripples would be a TON of work and would add thousands of polygons (making doing so a functional impossibility, since this would slow the software's rendering of the scene to one frame per second or slower).   Now with EMBM, it's a texture, NOT a bunch of polygons - it's rendered on the fly and textures can move, making it look photo realistic.  In terms of the polygon burden on the processor, there are still only the minimal quantity of poly's from the flat water, so it renders very quickly, the G400 taking up the slack and rendering the ripples with a minimal performance hit.  In practice, it's simply beautiful.  Here's a demo of the technology: example   (RealVideo - many megs) that's out there.

In case anyone's keeping track, the performance of the G400 was practically off the charts.

Here's a chart showing Quake2 performance (as a comparison, showing performance through the generations of rendering tech from software, to the Voodoo1, Voodoo2, and the Millenium G400.  It's almost cruel:

This was the result of a particularly brutal piece of deliberately bad level design that I put together specifically to stress the framerate performance (lots of round columns, lots of broken non-contiguous sky visible, lots of small brushes breaking up larger brushes.)  Typically playing Quake2 on an average level, with the Voodoo2, I would get 60-70 fps with 3dNow!-tweaked 3dfx drivers.   This was not possible to test, as there was not a 3dNow-enabled Matrox driver at the time of the test.  (There is now.)  FYI 30 fps is basically commercial quality animation - it's not that simple, but that's a good yardstick for smooth performance.

Quake2 is probably the best possible test bed, as it is a mature piece of 3d code, and has been tested to death by the various hardware review sites.  As you can see, the field keeps improving, and the rate is increasing as well (53% increase software to Gen1, 64% Gen1 to Gen2, and a stunning 79% speed increase at the lowest resolutions for the Generation 3 card over the Gen2 card).  The "0" values show where those methods were unable to support the tested resolutions.

When you test the G400 in a more controlled circumstance test, it looks even better:

This is the result for both cards using the open bench tests available at 3dbench.com.  Measurement is in Frames per Second.

The result?  You can probably figure it out.   This is a wa-a-a-y impressive card.  Flawless installation, decent bundle, unequalled performance, some monster cool additional features, for under $200?  Why are you still sitting there (unless you've already GOT one, I suppose - heh).