G400 Max Display

[Norman Chan]

I upgrade to the G400 Max recently but how do I see the performance differences if without doing any bench-marking program ?
From those normal game like Rainbow Six and FIFA200 etc ?
Previously using i740 AGP cards and V2 in SLI. Now G400 Max and V2 in SLI.

[exG-man]

Norman,
Hi. You made a great choice. When I switched from a TnT2 Ultra to my Max the first thing I noticed was that colours were more vibrant and alive. The biggest speed difference came in when I ran some of the more hardware intensive games, like: Half-Life, Mechwarrior 3, Apache Havoc, Falcon 4.0, Aliens vs Predator, etc. For whatever reason, other than the aforementioned colour change, Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear didn't change all that much. Maybe they're not as "tough" to run. Another GREAT benefit of the G400 Max is the higher resolutions I can now run without my pc turning into a slide projector. I run Half-Life, for instance at 1280x960x16 VERY nicely now. Visit the Matrox or Murc's listing of EMBM games. It truly makes the game look entirely different..It looks REAL. Because Matrox uses hardware to bump-map, not embossing (which is a layering method that "fools" our eyes into seeing an object with more depth) the effect is...well get an EMBM enabled game and see for yourself. The first one I got was Drakan, and then Slave Zero. WOW. One thing that I have both read and experienced is that the faster your cpu is, and the higher the resolution is, the better the Max will run. It's so advanced that it NEEDS to be pushed in order to work hard. I have benchmarked mine and have found that I can EASILY outpace a GeForce SDR card and in some cases come damn close to a DDR card!

I may be wrong but I would guess FIFA and RS aren't taxing your Max at all or you'd notice faster framerates with it as opposed to the Intel video card. What other games do you play? Benchmarks are fine and all but nothing beats playing a game that made your system struggle before and now FLIES with the Matrox. That's the real test of a card in my humble opinion. Right now I'm playing Battlezone 2 (with EMBM on) and it's probably the most beautiful game I've played. The shine and detail on the hover-crafts is so deep you'd swear it was made up of 10,000 polygons.
BTW, what are your system's specs? (cpu, ram amount, drives, etc.) There may be other ways to tweak your system to better use your Max. For instance, I have set my video aperture size to 256 mb in my bios and my system is much smoother running now.

Have fun..you own the world's best card now.


"It's only a flesh wound"

[This message has been edited by exG-man (edited 13 January 2000).]