Matrox Millennium G400 32MB w/ DualHead Seattle WA

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Originally published at Internet.com

The Background

Two years ago there were two ways you could get an awesome 2D/ 3D graphics system. One was to get a 4MB RIVA board from the company that had virtually no name, NVIDIA. The second was to get a 3dfx Voodoo board to handle 3D and a Matrox Millennium to handle 2D. The reason for the first configuration was simple. A cheap one-card solution and you kill two birds with one stone. The second seems, by todays standards, absurd. The fact of the matter was the Voodoo boards couldnt do any 2D so you needed a second card for both.

The Matrox Millennium was the best 2D card out there. It was an 8MB card that supported more colors and higher resolutions than the RIVA. Its drivers were mature unlike the early nightmare drivers of STBs Velocity (From personal experience it was really, really bad.) The Millennium had limited 3D ability. Then Matrox released their G100 and G200 product lines. These were major steps forward for Matrox. The G200 did not just have good 3D performance but it set a new standard for the 3D quality. The problem with the G200 was the OpenGL driver was too little too late. Matrox introduced the Millennium G400 as not just a performance upgrade, but a board with a new broader feature set.

The Current Market

The Millennium G400 is a major leap forward for Matrox. While the Millennium G400 is not going to kill the slew of new boards coming out just in time for the Christmas buying season, such as the GeForce 256 based products, Rage Fury MAXX, or S2000 boards in raw speed, Matrox has two big advantages. First off, it has super visual quality. Secondly, it has DualHead technology. This is the real advantage the Millennium G400 is going to have this Christmas. Some cards allow for simultaneous viewing on a monitor and a TV screen. The disadvantage with previous implementations has been that you had to run your monitor at the same resolution/ refresh rate as the TV. If you've ever tried it youll probably agree that it is not an optimal solution. Enter Matrox.

DualHead Technology for Everyone!

Say you have a brand new 21" monitor and the old trusty 15" that is sitting in the closet. Well, with the G400 the old monitor can be recycled to serve a useful purpose once again. Now you can display desktops on two different monitors with two different resolutions and two different refresh rates. With the recent drops in the prices of 17 inch monitors lately, getting two these days is not an expensive proposition. Of course the question here must be begged, what is better two 17" monitors running at 1280x 1024, the best they are good for, or to get one 21" monitor that runs at 1600x 1280. I say the 1280x 1024 maximum on two 17" monitors because even though I have 20/20 vision any higher resolution results in painfully small text. I prefer running that resolution on my 20" screen. After having some time using both configurations Im still unsure which I prefer. Sometimes working on two monitors got a little complex. Still, it was very cool and handy to have double the desktop space. In fact it was almost as good as having two computers.

Image courtesy Matrox Graphics Inc.

The DualHead technology is not just limited to displaying two simultaneous desktops. It can also extend a desktop in Multi-Display mode. In this mode two monitors can be used to display one desktop. It effectively gives you double the desktop space. The DualHead Zoom mode lets you look at a whole image in applications such as Adobe Photoshop on one monitor and have a high detail zoomed image on the other monitor. The DVD Max Mode displays a DVD title on a TV while leaving your monitor dedicated to the desktop. The DualHead feature is a sophisticated, robust addition to the product.

What DualHead Technology Means to the Business User

There is so much power cooped up in the average computer today that it can easily handle having two desktops running business apps at the same time. Having Word and Excel or PowerPoint open at the same time may seem interesting, but lets face it, the little minimize and maximize buttons do the job without the cost of a second monitor. For digital image editing this is an awesome tool. The low price of this board leaves no excuses for artists not to use two monitors. Where the Matrox unit can also shine in desktops that sit in conference rooms. You could use dual projectors, or you could prep on a monitor then output it later on a television screen or a projection unit, it is a really useful toy when giving presentations. The bad thing is that laptops are usually used in those situations and they dont have DualHead technolog - yet.

For the Home User

The home theater buff will love this. Say goodbye to a TV forever. A new PC with a solid TV card, a DVD player, and a sound card with Dolby Digital out amount to heaven when you can add a monitor and a high resolution projection system or TV. The TV-out is beautiful and connects to a TV via composite out or S-Video connectors. I've seen both good and bad implementations of TV-out over the past few years and the Millennium G400's is among the best in this area. The monitor and projection system can both accommodate higher resolution video. Of course, playing Quake 3 on a wall or big screen would be cool too. Matrox introduced a technology that takes most of the annoyances out of combining a traditional home AV system and a computer. This card is a gift from above to home AV buffs.

For the Gamer

Here is where it gets a little hairy. Getting another view in first person shooters is an obvious use for this technology. The problem is that it means moree calculations, or slower performance, and more information. Information overload is a real possibility here. You must ask yourself if the second view is worth lower frame rates. Its your call. Also, I beg you to remember that there is not widespread support for DualHead technology yet. Even if a few dozen games support it in a few months, the Millennium G400 will be considered a last generation part. Plus, how many of those games are you likely to buy? Then again EMBM does offer the best image quality around for supporting games.

Environment Mapped Bump Mapping Technology

If you are one of those people that would gladly sacrifice some excessive performance for stunning graphics then the Millennium G400 has a feature you will love. Environment Mapped Bump Mapping technology (EMBM). So what is the deal with Matroxs latest 3D visual quality enhancement? Think of your basic rendered surface. It is a flat, smooth surface that has a texture and a lighting effect applied to give the illusion of depth and complexity. The problem is that that renders a surface that has the complexity of a framed picture. EMBM gives surfaces bumps and visually can give the small details and imperfections that make things look real. Expendable is a fun game that implements this awesome new technology. Check Matroxs website for other titles that utilize EMBM. EMBM Off EMBM On

G400 Specs:

* Matrox DualHead Display support * Up to 32MB of memory * 256-bit DualBus architecture * AGP 2x & 4x support * Multi-threaded bus mastering support * 300MHz RAMDAC * Supported Resolutions o 640x 480, 800x 600, 1024x 768, 1152x 864, 1280x 1024, 1600x 1200, 1800x 1440, 1920x 1440, 2048x 1536 * S-Video and composite TV-out * OpenGL and Direct3D compatible * Driver support for Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT 3.51, NT 4.0, and for OS/2 Warp * Environment Mapped Bump Mapping technology * Vibrant Color Quality (VCQ2) rendering * Single Cycle Multi-texturing * Specular highlighting, vertex & table fog * 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit Z-buffers * 8-bit Stencil buffer * Bilinear, Trilinear, and Anisotropic filtering * Sort independent, vector / edge anti-aliasing

Drivers

The Millennium G400 comes with solid drivers. That is normal for Matrox. If you care about crisp 2D and play mostly Direct 3D games, the drivers are awesome. The Open GL drivers are a different story. I remember at the beginning of the Millennium G400's life the Open GL drivers were weak. Both Quake II and Quake III moved at such a slow rate that it was more reminiscent of previous generation boards. Matrox heard this cry and whipped up a new Open GL mini-ICD called their TurboGL drivers. Now the Open GL performance is what it should be. The TurboGL drivers are optimized for Pentium III and Athlon CPUs. The unified drivers are nice, although I had a problem using them with a G100 and a few weeks ago. I've never had a problem using them with another card, but I was spooked from the experience. My advice is to go for the unified drivers, if you do have a problem then Matrox offers non-unified options. I maintain my longtime position that Matrox has the most solid drivers that I have ever used.

Performance

The test configuration was as follows: Celeron 366 @ 506MHz (92 x 5.5) Abit BP6 motherboard 384MB PC100 SDRAM Sony 5x DVD drive 20.4GB Maxtor ATA/66 7200rpm hard drive Diamond MX300 Sound Card Linksys 10/100 NIC Creative Labs 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra 32MB or Matrox Millennium G400

Quake 2 Timedemo1.dm2 is the standard way to test video boards with todays games. Note th eMillennium G400 did lag a bit behind the TNT2 Ultra in all tests. Then again the TNT2 drivers have been out for a while and are about as tweaked out as they are going to get, while the G400s are still relatively new. Also, it should be noted that at 1024 x 768 the game was still more than playable even at 32- bit color depths on the Millennium. In fact there is really no reason to play the game at 16- bit color depths with frame rates like that. For 1600x 1200 gaming I would suggest getting a faster CPU. I think it is interesting to note also that at 1600 x 1200 x 32 the G400 did manage to beat out the TNT2 Ultra based competition.

Quake 3 Test 1.08 is a good glimpse of how video cards are going to perform with tomorrows games. The G400 in the tests boasted better image quality than the TNT2 Ultra. Yet the numbers speak for themselves. The G400 just doesnt have the speed of the TNT2 Ultra based board. I should mention however that with and Athlon or PIII and Matroxs TurboGL driver the performance gets a big boost due to the utilization of 3D-NOW! and SSE.

Expendable is a D3D game bundled with the G400. I decided to use the demo versions timedemo feature, which uses a whole bunch of explosions to see how well your card can handle D3D games. Here we see the G400 hold its own against the TNT Ultra. Overall the boards are close in performance but the G400 killed the TNT2 Ultra at 1600x1200x16 mode.

Software

Tired of software bundles that have old games or ones that nobody cares about? Well you wont find one of those bundles here. You will find a single game in the G400s packaging, Expendable, which uses EMBM. The bundle is rounded out by two titles from Micrografx, Picture Publisher 8 and Simply 3D 3. Picture Publisher is a 2D photo-editing program. Simply 3D is a pretty easy to use program that lets you make 3D text, logos, and objects. The G400 also comes with a software DVD player and PointCast. The DVD player is fast. PointCast is a great free news service for your computer. The bundle is not skimpy, and at the same time it is full of useful goodies.

Conclusion

If you want to run one monitor at a high resolution, there are other choices out there. If you want to run with two monitors the G400 is for you. The choice to get the G400 comes down to weighing three factors. First do you need the DualHead technology? If not you may look elsewhere. Do you want to use high resolutions? I dont care what other people say, Matrox has long been known for their solid high-resolution graphics. If you are looking for 1600x 1280 or higher, Matrox may be the best consumer priced option. The last question, do you want to play OGL Q3? If so think twice about this card unless you have an Athlon or PIII because youll want to use the TurboGL driver. Personally, I am a fan of new technology. The G400 is a representation of the out of the box thinking that Matrox has shown in the past. While others are constantly trying to make faster products, Matrox looks to make a more robust package. ---------------------------------------------------------------------