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Hardware Pros Review: Matrox Millenium G200
Matrox has done it again.
The Millenium G200 definitely outperforms any other 2D/3D graphic accelerator card that I
have seen so far. Furthermore, it has outstanding 3D support. For several users, the G200
- series should eliminate the urge for a another 3D game card. After many benchmarks, the
Voodoo2 is still the fastest 3D add-on card for games, but the G200 comes very close.
However, while maintaining its awesome performance, I have noticed that the graphics were
sharper and clearer than those of the Voodoo2.
After examining the physical hardware layout of the Millenium and the Mystique, I have
noticed that their boards are somewhat similar to each other. The major differences
between the two boards in technical layout is that the Millenium G200 has a higher speed
RamDAC which produces a flicker free image at very high resolutions such as 1600x1200 for
such things as CAD applications. The other difference is the memory, the Millenium
G200 features faster SGRAM while the Mystique G200 features SDRAM. The trade-off for this
faster RAM is the absence of a TV-Out port on the Millenium.
The one obvious absence which gamers may not like is the OpenGL support used for powering
OpenGL games such as Quake2. This driver is currently in production with an ETA of
September for the Windows 95/98 version. However, Matrox did not totally abandon us, they
provided an OpenGL Direct3D wrapper with the G200 series card to use until then. The
Direct3D wrapper converts OpenGL code to Direct3D. Obviously this is not the best solution
and by doing this there is a great performance hit over a real OpenGL ICD, but it should
be good enough until they release their OpenGL ICD.
Get the D3D OpenGL
wrapper for the G200 here (141k)
Looking at the board on the left hand side of the screen, you will notice that the card
itself is dominated by two major features. The first is a large heatsink covering
the MGA-G200 chipset. The second major feature is the memory expansion slot located toward
the end of the board. As for the installation of the card, I opened up the case, placed
the card into the AGP slot then closed the case and booted-up the computer. Plug-and-Play
detection worked perfectly as well as driver installation in Windows 98 and Windows 95.
However, be sure that the Millenium G200 is assigned an IRQ, you can do this by checking
in the device manager. I have placed the card next to my Diamond Monster 3D II 12
Meg board. So far, there have been no conflicts between the two at all. Even though I have
heard that people are having resource conflicts. If you do, simply change the memory
address of one of the cards in the device manager. Moreover, my system includes a SCSI
adapter, a PCI network card, Diamond Supra 56k SPi modem, and a SoundBlaster AWE 64.
Here are some Benchmarks:
- Forsaken:
800x600x16: 74.6
1024x768x16: 40.2
- Incoming:
800x600x16: 44.2
800x600x32: 28.9
1024x768x16: 34.2
1024x768x32: 18.0
Test machine:
Pentium II 266, 128mb SDram, Pioneer 32x CD-ROM drive, Fujitsu 3.5gig, Seagate 2.5gig, and
a Quantum 2.1gig Hard drives, Matrox Millenium G200 8MB SDRAM and Windows 98
- I must say, the benchmarks are pretty good for a P II 266, while others benchmark it on
a P II 400. (Not everyone has a PII 400).
Ratings:
| Area |
Score |
| 2D Performance |
98 |
| 3D Performance |
80 |
| 3D Image Quality |
96 |
| Drivers |
95 |
| Features |
85 |
| Sofware Bundle |
80 |
| Price |
95 |
| Overall |
89 |
Conclusion:
The G200 has been very popular since it came out. It
combines unbeatable performance in 2D with outstanding 3D image quality at a good speed.
Like I said, "Matrox had done it again!" Other 2D/3D cards will soon be
appearing in the market later this year, but for now, the Matrox G200 is the clear 2D/3D
board winner if you don't mind the absence of a TVout feature. In addition, just two
words, "Unified Drivers". You can definitely count on the company
"Matrox" for frequent driver and BIOS updates as well as technical support.
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