Matrox Millennium

[CuEdge]

I just recently dug out my good and trusty Matrox Millennium card. Does anyone have any experience with how this card performs in Windows 2000? How is the 2D performance compared to G4xx, G550 and Parhelia?

[Tempest]

I used one in an Athlon + W2K system for a while. It worked and looked good enough and I didn't notice any major slowdowns. I'm sure there IS a difference, but from a 2D point of view the performance has been pretty much adequate ever since the good ol' Millennium came out.

The maximum resolution I used was 1280x1024, which is also the largest 24-bit resolution that my 4 meg card can offer. And two megabyte cards can only cope a 24-bit maximum of 800x600, so resolutions could become a limiting factor if you want truecolor and are used to newer cards with lots of memory.

I'm getting speculative here, but if you take your Millennium up to 1600x1200 I guess you might also notice some image degradation because decent refresh rates at that resolution are quite close to the limits of what the Millennium was designed for.

---> But, all in all: If you only do 2D work, and that at modest resolutions, you don't need anything better.

[UtwigMU]

Have Millennium 2MB PCI and G400 16SH AGP on Win2k system.

It's slower than G400 in 2D obviously (clock is about 60MHz), too little RAM for video and overlays.

For instance, when I maximize AutoCAD accross 2 screens (Mill + G400) shade something 3D and start continous 3D orbit, it is about 3 times slower when on Millennium or on both screens than only on G400.

Desktop (window dragging) speed is slower but by no means hindering.

Otherwise it has unified drivers with G400 and if you install properly you get pixeltouch and all usual Powerdesk features.

With 2MB you're limited to 1152x864@16bit or 800x600@32bit, RAMDAC can do 1600x1200, but for serious colour depth you need at least 8MB card at that resolution.

Just great for 2D work, if you want to watch video (Real, Quicktime, ....) you need to lower 3D acceleration down a few notches in application settings.

Image quality: at 1024x768 it's not by any means worse than G400 (excelent by itself), however my 2nd monitor is inferior.

Drivers: Latest Win2k Matrox drivers are IIRC from early 2002. If using Nonmatrox (or Parhelia which doesn't have unified drivers with GXXX and earlier) card with Mil. PCI use Windows drivers, otherwise use Powerdesk.

Installation: If you don't want Windows 2000 to load their drivers, boot with a card that doesn't get detected by them (G400 and above), displace (rename) mga*.* in C:\WINNT\inf, turn off, insert Millennium and reboot and download Matrox drivers.

Known problems (with G400 and Mill):
- You need to enable special dualhead support when installing G400 drivers in order for video and DirectX games to work properly on G400 and still be abble to use your 2nd screen (Millennium)
- If using Ultramon, don't install virtual desktop feature since it screws up display enumeration (virtual displays get enumerated in registry before real hardware displays) and Powerdesk gives you that feature anyway.
- When running desktops of different colour depth, expect taskbar, systray and some quicklaunch and start menu icons to fall back to 256-colours mode.

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by Tempest
I'm getting speculative here, but if you take your Millennium up to 1600x1200 I guess you might also notice some image degradation because decent refresh rates at that resolution are quite close to the limits of what the Millennium was designed for.

FWIW, I used to run my VLB Ultima at 1600x1200 - right at the limits of the RAMDAC - and it looked just fine. And this was on a 21" Iiyama.

[anani]

G400 Max is the greatest of all