g400 or g450 for emulation(long)?

[cityfly]

I'm building a computer to stand next to my tv(only display), so I can play emulators(don´t care for 3d games).

I want a matrox g4XX because of the quality of the scart-rgb output(only card that has one right?)

After reading through the manuals of both the g450 and the g400 I have some doubts
that I think you guys can help me with.

does DDR memory matters in 2D perfomace?

As far as I've been able to find out,
g400 can output to tv fullscreen dos mode(under win98) AND real dos mode(with no drivers) but g450 doesn’t work in neither way. is this true?

As I will only be using the secondary vga port(tv-out) will the g450 give me a better image quality/2d performace because of it's faster 230mhz RAMDAC versus the g400 135mhz one?

Sorry for the long post, and thanks for any help you can give me

[Alec]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">As I will only be using the secondary vga port(tv-out) will the g450 give me a better image quality/2d performace because of it's faster 230mhz RAMDAC versus the g400 135mhz one?</font>

I guess it will.

About the DDR memory, it doesn´t have much importance, ´cause between 128-bit SDR memory (G400) and 64-bit DDR memory (G450) there´s no theoretical change.
No answer for the other questions, sorry. Anyone?

[This message has been edited by Alec (edited 28 June 2001).]

[Maggi]

I'm afraid that there's no DOS to TV out option on the G450 ...

The G400 does it fine though.

Btw, what sort of emulation are you targeting at ?

Cheers,
Maggi

[cityfly]

obrigado

[Wombat]

The faster DAC will only give you a higher possible resolution. The G400 will probably actually look better. This is because it has a separate (Zoran?) chip on board for the secondary display. From what I've been able to tell, the output quality is better than the G450's. This may also explain why the G400 has better DOS support.

[cityfly]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Btw, what sort of emulation are you targeting at ?</font>

I will be using mainly mamew(win32) so no problem with the g450, but I would like to use some dos emus like ZSNES, raine, etc I know there are win32 versions, but I don´t think I can use a frontend with them.

[impact]

I have tried this with a windows wgens (sega genesis) emulator and I have to say it's a really neat idea. 50 fps with 2x antialising, Sonic looks soooo good and plays so fast...

Haven't tried any other emus tho...

[Alec]

de nada

[cityfly]

bump

[Indiana]

Last time I checked MameGL (the OGL version that includes bilinear filtering, can help some low-res games when played full-screen...) won't run with the G400s ICD - just got a white screen.

Otherwise CPU-speed will usually be much more important than gfx-cards for emulation.