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G400 - Worth It

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  • G400 - Worth It

    Well, this being a Matrox forum, I think most of the answers you get will be the same:

    G400!

    Don't even wait for the MAX....get a regular 32meg dualhead, and overclock it to MAX speeds...
    Core2 Duo E7500 2.93, Asus P5Q Pro Turbo, 4gig 1066 DDR2, 1gig Asus ENGTS250, SB X-Fi Gamer ,WD Caviar Black 1tb, Plextor PX-880SA, Dual Samsung 2494s

  • #2
    Hi there

    Have finally received my G400 yesterday I guess I can finally give an informed opinion

    I think the question here is about the G400 and the TNT2.

    I wouldn´t even think about the V3, it was already an outdated card when it come out. Lightning fast, perhaps, but even if speed is everything to you, in a few months it will be outdated, because new games with huge textures are coming and 16 Mb, 16-bit only and 256x256 textures aren´t really cutting it anymore. If glide is very important to you, hey, keep the V2.

    Both G400 and TNT2 are great cards, undoubtly. The G400 wins in overrall image quality, (both 2d and 3d), new features (dual head and EVBM) and raw performance at higher resolutions. TNT2 is still plenty fast at low resolutions, specialy in OpenGl, much faster in unreal and half-life (the fist one because that half-hack they call direct3d port for unreal is highly optimized for the TNT´s drivers and the second one allegadely because a specific bug in Matrox ICD) but hopefully the next G400 drivers are catching up and correcting the bugs. Nvidia is one year ahead in OpenGL driver developement, don´t forget it.

    And keep in mind TNT2 is plenty fast, but it has some cheesy tricks: it does per-triangle mip-mapping (faster, but uglier) and it DOES NOT trilinear filtering. It dithers the mipmap boundaries, and it´s UGLY. What´s the point in having 32 bit colour if one can still see dithering in the screen?

    See http://www3.sharkyextreme.com/hardwa.../g400_indepth/ and judge by yourself.

    I have a Celeron 450A, so our system should be similar in performance (the rumors that the G400 didn´t well with celeron were just that, rumors) and I am more than pleased. I have a retail 32Mb overclocked to MAX speeds (150/200), and it scores higher at 1280x1024x32 than my overclocked G200 did at 800x600x16...

    You should have guessed by now what card I would pick

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    • #3
      G400 - Worth It

      I currently have a voodoo 2. I want to upgrade, probably to a G400/Max, TNT2 ultra or Voodoo 3500. I know the G400 M seems to have the most power but I am worried about poor drivers causing poor frame rates and multiple bugs. Which card do you think I should buy. I have a PII 450 and 256MB RAM.

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