By Andrey Vorobiev

This chip is presented by Matrox Millennium G400 DualHead 32 MBytes, AGP videocard.

Features:

• Matrox G400 chip, 126 MHz clock rate;
• 32 MBytes SDRAM memory in eight SEC 5ns microchips, 168 MHz clock rate, 128-bit bus;
• Peak speed of scene drawing in multitexturing mode is 126 megapixels/sec and 252 megatexels/sec.

Wasn't overclocked due to elder card present.

These cards have been released in the Summer'99 and have been positioned mainly for hi-res 2D graphics, which quality is traditionally high for Matrox. But if that time G400 3D features have been high, now they are not good and that has lead these cards to 2D sector. I shall mark that these articles were written 2 years ago, thus you can just get acknowledged with cards' features.

For the 20th of November'2001 the latest drivers version from Matrox is PowerDesk 6.72. Test results are in summary diagrams.

Taking into account little prevalence of these cards and their aiming at 2D market segment, this section will be archived in December and won't be updated since that time.

Earlier results obtained on PIII - 600 MHz:

Results obtained on PIII - 700 MHz:

Results obtained on PIII - 1000 MHz:

Below are screenshots taken on this card and reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3.

Games / Cards	1	2	3	4	5	6
Matrox G400
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	7	8	9	10	11	12
Matrox G400
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	13	14	15	16	17	18
Matrox G400						-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	19	20	21	22	23	24
Matrox G400	-			-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	25	26
Matrox G400
NVIDIA GeForce3

Game list:

1. Return to Castle Wolfenstein
2. Unreal2 - for GeForce cards, Unreal - for all other
3. Comanche4
4. No One Lives Forever
5. Serious Sam
6. Colin McRAE Rally2
7. Red Faction
8. Rally Trophy
9. Sacrifice
10. Venom
11. Need For Speed V (Porshe 2000)
12. Real MYST
13. Blade of Darkness
14. Giants
15. 3DMark2001: Game1
16. 3DMark2001: Game2
17. 3DMark2001: Game3
18. 3DMark2001: Game4
19. 3DMark2001: Dot3
20. 3DMark2001: EMBM
21. 3DMark2001: Vertex Shaders
22. 3DMark2001: Pixel Shaders
23. Black & White
24. Undying
25. Anachronox
26. Max Payne

There are some quality problems. E.g. Unreal has striped fog, and that is not good for gameplay. And there are also some artefacts like missing textures and some strange stripes:

And UT has these artefacts:

Need For Speed: Porshe 2000 has strange fog. You can see it in the tunnel from a far distance:

And it disappears when you get closer:

This occurs on several tracks.

Giants often locks up and has artefacts (with 6.71, 6.72 drivers):

Moreover, Black & White produces black screen with 6.50 drivers, and 6.51 version causes frequent lock ups. 6.70 version causes even more quality problems: Z-buffer problems on i815 platform, great perfomance loss in Quake3, unstability of Serious Sam.

2D quality is traditionally perfect. 1600x1200 gives a crystal clear picture.

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