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Product: Matrox Millennium G400 32MB Dual Head
Company: Matrox
Website: http://www.matrox.com
Estimated Street Price: £150/$149.95
Review By: Byron Hinson

The Features

Table Of Contents
1: Introduction
2: Installation & Driver Quality
3: 2D & VCQ
4: EMBM
5: DualHead
6: DVD Playback
7: Benchmarks & Games Tested
8: Overall
9: Screenshots

If you have been into computers for the last 4 years or so, you will know that Matrox used to be the kings of 2D graphics in terms of both quality and speed. With the invention of 3D graphics cards Matrox, unfortunately lost a lot of ground to 3Dfx and NVidia. Since then Matrox has tried to get back into business with the release of the G200 (Which didn't have a OpenGL ICD on release) which wasn't a major performer. But now they are back with the G400, so how does their new card match up to the competition now?

Here are the basic features of the new card:

  • .25 micron, five layer metal process technology
  • 256-bit DualBus architecture
  • True 128-bit external bus to video memory
  • Full AGP 2X/4X with Multi-threaded Bus Mastering
  • 32MB 6ns SGRAM
  • True Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
  • Vibrant Color Quality2 (VCQ2) rendering
  • Matrox DualHead Display Technology
  • 32-bit Z-buffer including 8-bit stencil buffer
  • Symmetric Rendering Architecture
  • 300MHz RAMDAC with UltraSharp RAMDAC technology
  • Display up to 2048x1536x32-bit
  • Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic filtering
  • Single cycle multi-texturing
  • Texture sizes up to 2048x2048
  • Full scene anti-aliasing
  • Full hardware subpicture support for DVD playback
  • Matrox SoftDVD Player
  • Rage's Expendable included
  • Software bundle: Micrografx Picture Publisher 8 and Simply 3D™ 3, Expendable™ from Rage Software, the Matrox Software DVD Player and PointCast Network

2D resolutions and colours¹

Colors 16 MB Colors 32 MB
256 2048 x 1536 256 2048 x 1536
65 K 2048 x 1536 65 K 2048 x 1536
16.8 M 2048 x 1536 16.8 M 2048 x 1536

 

3D resolutions and colours

Colors 16 MB Colors 32 MB
65 K 2048 x 1536 65 K 2048 x 1536
16.8 M 1600 x 1200 16.8 M 2048 x 1536

 

Maximum refresh rates²

  Millennium G400 MAX Millennium G400
Refresh Rates Vertical (Hz) Horizontal (KHz) Vertical (Hz) Horizontal (KHz)
2048 x 1536 85 130 70 110
1920 x 1440 85 130 75 115
1800 x 1440 85 130 80 120
1600 x 1200 100 130 100 130
1280 x 1024 120 130 120 130
1152 x 864 140 130 140 130
1024 x 768 160 130 160 130
800 x 600 200 130 200 130
640 x 480 200 130 200 130

¹ Single display mode
² Maximum refresh rates are attainable when using 8- or 16-bit color palettes.  Maximums may not be attainable at the highest display resolutions with a 24- or 32-bit color palette

 

Installation & Settings -->

 

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