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specs
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 Matrox G400 32 MB
Award or no award, that is here the question
(Review by MS; Sept. 16, 1999)

Performance and test environment

The first impression of the G400 was that this card, while visually very pleasing, did show a significant lack of stability. Applications affected were primarily D3D games / benchmarks such as Rage’s Incoming, Final Reality and Tirtanium 3D. This scenario changed with the release of the new drivers (Rev 5.21, posted on 9-3-99 by Matrox).


Unfortunately, the release of the new drivers happened only one day after we had to return the FIC SD11 / Athlon system , so that the benches and some of the glitches shown below reflect the old drivers. What did not change with the new drivers, was the poor performance in OpenGL appplications, specifically QuakeII and QuakeIII at lower resolutions. In any case, before going into more details, let’s take a look at the system configurations used here:

Common system components were: IBM 9.1 UATA HDD, Corsair Micron PC133 SDRAM / EMS HSDRAM (128 MB each) Creative Ensoniq Audo PCI card, Acer 76e monitor, desktop resolution set to 1024x768, Windows98.

Image Quality

Beyond any doubt, the G400 has the best image quality I have seen so far. The 300 MHz RAMDAC provides the ultimate in flicker free display and the colors are simply magnificent. The fact that my monitor blew a few capacitors while hooked up to the G400 deserves some attention but is hopefully an unrelated incident.

Overall System Performance

In previous reviews we have, on occasion, stressed the kind of impact that a video card can have on the overall system performance in business applications? While the differences are not necessarily earthshaking, the G400 deserves the honorable mentioning of pushing the Winstone99 score of a K6-III system running at 112 MHz x 4 (448 MHz) to 26,3 which places the system somewhere in the same league as an Athlon 550. Replacing the G400 with a variety of other graphics adapters gave the first runner up a score to 25.9 (TNT2) whereas other cards scored in the mid 25s. Interesting, particularly because it shines some light on the CPU usage of the graphics adapter but I digress.

Other observations

Expendable, was running smoothly on all platforms. Without bump mapping, Expendable is drab enough to qualify as benchmark only. With bump mapping enabled, Expendable actually doesn’t look that bad. Still, hopefully, sometime, there will be some game that will do what "Trespasser" promised to be. Until then, there will be another game of the month every 4 weeks, fading away as quickly as they rose to the top so, who cares too much?

Next Page:    => G400 and Athlon =>

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