|
 |
| H.H.
Test System |
| Same
as it ever was... |
|
LiteOn
Mid Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 866EB,
Abit
SE6 i815 Motherboard and Matrox Millenium
G450 Dual Head 32MB AGP, 128MB of PC133 True
CAS2 SDRAM from Corsair (thanks Outside
Loop), IBM 15Gig 7200 RPM ATA100 Hard Drive
(thanks again Outside
Loop), Kenwood 72X CDROM,
Win 98SE,
DirectX 7.0a, Matrox
PowerDesk Drivers for Windows 98 Revision 6.10.004
Whoops,
we almost forgot. Here is an obligatory Quake
3 screenshot just for old time sake. This is a
very large 1024X768 shot with little compression, so
be patient those of you on dial-up lines.
That's
right folks... No FSAA for the G450. It just
doesn't support it. However, from a color
saturation and overall image quality standpoint, it
is really hard to beat a Matrox card.
Also,
Matrox should get an award for their efforts on
evangelizing Environment Mapped Bump Mapping.
There are quite a few games that support this
feature now and most of the major competitors in 3D
Graphics haven't even implemented it in their
products yet. Here is a good example of what
you can do with this feature.
Rage
Software's "Expendable" With and Without
Bump Mapping
No
Bump
Mapping
With Bump Mapping
The
effect of producing reflections and rippling in the
water area of this shot, is very dramatic.
Nicely done by the folks at Rage with the help of
Matrox
On with
the numbers....
 |
| Benchmarks
With The G450 |
| All
work and no play |
|
On the
DVD Playback side of things, we have Mad
Onion's Video 2000 Mark. Let's see how it stacks
up. Click image for viewing.
Video2000
Mark - DVD Playback Quality and Performance Test
DVD
Playback features and quality have improved nicely
since the G400's introduction. You can reference
a quick round-up we did with several cards including
the G400 and GeForce, here. However,
performance has dropped off a little from the
G400. Is this a sign of things to come?
Please read on.
We
next moved on to the gaming tests and to start we
have Mad Onion's 3DMark 2000.
3DMark
2000 Benchmarks On The Millenium G450
Click
image for full view
Sorry
folks, here is where the let down begins.
These scores are not even in the same league as a GeForce2
MX (scores from our previous review here).
They are even lagging behind the Rage
Pro128 chip on the ATI All in Wonder.
Keeping
in the Direct 3D vein, we decided to start up an
Unreal Tournament test with D3D driving it.
Unreal
Tournament Fly By Demo Benchmarks
If you
are thinking that there is a trend happening here,
then you are on the right track. The Matrox
Millennium G450 doesn't hold a candle to most of the
recent round of Graphics Cards, as far as Direct 3D
Gaming Performance goes. It actually ran UT
quite well from an image quality standpoint but
frame rates at anything above 1024X768X16, were
basically unplayable. On the other hand, if
you are comfortable with 800X600 resolutions, which
still looks great on the UT engine, the card still
"has game".
"What
about OpenGL Games" you ask? We'll cover
this as well but it may not be pretty.
Quake
3 Arena Time Demo Tests, Investigation and The
Rating |
