G200 3D Performance

[Matt Houben]

Hello folks,

Most of the time, I play UT in 800x600x16 bit color. I get around 30 FPS with that. Yesterday I tried to set it to 1024x768x16 bit color. I got around 14 FPS..

Also, when running 3DMark2000 at 800x600x16 I get a score of around 1600. I suspect running 3DMark2001 will be pretty useless .

Is this really due to the limited 3D performance of the Millennium G200 or can something else be wrong.

My system spec:
ASUS P2B rev. 1.10 motherboard
256 MB 100Mhz SD-RAM
Pentium III 800 MHz CPU
Matrox Millennium G200 AGP 8 MB
Soundblaster Live! with digital I/O
Quantum Fireball EX 6 GB UDMA/33 HDD [C:, D:]
Seagate Barracuda 20 GB UDMA/66 HDD [E:, F:, G:]
HP8100i CD-RW 24x/4x/2x [X:]
3.5" FDD [A:]
5.25" FDD [B:]
MediaForte Momenta 56K DSP fax/voice/modem
HP 4100c USB scanner
HP LJ-5L printer
OS: Win98
All HD partitions FAT32

I use the latest MS certified drivers for the Millennium G200.

Regards,

Matt

[Maggi]

Your performance looks about right for a G200.

Adding more memory could improve it a bit, but you'd loose overlocking potential.

Are you OCing your G200 ?

Cheers,
Maggi

[Maggi]

whooops, I just noticed you're using the certified drivers ...

Try PD 6.23 instead, but use the uninstaller first, to get rid of all traces of old drivers.

[Matt Houben]

No, I do not overclock my G200. I tried once to turn up the clock with the matrox utility but got BSOD very soon. So I stopped trying and left it running at standard speed.

BTW, expanding the memory is IMHO not worth while; I better to buy a whole new card.

Is there such a big difference in performance between the MS certified drivers and the latest drivers :?

[This message has been edited by Matt Houben (edited 04 April 2001).]

[rubank]

Matt,

for successful o/c, first take off the heatsink and remove the stuff Matrox put between the sink and the chip, apply a thin coating of copperpaste, remount the heatsink (twisting it down properly) and add a fan to the sink for added cooling effect.That might do the trick.

On a sidenote, having little to do with gaming performance, you should make your Barracuda HD your primary (C:\) and use your Fireball for storage. Some good general performance could be gained here, newer and bigger HD:s are generally substantially faster.

rubank

[This message has been edited by rubank (edited 04 April 2001).]

[Matt Houben]

Yes, you are propably right: making the Seagate drive the primary one would improve performance, although the Quantum drive is not so slow either (in spite of the 5400 RPM). I put the swap file anyway on a separate E: partition on the Seagate. Also, all games are located on the G: partition.

On the long run, I expect the Quantum to be replaced by a 30 GB 7200 RPM drive anyway.

My next PC will definitely have a RAID 0 setup. That really speeds up things.

[arbymo]

get MGATweak from MURC main page and overclock the hell out of ur G200.
u can gain as much as 25-30 % performance increase.
w/o overclockin i would get 30 fps in quake, with o/c i get as high as 40 fps at 800x600.
also make sure that u stick a fan to ur G200 heatsink, even a small 486/pentium fan will do the work.

[Nuno]

The G200 overclocked pretty well, but the question is if it´s worth it.

Even the G400MAX is getting outdated in 3D performance, and it´s 2-3X faster than a G200.

If you´re a gamer, get a new card (heck, even a MX has stellar performacne compared with the G200...)

[Matt Houben]

As long as the games that I want to play run decently at 800x600x16, I will stick with the G200. When to time comes that I really need to replace it, and there is nothing new from Matrox, I think I will check out the Radeon (Geforce cards have IMHO inferiour display quality). How good is the Radeon anyway, comparing it to the Matrox cards?

[Nuno]

Ok, I understand.

So if that´s what you want to know, yes, the performance is adequate for a G200.

If you´re willing to overclock it, use powerstrip. MTSU overclocking just sucks and not always works. And it sucks because at the same core/memory frequencies, My G400 is always around 10% faster with powerstrip than with MTSU. My guess is they slow memory timings at higher frequencies.

[FrankDC]

A Radeon DDR is 2-4 times as fast as the G450, depending on the game. See:
http://www4.tomshardware.com/graphic...8/g450-07.html

Frank

[Nuno]

Kyro II looks promising too. And cheap.

[Randy Simons]

The G200 is old, and hence, slow compared to todays cards. Some games wont even run, because they require hardware multitexturing..

As for Unreal Tournament, fps is everything and I play it at 640x480, with everything OFF or LOW. (No dynamic lighting, low res texture , no decals, no detail, no nothing) which gives me enough to play in multiplayer games, most of the times.

Actually I haven't played a game @ 800x600, the performance drops quite a bit when using higher resolutions on this card...

It's a good card, but for todays games it's just too old.

[Matt Houben]

Well, at least UT runs fine at 800x600x16; I guess the 800 Mhz CPU compensates a little bit for the slow G200 .

[Ovi]

Hi
Even on my rig, UT runs pretty decently and I get 30-35 fps on an average,at 800x600 at 16 bit.It feels very smooth
Randy: How many fps do you get in UT at the abovementioned resolution?
Cheers
Ovi

My rig: P-III 450, 128 MB PC100 SDRAM, 4.3 GB Samsung HDD, Matrox Millennium G200 8 MB etc....