Matrox Millennium G450 32MB
Matrox is one of the
oldest and most experienced graphics card makers, having been around since the
dawn of personal computing time (i.e. the late 1970’s), and has recently
maintained a somewhat lower profile than high-flying, edgier companies like
nVIDIA or ATI. The Matrox crew knows full well that their bread is buttered on
the business side of the PC world, and have a stack of OEM contracts to prove
it.
The popular G400 card
with the DualHead feature has been a winner for Matrox, and has been a favorite
of their business customers since its introduction. However, nVIDIA, not content
with their ever-growing share of the video chipset market, has decided to
intrude upon Matrox’s turf with the introduction of the GeForce2 MX and its
rival TwinView feature.
Let’s take a look
at the relevant features of the G450:
General
 | Fabrication
process – 0.18 micron| Internal
Bus Width – 256-bit DualBus | Memory
Interface – 64bit Double Data Rate (DDR) | AGP
Interface – AGP 1X, 2X, 4X | Frame
Buffer – 8-32MB | Integrated
TMDS digital flat-panel transmitter | Integrated
TV encoder | Two
integrated RAMDACS | Max
2D resolution at 24/32bpp (primary display) – 2048x1536 | |
3D Features
Single-cycle
multi-texturing
| Max
3D resolution at 32bpp (primary display) - 2038x1536| Environment-Mapped
Bump Mapping (EMBM) | Internal
rendering – 32bit | Source
textures – up to 32bit | Maximum
texture size – 2048x2048 | Hardware
non-power-of-2 textures | 32bit
color output | 32bit
independent Z-buffer | Stencil
buffering | AGP
texturing | Trilinear
filtering | Microsoft
DirectX support | OpenGL
support | |
Display Features
| DualHead
Display
Different
ways to pair VGA monitors, flat-panel displays, and TVs – 9 possible
configurations | Independent
flicker-free TV output support | Single
chip multi-monitor support | Digital
Visual Interface (DVI) support | |
DVD & Video Features
| Full
frame rate, high quality DVD playback| HW
sub-picture blending for DVD | Full
access to Microsoft Windows with independent full-screen DVD/video playback
on TV | |
Other Features
| OS
Support
Platforms
– AMD and Intel | Driver
Optimizations |
Plug-and-Play
AGP 2X and AGP4X | |
With the G450, Matrox
hopes to fend off the threat of the GeForce2 MX and nVIDIA’s card-producing
minions. One of the things that Matrox wanted to get through to us when they
shoveled over the marketing docs that came with our sample was that TwinView is
a poor substitute for DualHead.
The implementation of
TwinView is certainly not as feature-rich as DualHead; plus, Matrox only uses
one chip to do everything. By turning to a .18 micron process, Matrox was able
to shrink the main core of the G400 chip enough so that they could squash a TMDS
transmitter for digital flat panels, a TV encoder, and the primary and secondary
RAMDACs for the separate video outs all on one piece of silicon. This new design
is now the G450. The closest in functionality to the G450 that has been
announced using the GeForce2 MX is the Hercules 3D Prophet II MX Dual-Display,
but it uses three chips to get almost the same the job done, and has an MSRP of
$199.
