Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/617

Matrox Millennium G450

by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 5, 2000 3:04 AM EST


For the past year we have been living in a NVIDIA dominated world.  Companies that we once anticipated graphics chipsets from have been more than just quiet over the past year. 

S3 remained very withdrawn from the public eye after the botched release of their Savage2000, and after failing to deliver on claims of T&L support they have all but abandoned the line and any future the chip might have had. 

3dfx has been much more present in the industry, with the long overdue release of their Voodoo5 product.  However with only one flagship product, 3dfx is definitely in need of a lower cost VSA-100 part (Voodoo4 where are you?) and we are still waiting to see the debut of their $600 Voodoo5 6000 which was supposed to be launched three months ago. 

One name that we haven’t heard anything from was the original king of 2D accelerators, Matrox.  The “whatever happened to Matrox” story follows along the same lines as what happened to S3.  The transition to true 3D accelerators (Rendition Verite, Voodoo, Voodoo2, TNT, etc…) caught Matrox off guard and before they could react, the best feature they could claim was that their 2D looked good.  While that claim is definitely one to be taken seriously, among all the 3D accelerated eye candy that was being shown off by companies like 3dfx, no one seemed to pay much attention to 2D anymore.

Matrox did learn to roll with the punches and they released their “comeback chip”, the G200 in August 1998.  Unfortunately, as with the other “comeback chip” that was released around that time frame (the S3 Savage3D), the G200 was plagued by driver problems.  The G200 was shipped without a true OpenGL ICD and used a Direct3D wrapper in order to support OpenGL - Quake 2 engine based games.  In spite of this, the G200 did boast very impressive image quality, both in 2D and 3D rendering situations.

In an attempt to improve upon the weaknesses of the original G200 chip, Matrox brought forth its successor, the G400.  Released in May 1999 the G400 did have a full OpenGL ICD out of the box and Matrox continued to improve upon the performance of the G400 as the months went on.  The G400 was also Matrox’s first chip to boast their DualHead feature, the ability to run multiple displays off of a single Matrox chip.  Unfortunately, what plagued the G400 wasn’t drivers and it wasn’t features, while the performance wasn’t incredible, what really held the G400 back was the pricing and availability of the card that everyone wanted, the G400MAX.

When the G400MAX did eventually hit the streets, there was a relative lack of interest, instead people were turning towards the higher performing 3dfx and NVIDIA solutions as well as their promises of even faster, more powerful products in the months to come.  With that, we never heard another peep out of Matrox.  While the occasional press release was sent our way, and the G400 eventually made its way into a Marvel product, Matrox hadn’t released a competitor to the GeForce, the GeForce2 and hadn’t had anything planned for either of those releases. 

Not too long ago we received word that Matrox was pursuing a G450, and as you can tell by the name, it wasn’t intended to be the long awaited follow-up to the G400, rather a small step up.  The G450 was supposed to be released in May 2000 with retail availability in June; it is now September and the G450 is finally here. 



The Chip

The G450 takes advantage of the fact that, in spite of the high prices and poor availability of the MAX initially, the G400 was a very good product.  Its DualHead feature gained so much support, especially from the professional markets that it quickly became Matrox’s claim to fame, pushing their “king of 2D” title into the passenger’s seat. 


Click to Enlarge

Unfortunately, even a year after the release of the G400, the chip is still entirely too expensive to be a viable option for many users.  With the cheapest DualHead G400 card still selling for $180, it’s very difficult to resist the temptations of a GeForce2 MX which offers much higher 3D performance at a considerably lower price; and for around the same price a GeForce2 MX based card with TwinView isn't far from reach. 

Instead of allowing NVIDIA to completely take over the market they helped to create with their first DualHead products, Matrox designed the G450 to be a G400 chip targeted mainly at the corporate market.  Instead of even bothering to compete in the gaming market with their 1 year old 3D core, Matrox will save that for a later chip, for now, the G450 is a return to their roots in corporate/professional systems.


Click to Enlarge

The G450 chip is a highly integrated yet low-cost version of the G400.  The first change is a die shrink from the 0.25-micron process of the original G400 to a much smaller and cooler running 0.18-micron G450 chip.  This paves the way for the rest of the improvements Matrox made on the original G400 design. 

Continuing this trend of downsizing, Matrox took away the G400’s 128-bit memory bus and replaced it with a 64-bit bus.  Moving down to a 64-bit memory bus cuts the G450’s pin count considerably, but at the same time cuts the G450’s memory bandwidth in half.  In order to help lessen the blow of this change, Matrox added support for DDR SDRAM.  In theory, DDR SDRAM, on a 64-bit memory bus, should perform identically to the SDR memory that was on the original G400 boards with their 128-bit memory bus. 

While Matrox continues their tradition of not talking about operating frequencies of their products, the DDR SDRAM on the G450 appears to be running at 166MHz, which is the same frequency that the original G400’s SDR memory operated at.  However, since the memory is in fact DDR SDRAM it is operating at an effective 333MHz, meaning that the G450 should theoretically have the same amount of memory bandwidth as the regular G400 (approximately 2.7GB/s).  This will inherently limit its performance to below that of the G400MAX which has a 200MHz memory clock.

The core itself appears to be running at the same clock speed as the original G400, 125MHz.  This gives it a theoretical fill rate of 250MTexels/s, identical to that of the original G400 and still under the 333MTexels/s fill rate of the G400MAX. 

So far it seems as if Matrox has not used the 0.18-micron process of the G450 to their advantage at all, since the G450 holds seemingly identical specifications to its predecessors.  What did Matrox use the 0.18-micron process for? 



The G400’s strengths came not only from within the chip itself, but from the features that were included on the card as well.  Matrox essentially took the features that made the G400 popular, and integrated them, along with a few others, into the roomier G450 core. 

The external RAMDAC that used to power the secondary display has now been integrated alongside the 360MHz primary RAMDAC.  The Matrox TVO chip that used to allow for TV output on the G400 has also been integrated into the G450 chip.  The G450 core is also home to both CRT controllers that drive its DualHead features. 

Going the way of NVIDIA, Matrox has also integrated a TMDS transmitter into the G450 chip that allows for output to DVI based digital flat panel displays.  Let’s hope that Matrox learned from NVIDIA’s mistakes and integrated a TMDS transmitter capable of displaying at resolutions greater than 1024 x 768. 

Because of all of this integration, the G450 board is noticeably shorter than the G400 boards, and the PCB is much more plain.  A smaller PCB, combined with all of the integrated features of the G450 leads up to its $145 price tag. 

The G450 will be available on two cards, the Matrox Millennium G450 and the Millennium G450-DVI.  The latter replaces one of the two outputs with a DVI connector which takes advantage of the G450’s integrated TMDS transmitter, but both cards support TV-output through an external dongle pictured below. 

With all of these features integrated into the G450 the “cool running” 0.18-micron chip becomes noticeably warmer, but still only requires a heatsink to effectively cool it. 



DualHead Take Two

What ended up being the biggest feature the G400 chip had to boast was its ability to drive multiple displays off of a single chip, appropriately dubbed DualHead.  This wasn’t a first for the Montreal based company, in 1979 the company was the first to produce a single video board that could drive multiple displays with their QuadVideo products. 

Now, with the G450, Matrox improved upon their already very useful DualHead technology. 

Upon detecting a secondary display connected to the second output on the Millennium G450, whether in the form of an analog flat panel, a DVI flat panel (Millennium G450-DVI only), a secondary CRT, or a NTSC/PAL TV, the Matrox drivers will pop up with a dialogue box asking whether or not you want to enable DualHead functions.

The G450’s DualHead remains unchanged from the first instance of DualHead introduced with the G400 in that it still offers three main operating modes: Multi-Display, Clone, Zoom and DVDMax.

DualHead Multi-Display is simply Matrox’s multi-monitor support that is an extension of what is provided for under Windows 98/Me/2000, as well as support from scratch for Windows NT. 

Under Windows 98 and Me, the G450’s DualHead Multi-Display can be used to add a second monitor to your desktop that has a resolution and refresh rate independent of the primary display. 

This secondary display can be used as an extension of your current desktop, and using a setting in Matrox’s control panel you can ensure that your icons and window positions will remain in the same place every time you start up your computer.

Under Windows NT/2000 you lose some flexibility in that your two displays cannot have resolutions independent of one another.  This isn’t as much of a limitation with the G450’s DualHead implementation because the secondary display is no longer limited to 1280 x 1024, rather 1600 x 1200.  Regardless, if you’re planning to use an older, smaller monitor alongside your current setup under NT/2000, keep in mind that you have to keep your resolutions synchronized. 

Eventually Matrox plans to have support for real time switching between the various DualHead display modes through keystroke combinations, however currently that is limited to being able to enable Zoom under Windows NT/2000. 



Borrowing a page from the 3Dlabs book of success, the G450’s DualHead implementation supports hardware OpenGL acceleration on both displays under NT/2000.  This is mainly a feature for professional users working with applications that require OpenGL rendering in multiple windows that could be spread out over both displays.  Hardware Direct3D acceleration across both displays is supported in Windows 98/Me/NT/2000 however. 

A new feature that the G450’s DualHead brings to the table is Matrox’s Multi-Desktop (MMD) function.  MMD basically allows you to configure multiple desktops, each with different application window locations, backgrounds, etc… 

Matrox’s DualHead Zoom is back with the G450, while Matrox is planning on adding an application specific zoom feature in a forthcoming driver release, currently the zoom feature is pretty much unchanged from what we’ve seen before with the G400. 

The only difference seems to be that a new feature, DualHead “Multi-Zoom” is supported under Windows NT/2000.  This feature simply allows the user to set presets for windows to zoom into which can be toggled through using keystroke combinations. 

A feature we really enjoyed when Matrox first debuted it with the G400 is their DualHead DVDMax function.  This basically allows a secondary display to carry a full screen DVD playback stream while the primary display to remain at its current resolution without any DVD playback windows on the screen.  This allows you to use your computer to play a DVD for the family while you’re working on the computer at the same time. 

A new feature Matrox is introducing first with their Windows NT/2000 drivers is what they call ScreenGrab.  ScreenGrab is nothing more than a Matrox screen capture utility that can be used alongside the DualHead functions to capture portions of your screen, regardless of the DualHead mode you’re operating in.

In addition to the unchanged DualHead Clone features (displaying the same desktop on both displays), the G450’s DualHead features the same DualHead TV output that we’re used to, however this time around you can output to your TV a desktop resolution of up to 1600 x 1200.



Drivers



Test Notes

  • The Matrox Millennium G450 card would not work on a BX motherboard running at an overclocked 133MHz FSB setting. The system would not get further than the POST screen. For more information on AGP cards on a BX133 platform read our BX-133 Video Guide.

The Test

Windows 98 SE Test System

Hardware

CPU(s) Intel Pentium III 500E
Motherboard(s) AOpen AX6BCPro Gold
Memory 128MB PC133 Corsair SDRAM (Micron -7E Chips)
Hard Drive

IBM Deskstar DPTA-372050 20.5GB 7200 RPM Ultra ATA 66

CDROM

Phillips 48X

Video Card(s)

Matrox Millennium G400MAX 32MB
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB
Matrox Millennium G450 32MB

NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX 32MB SDR (default clock 175/166)
NVIDIA GeForce 256 32MB DDR (default clock - 120/150 DDR)

Ethernet

Linksys LNE100TX 100Mbit PCI Ethernet Adapter

Software

Operating System

Windows 98 SE

Video Drivers

Matrox Millennium G400MAX 32MB - 6.00.010 Beta
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB - 6.00.010 Beta
Matrox Millennium G450 32MB - 6.03.026 Beta

NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 32MB SDR - Detonator3 6.17
NVIDIA GeForce 256 32MB DDR - Detonator3 6.17

Benchmarking Applications

Gaming

GT Interactive Unreal Tournament 4.04 AnandTech.dem
idSoftware Quake III Arena demo001.dm3



At 640 x 480 the G450 doesn't look bad in terms of gaming performance, however it is being outperformed by the regular G400. So much for "theoretically" equal amounts of memory bandwidth.

At 800 x 600 the G450 is already having problems competing with the TNT2 Ultra, while this is a corporate card, its inability to outperform it's year old sibling is pretty disappointing.

Again at the bottom of the charts, it's interesting to note that the equivalently priced GeForce2 MX, is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Why don't you see any scores on faster platforms? Look at the above CPU scaling performance of the G450, notice a trend? The card is so clearly limited at all resolutions above 640 x 480 x 16 that a faster CPU doesn't make any difference at all in performance.



UnrealTournament proves to play well with any current or previous generation card that has decent Direct3D performance.

When fill rate and memory bandwidth limitations begin to kick in, the G450 drops down to the bottom of the charts yet again.



2D Image Quality and Performance

Matrox has always been the king of 2D image quality, and the G450 does nothing to change that title other than reinforce it. The sharp 360MHz RAMDAC the G450 borrowed from the G400MAX provides for a very sharp display at 1600 x 1200 and even at higher resolutions provided that you have a high end monitor capable of displaying such resolutions.

On our Sony FD Trinitron GDM-F500 display the G450 provided a sharper picture than any competing card we tried, but that is to be expected from Matrox. What was even more impressive was that the image quality of the secondary display at 1600 x 1200 was definitely acceptable.

A card with good drivers won't have a problem with 2D performance as you can see by the above scores. The 1 - 2% performance difference between the various cards is negligible.

Nothing to see here, the cards perform within a couple percent of one another.



Final Words

The G450 is by no means a savior for Matrox, instead it's simply protecting a territory that they have worked so very hard to acquire.

It is very simple to compare the G450 to NVIDIA's GeForce2 MX and say that the latter is the clear winner, however the two chips are most definitely geared towards different audiences.

For 3D performance, that includes gaming performance as well as high end 3D rendering, CAD, etc... the GeForce2 MX is a clearly superior solution to the Matrox G450. The G450, which will begin shipping this month, provides performance below that of cards that began shipping over a year ago. The GeForce2 MX, on the other hand, with its powerful T&L unit that can truly come in hand in professional OpenGL applications does nothing but offer the best performance possible at that price.

And while NVIDIA's TwinView is a step in the right direction, it lacks the maturity and the flexibility of Matrox's DualHead. Only recently was TwinView supported by NVIDIA with the Detonator3 drivers, and even then the support only comes under Windows 9x/2000, there is seemingly no TwinView support for Linux users. Matrox has historically had solid Linux drivers, and later on this week we will be taking a look at support for the G450 under Linux to illustrate a commonly overlooked area that Matrox has been excelling in quite well.

As far as functionality goes, Matrox's DualHead is superior to what we have seen thus far from NVIDIA with their TwinView. NVIDIA will most likely continue to improve TwinView so that one day it may be just as feature-filled as what Matrox is currently offering, but then we raise a question of when.

So if you want the performance today, you go to NVIDIA, and if you want the features offered by DualHead, the Millennium G450 is the perfect solution for those that felt the Millennium G400 was a bit too expensive just for multi-monitor support.

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