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After living with a G400MAX for a couple of weeks and a G400 oem 16meg for a few weeks before that I've decided to post my experiences and opinions for the heck of it 
While I play games, 75% of my computer time is spent in 2D apps such as browsers, Excel, Word etc. and I have a 21" monitor so 2D visual quality at higher resolutions is very important to me. Frankly that is one of the main reasons I stuck with Matrox and went with a G400 rather than a TNT2 or V3. My previous video card setup was a 4MB Millenium II and a 8MB Voodoo2.
I read as much as I could on the web, not just reviews but users experiences in forums such as this one. My expectations with a G400 were excellent visual quality even at high resolutions, great D3D performance especially at higher resolutions, lesser open gl performance. I am however expecting better performance especially in open gl as drivers are released over time although I doubt it will ever equal a TNT2.
My machine a an Abit BP6 with dual cerleron 366's @550.
The visual quality is there, I am very pleased with the 2D performance and image quality overall.
D3D performance and quality seems great as well in the games I've played EAW, WWII Fighters, NFSIII.
Open GL in Win9X is so so, about what I expected although I admit I was expecting a good increase in the latest drivers and was somewhat disappointed. I hope it will increase in the future. I hope they'll at least fix the texture swapping problem in the next driver release.
The NT drivers seem very poor, especially Open GL. I get the impression that Matrox is concentrating on Win9X and ignoring NT for now. No one seems to know if the newer 4.2x NT drivers are G200 specific or will work well with a G400. Right now with PD 4.12, Q3 demo barely runs at 1024x768, maybe 5fps and locks up. I hope Matrox will address NT at some point in the near future.
The driver installation and removal as well as the tweaks needed to perform like forcing agp2x, vsync etc is not the most user friendly At least they have an uninstaller and I realize some of this may be due to microsoft but there's got to be a better way. At least put more tweaking options in the display properties tabs. Of course I knew going in that the drivers would be imature and hopefully will improve over time.
I haven't even had a chance to try dual head yet but so far overall my expectations have been met and I am happy with my choice of video card. Other than the gyrations needed to install and uninstall I've had no system problems with either card I've tried. I just hope Matrox continues to come through over time with new driver releases.
One thing I'd love to see. I see guys "in the know" like Kruzin that have lots of experience tweaking these cards and answering questions. Instead of posting answers here and there and folks like me having to sift through tons posts, I'd love to see a G400 tweaking FAQ. I realize it may be lazyness on my part and they have better things to do but it may save them time in the long run where they can just direct folks with questions to a FAQ rather than answering questions individually.
Anyhow, sorry for the long post and thanks for listening.
While I play games, 75% of my computer time is spent in 2D apps such as browsers, Excel, Word etc. and I have a 21" monitor so 2D visual quality at higher resolutions is very important to me. Frankly that is one of the main reasons I stuck with Matrox and went with a G400 rather than a TNT2 or V3. My previous video card setup was a 4MB Millenium II and a 8MB Voodoo2.
I read as much as I could on the web, not just reviews but users experiences in forums such as this one. My expectations with a G400 were excellent visual quality even at high resolutions, great D3D performance especially at higher resolutions, lesser open gl performance. I am however expecting better performance especially in open gl as drivers are released over time although I doubt it will ever equal a TNT2.
My machine a an Abit BP6 with dual cerleron 366's @550.
The visual quality is there, I am very pleased with the 2D performance and image quality overall.
D3D performance and quality seems great as well in the games I've played EAW, WWII Fighters, NFSIII.
Open GL in Win9X is so so, about what I expected although I admit I was expecting a good increase in the latest drivers and was somewhat disappointed. I hope it will increase in the future. I hope they'll at least fix the texture swapping problem in the next driver release.
The NT drivers seem very poor, especially Open GL. I get the impression that Matrox is concentrating on Win9X and ignoring NT for now. No one seems to know if the newer 4.2x NT drivers are G200 specific or will work well with a G400. Right now with PD 4.12, Q3 demo barely runs at 1024x768, maybe 5fps and locks up. I hope Matrox will address NT at some point in the near future.
The driver installation and removal as well as the tweaks needed to perform like forcing agp2x, vsync etc is not the most user friendly
At least they have an uninstaller and I realize some of this may be due to microsoft but there's got to be a better way. At least put more tweaking options in the display properties tabs. Of course I knew going in that the drivers would be imature and hopefully will improve over time.I haven't even had a chance to try dual head yet but so far overall my expectations have been met and I am happy with my choice of video card. Other than the gyrations needed to install and uninstall I've had no system problems with either card I've tried. I just hope Matrox continues to come through over time with new driver releases.
One thing I'd love to see. I see guys "in the know" like Kruzin that have lots of experience tweaking these cards and answering questions. Instead of posting answers here and there and folks like me having to sift through tons posts, I'd love to see a G400 tweaking FAQ. I realize it may be lazyness on my part and they have better things to do but it may save them time in the long run where they can just direct folks with questions to a FAQ rather than answering questions individually.
Anyhow, sorry for the long post and thanks for listening.
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