The Benchmarks
     

Our Test System

Full Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium3 -450 Overclocked to 558 MHz. Abit BE6 DMA66 capable motherboard, 128MB of PC133 HSDRAM, WD 18G 7200RPM DMA66 Hard Drive, Matrox G400MAX @ 166MHz. Core/221MHz. Memory Clock, Toshiba SDM1202 3rd. Gen. 4.8X DVD/32X CDROM, Win 98, DirectX 6.1, Matrox Drivers Version 5.21

 

Let's get right to the numbers...

As you can easily see, these are great framrates in 16bit and full 32bit. There was hardly a difference between the two color depths. The only card we have seen faster in house was the Voodoo3-3500TV which does not support full 32bit color of course.

Let's look at some Quake2 Crusher Demo action!

 

We then fired up the real OpenGL test, Quake3 Arena...
 
Once again, the G400MAX turns in some very good numbers. There is one area to note however with respect to the G400MAX's OpenGL performance. It could be SOOO much better! We used a very recent version of the Matrox drivers and their OpenGL ICD. These numbers are probably a few ticks ahead of where Matrox was with these drivers even a few weeks ago. Still, it is obvious that the G400 line suffers from inefficient OpenGL support. However, as of the writing of this review, Matrox has released no less than three new driver releases in a two week span. Our testing is based on driver rev. 5.21 and 5.25 has just been released. They are obviously working feverishly on this issue. My money is on the folks at Matrox, that they will be able to tap the full potential of this chipset, in OpenGL applications, very soon.
     
Now just to show you the kind of "headroom" the G400MAX has, we fired up a couple of D3D titles!

 

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 ---> D3D G400MAX Benchmark Numbers here! <---