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On the FIC SD 11 / Athlon 550 combo, the G400 behaved pretty much as expected, that is, all scores are in a range that hardly leaves any wishes open, with the exception of the OpenGL applications tested. Please note though that the drivers used on the Athlon platform were an earlier revision since Matrox did not release Rev. 5.21 until after we had to return the system to the manufacturer.

Direct 3D applications, particularly those that draw directly on the main memory are the strong domain of the G400 and this becomes quite evident by looking at the scores achieved.

Considering the fact that with the Viper 770 Ultra (TNT2) the maximum results possible on the Atlon 600 system was 176 fps, the 169 fps delivered by the G400 look extremely good. By pushing the core frequency to 135 MHz and simultaneously raising the memory clock to 180 MHz, the frame rates went up to 176 fps.

Final Reality

Final Reality has always been one of the benchmarks where the G200 was able to profit from the weight of the bus transfer category and the G400 pushes this even further by reaching astounding 10.18 marks in this domain. Needless to say that a score like that raises the overall result to hitherto unthinkable high scores.

3Dmark 99Max

Compared to FR 1.01, the G400 scores in 3Dmark 99Max are only mediocre. Nothing too exciting but not too shabby either

After the synthetic benches, how does the G400 perform in real games like Unreal?

Overall, the image quality is very good, however, the highest resolution supported without artifacts was 800x 600. At 1024x768, picture distortions, accompanied by triangle blackout were a prominent feature, at least when all image rendering options like fog etc. are enabled. The most likely reason for this insufficiency is a weakness in the driver support since we have seen this feature come and go with different drivers / cards in the past. The fact that we did not observe these anomalies on the other two test systems (after upgrading to the 5.21 drivers) supports the idea of driver issues being responsible for the problems mentioned.

Unreal FlyBy timedemo (16 bit)

Now, what about OpenGL?

Weak OpenGL support has been the main drawback of the G200 Millennium and, unfortunately, not too much has changed. The Matrox OpenGL ICD is workable, albeit at the bottom end of the scale when it comes to performance. The framerates achieved in QuakeII pretty much speak for themselves, in addition, 1024x768 is the highest resolution supported, attempts to run the G400 at 1280 x 960 pixel resolution ended with the error message "Glimp initializing failure". Moreover, the Crusher demo recorded by Brett "3-Fingers" Jacobs ran stable only up to 800 x 600 pixels resolution and notoriously crashed at 1024 x 768.

QuakeII demo1 and Crusher frame rates

Quake III

Similarly, in Quake III, the G400 shows some definite weaknesses as demonstrated by the lack of speed at the lower resolution / faster settings. In addition, the “high quality” (800 x 600) setting resulted in a rainbow colored image restricted to the left half of the screen while the right half of the screen showed nothing but a horizontal grating pattern. However, it is very obvious that at higher resolutions, the G400 makes up for the lack of speed at faster settings.

QuakeIII frame rates :demo1, top panel | bottom panel, demo 2
Comparison between the Xentor 16 and the G400. 800x600 was not run at the high quality setting on the G400

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