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Today I finally got my hands on a Matrox G400 32 MB Dualhead over here in Holland. Was a close call. It was the last one they had from their batch and the next one wasn't due until in 4 weeks.
2D seems to be faster than my previous intel 740 based AGP card, but clarity is exactly the same. But I'm running my 15" monitor only at 1024x768. So I'll leave the higher resolutions up to the others. ;-)
I immediately played all games and never even used 16 bit again. 32 bit indeed is much better to look at. Transparency and multitexturing with more than 2 textures aren't dithered or banded. And overall the image seems more colorfull. And yes, I DO notice it while playing. Glad to get rid of my Voodoo2 and it's ugly banding, dithering and horizontal stripes.
All my Direct3D games run fluently in 1024x768 32 bit color and nobody can tell me anymore that 32 bit is out of the question and that it has a too big performance hit. Quake II runs quite smoothly 1024x768x32, but sometimes stutter. Can't wait to get my hands on new drivers.
And ofcourse some benchmarking in Quake 3 Test 2:
Pentium II 450 MHz
128 MB RAM
Matrox G400 32 MB dualhead (default clock settings)
Quake 3 game settings were all on except for VSync and High quality sky. Color depth at 32 bit, textures at highest setting in 32 bit and no compression. High detail geometry and bilinear filtering. Hope I didn't miss anything.
q3testdemo1 q3testdemo2
640x480x32 34.0 37.0
800x600x32 32.9 36.4
1024x768x32 28.8 33.8
Tried to overclock after heavy usage of the card, using Powerstrip GX. I managed to clock my card at 133 MHz core and 175 MHz memory. After that I get anomalies. Maybe time for a big cooler like I someone else posted here.
Running q3testdemo1 at 1024x768x32 I got 29.3 fps, so on my system my plain G400 isn't fillrate limited but rather CPU limited. (Tombman, I still believe that nVidia's drivers again have some multitexturing problems or something if my plain G400 has better scores than your TNT2 Ultra with much better OpenGL drivers.)
Matrox has found a new satisfied customer in me.
With regards
Frank Schoondermark
2D seems to be faster than my previous intel 740 based AGP card, but clarity is exactly the same. But I'm running my 15" monitor only at 1024x768. So I'll leave the higher resolutions up to the others. ;-)
I immediately played all games and never even used 16 bit again. 32 bit indeed is much better to look at. Transparency and multitexturing with more than 2 textures aren't dithered or banded. And overall the image seems more colorfull. And yes, I DO notice it while playing. Glad to get rid of my Voodoo2 and it's ugly banding, dithering and horizontal stripes.
All my Direct3D games run fluently in 1024x768 32 bit color and nobody can tell me anymore that 32 bit is out of the question and that it has a too big performance hit. Quake II runs quite smoothly 1024x768x32, but sometimes stutter. Can't wait to get my hands on new drivers.
And ofcourse some benchmarking in Quake 3 Test 2:
Pentium II 450 MHz
128 MB RAM
Matrox G400 32 MB dualhead (default clock settings)
Quake 3 game settings were all on except for VSync and High quality sky. Color depth at 32 bit, textures at highest setting in 32 bit and no compression. High detail geometry and bilinear filtering. Hope I didn't miss anything.
q3testdemo1 q3testdemo2
640x480x32 34.0 37.0
800x600x32 32.9 36.4
1024x768x32 28.8 33.8
Tried to overclock after heavy usage of the card, using Powerstrip GX. I managed to clock my card at 133 MHz core and 175 MHz memory. After that I get anomalies. Maybe time for a big cooler like I someone else posted here.
Running q3testdemo1 at 1024x768x32 I got 29.3 fps, so on my system my plain G400 isn't fillrate limited but rather CPU limited. (Tombman, I still believe that nVidia's drivers again have some multitexturing problems or something if my plain G400 has better scores than your TNT2 Ultra with much better OpenGL drivers.)
Matrox has found a new satisfied customer in me.
With regards
Frank Schoondermark
)
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