G450 reviewed for what it is...

[DuRaNgO]

This is a very good review that speaks of the G450's abilities, INCLUDING visual quality in Quake 3

Here!
jim

[rugger]

I find the reviewer in this case rather clueless, and the review on the whole to be rather ameturish.

While he speaks wonders about the 2d image quality, not a lot of knowledge is required to recognize the G450's excellent 2D image quality. (even at reasonalbly low resolutions, my G400 is slightly clearer than my Geforce). I have no idea whether he knows what he is doing with about DVD, but neither do I (I don't have one). However, he falls into the trap of listening to marketing hype over RAMDAC speeds. He fails to recognize that it is not the speed of the RAMDAC that offers crisp display, but the quality. (my geforce has a faster RAMDAC than my G400, but the G400 looks better because of QUALITY)

It is when he views the 3d capibilities of the G400 that he shows how very little he knows about video cards. He should have known why the geforce cards score better in 3dmark2000 (T&L for those who need to be told everything). He should have tried more than one driver release when the 3dmark2000 score idicated problems. The very latest drivers from matrox(6.21) appear to have triangle setup problems that reduce the performance of the card somewhat on some configurations (I had the same problem as him on my somewhat similar machine). About 3d quality, given his demonstrated cluelessness over 3d speed, I feel very weary about making the same conclusion he does.

Overall, while the reviewer has decent writing skills, lack of research and general video card knowledge make him sound clueless, and reflects very poorly on the review.

PS. the G400 and G450 are decent cards, but they need decent drivers that stop breaking various things.

[Joel]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">PS. the G400 and G450 are decent cards, but they need decent drivers that stop breaking various things.</font>

Like what???

Joel

[IcedEarth]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Joel:
Like what???

Joel

</font>

Like missing and corrupted textures in Unreal Tournament in 16-bit mode for instance.

[Joel]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">So, is this enough evidence for you to remove your rose coloured glasses and realize that the G4XX drivers could be better.</font>

I wasn't asking for evidence I was just asking you to explain your statement. It is true that most of those things have been discussed in the forums and for the most part have been corrected. Plus I never said the drivers couldn't be better. As for wearing rose colored glasses, I can't really do that because it might hamper my duties as a driver's beta tester for Matrox. As for 3DMark2000, I don't consider it to be a good benchmarking tool at all, considering that it is written in such a way that it favors the nVidia cards which causes it to perform badly on other cards.

Joel

[DosFreak]

"I don't consider it to be a good benchmarking tool at all, considering that it is written in such a way that it favors the nVidia cards which causes it to perform badly on other cards"

OMMFG, not this again.....

[Barbarella]

hi all,

i don't think this is a bad review. The guy wrote.

"I was very impressed with the display quality of the Millennium G450 in Quake III "

A lot of people (reviewer) forgot to mention that Matrox G400/G450 have not only a high quality picture in 2D, but in 3D too !

And i prefer sentence like this, rather then the "Hey man this card sucks, i can get 120 FPS in 1600*1200 with my Q3"

Sure he is not a pro, but give him time to learn. He seems not to be an idiot.

[Joel]

www.matrox.com/mga/media_center/utilities/gdi_bypassing.cfm

And this is just one of their tricks.

Joel

[Himself]

GDI bypassing is as old as the hills, for one thing, nobody benchmarks GDI anymore so it's rather pointless to bring it up in 2001.
For Matrox to even bring it up just shows how much out of touch they are with markets other than their own, what are they, Eaton's? (clothing company in Canada that recently relaunched with the premise that all you need to sell is the colour purple spelled in French)

I agree that NVIDIA cuts corners on quality to get faster benchmark scores, but it has nothing to do with GDI bypassing and they really can't hide the lesser quality. To be fair and I don't really want to be, giving the user the options to tweak the balance between quality and speed is not evil. I won't buy an NVIDIA card in the near future because I just don't have the time to be tweaking the damn thing for every game, every time I want to play it. If a game has cut scenes, I'd like to see them, etc.

[rugger]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Joel:
Like what???


Joel


</font>

Here are a few examples for the Windows 95/98/ME drivers

Version 6.21 - some people (KT133 motherboards users probably) are having problems with low polygon throughtput. I have been hit by this bug, poly throuhtput falls to about 500K/per second under 3dmark2000 from 2000K/per second in 6.10. probably explains the really low 3dmark2000 score the reviewer got on the G450

Version 6.10 - texture problems under quake 3 arena (discussed extensively on the forums) under the ICD. Does not occur under 5.X drivers or the TurboGL drivers.

Version 5.X - Poor OpenGL ICD, terrible performace, incomplete. Earlier 5.X version have direct3d problems.

OpenGL ICD, all versions - Bugs with many proffesional OpenGL programs, as discussed extensively on the forums.

So, is this enough evidence for you to remove your rose coloured glasses and realize that the G4XX drivers could be better.

BTW, I have nothing against the hardware, It is solid, fast (TNT2 speed is not slow, despite what Nvidia would have you think) and runs cool. (no unreliable fan)