Matrox
has been in the Graphics Card business since the invention of
electricity. OK, so maybe that's a little overstated but when it
comes to PC Graphics, Matrox is the "Grand Daddy". They
have always been known for high end accelerators built with the
Computer Professional in mind. CAD and other Desktop Graphics
Applications were always their strong suit.
As the 3D Accelerator Market came of age, Matrox was there with some
of the first ever 3D Accelerated features in a 2D card. However, a
new market of then "Start-Up" companies like 3dfx and
NVIDIA entered the picture and soon leapfrogged Matrox with the
nimble aggression that only a small focused group could bring.
Since then things surely have changed and many others have entered
the picture. One company has remained a constant through these
market trends. Matrox is still making leading edge accelerators and
they are back in the 3D race with a strong entry. This is a look at
the "Top Shelf" of their new G400 product line, Millennium
G400MAX. |
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Card
Design - Dual Heads?
Clean
simplicity, that's what the G400MAX's design is all about. There are
not a lot of chips on this board, as you can see in this shot, for a
card that supports Dual Monitors. There are two VGA connectors on
its header and the G400 line supports simultaneous independent
output of different images on two monitors. This will allow you to
display two different apps, one on each monitor, while they are
being run in a multi-task environment. One can conceivably play a
DVD title on one screen while word processing on another. Also,
gamers can output to a TV while simultaneously driving their
monitor. Of course their is also the option of expanding your
desktop across two monitors. This is great for business folks who do
a lot of spreadsheet work. Finally, graphics designers can rejoice
in the ability to work on an object in one monitor and then have a
"Zoom" view of any region of their work, on the other
monitor simultaneously. Matrox calls these various modes "DualHead
Zoom"," DVD Max" and "Clone Mode". Here is
how they achieve this dual-drive capability.
The G400 line of
Graphics Processors has a 256bit DualBus architecture.
Click
to enlarge
Here are the
rest of the key specifics on Matrox's Siamese-Twin Power House.
Features
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Floating Point 3D Setup Engine with
dynamically re-allocatable resources:
? Ultra-pipelined floating point and culling
engines
? Optimized support for Direct3D and
OpenGL triangles, strips, fans and vectors
? Flexible Vertex Format natively
supported
? Vertex Buffers natively supported
? Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
? Single cycle multi-texturing
? Vertex and table fog
? Specular highlighting (any color)
? True color ARGB Flat and Gouraud
shading
? Vibrant Color Quality2(VCQ2) Rendering:
? 32-bit precision internal pipelines
? up to 32-bit source textures
? 32-bit output
? 16bpp dithering down from 32bpp
palette for 16bpp output
? Full sub pixel and subtext correction
? 8-bit precision for filter coefficients
? Highly saturated & separated analogue
color output (Ultra Sharp DAC) |
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Filtering support:
? 11 level mip-mapping support
? Bilinear Filtering
? True eight-sample per pixel trilinear
filtering
? Anisotropic filtering
? Alpha blending:
? All blend modes under DirectX 6 and
OpenGL
? Supports all permutations of passes
including light maps, environment maps,
reflection
maps, etc.
? Z-buffer support:
? 16-bit
? 32-bit
? 24-bit plus 8-bit stencil buffer used for
shadows, overlays, etc...
? Guard Band Clipping
? Single, Double or Triple buffering
? 3D-image effects combined with no
exclusion conditions
? Sort independent (full scene) anti-aliasing
? Vector/edge anti-aliasing
? Hardware dithering including dithering of LUT textures |
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That's a pretty
complete set of features. Matrox didn't leave out any of today's
current "hot-buttons" in the world of 3D Graphics. New
technologies are coming on line shortly but this is the most
comprehensive list 3D Graphics capabilities currently available on
the market.
Here's what our
card looked like.
Not quiet as
pretty as that nice Marketing Shot above but check out the stock
Aavid fan that Matrox sticks on this bad boy! The core clock for the
G400MAX on our unit seemed to be set at 150MHz., although Matrox
will not confirm this. That tied in the memory chips to a 200MHz.
clock. At least that's what "Perftune" from Entech
was telling us. However,
we were able to overclock the G400MAX to 166 MHz. Core and 221MHz.
Memory clocks.
"VCQ"
and "EMBM" (so many acronyms, so little time...)
In addition,
Matrox went the extra mile and one-upped the competition for this
round of technology. The addition of Environment Mapped Bump
Mapping, "EMBM" for short and VCQ2
Vibrant Color Quality2,
should give Matrox the lead in overall image quality until the next
generation of cards arrive.
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