The G550/G800 thing...

[Chad Page]

... is probably because the G550 is a cut-down version of the G800.

(the following is all speculation)

There were rumors that the G450 and G800 chips were pin-compatible - and eventually marketing probably decided that making the 128-bit DDR G800 did not provide enough performance to compete.

Hence Matrox used the G800 core chip in a new 64-bit PCB to keep costs low - it looks like a single head G550 would actually be cheaper to make than a G450, hence allowing Matrox to sell an OEM product while maintaining profitability.

Basically Matrox decided to be kings of 2D, not 3D. Which appears to be a lot more profitable in the long haul, given what happened to a previous king of 3D...

[Kruzin]

Welcome aboard the might MURC

"(the following is all speculation)"

We have a special forum just for speculations.
That is the Crystal Ball forum...which is where this thread is now relocated to...

[Ant]

Hmm wonder what will happen if I install some of those older drivers that contained "G800" on this G550

[prr]

Re: The G550/G800 thing...

There were rumors that the G450 and G800 chips were pin-compatible - and eventually marketing probably decided that making the 128-bit DDR G800 did not provide enough performance to compete.

These rumors are only rumors. If G450 and G800 were pin-compatible, G800 could not have 128bit DDR. If G800 had 128bit DDR, it could not be pin-compatible with G450.

[Greebe]

prr... yes it could be... just not all the pins on the g450 would have been used

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Ant
Hmm wonder what will happen if I install some of those older drivers that contained "G800" on this G550

now there is an idea ...

got a link ?

[Chad Page]

It wouldn't make the card faster, as the difference between the G550 and the "G800" would be the memory bandwidth.

[Maggi]

interesting ...

got some more ?

[Ant]

No but if the G550 is a cut down G800 then surely it would get detected by the "G800 drivers" as a G800, if it's not then it wouldn't

Originally posted by Chad Page
It wouldn't make the card faster, as the difference between the G550 and the "G800" would be the memory bandwidth.

[Kruzin]

Well, before it degraded into a foul-mouthed flame war and was shut down, this thread started off with someone claiming to have a G550 being detected as a G800 in an old version of drivers

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27652

[[GDI]Raptor]

G550 = miniG800

I still think that G800 was tended to compete with GeForce, and Radeon, but Matrox experienced problems under development, and desided to start from the botom making a new card not based on G200/G400 core.

So they took the G800 chip they had developed, produced it on a 64 bit bus-interface, removed som functions in the T&L device, removed some rendering pipelines, bud kept the feature that made the card do two pixels per clock. Now they had a perfect chip for the buissnies market. Cheep, good 2D, dualhead, ++

In a buisnies card, 3D doesn't mater, we still use G100 AGP, and G200 in workstations at my work. The servers run on Milennium II cards. And the G550 is good enough for playing some games in the lunchbreak

[SmellYfeeT]

G550 was purely based on G400 design from ground up, they added another texture pipeline and some T&L stuff and offcourse Dual DVI
As far as I know the DX8 chip that is suppose to be comming out soon -G800 or what ever it will be- is based on a new design that started a while ago.

[[GDI]Raptor]

G550 = G800

Installed SiSoftware Sandra 2001 Profetional on my computer at work, and likk what it reconiced the display adapter as!

I use the latest Matrox BIOS file, and the latest WHQL drivers for Windows 200

[GT98]

DOH!!!!

Interesting finding!


Scott

[Greebe]

I was wondering just how long it would be before you guys would believe what we've been saying for many a moon now. Doh!