G200
The Matrox Millennium G200:
Great Performance, Low Cost
by Matrox
Matrox has long been considered one of the best 2D-video accelerator manufacturers on the PC market. Matrox’s previous triumphs included the Millennium, Mystique Series and Millennium II video cards. These cards were great 2D performers but they just didn’t have what it took in the 3D-performance area to be competitive with cards like the Rendition and 3DFX. So the question is, does the G200 perform well enough to be competitive" It sure does; read more to find out why!
My first impression of the card was that it was pretty nondescipt for the most part, but did have a couple features that caught my eye. The card comes packaged with a pretty thick manual (mostly because it’s in 5 or 6 languages) but the manual is well-documented and gives you all you need to know. Items also included with the video card are the driver disk, some Matrox stickers, and the blister packing that holds the card. There were newer drivers on the web, so I decided to download them before I installed the card. The card touts both a memory upgrade slot and a header connector for Matrox’s Rainbow Runner video capture card. This feature should please gamers interested in video capture and editing. The memory expansion is designed for people who want the extra memory for rendering or CAD work, but I’m not sure how much 8 more megs would improve 2D or 3D gaming performance since I didn’t have an upgrade available to test. The Card is AGP 2X so if your motherboard doesn’t support AGP 2X you may need a bios flash or new motherboard.
Installation was very simple for the G200 and I ran into no glitches whatsoever. I first removed the drivers for my Diamond Stealth 2 G460 from the add/remove programs menu under control panel. Next, I shut down the computer and took out the G460 and dropped in the G200 into the AGP port. I fired up my machine and immediately it told me I had new hardware and asked me where to look for the driver. Since I had previously downloaded the new driver, I told it where to look and it installed the updated driver with no problem. Next, I ran the setup program that came with the downloaded driver and it installed the Matrox Powerdesk utilities. Now that I had everything installed, I rebooted my machine and prepared to do some 3D gaming!
The card is Direct 3D compliant, and the box hints at Open GL drivers, but when I benched this card, no real Open GL drivers were available yet. Matrox claims that Open GL support is forthcoming, so hopefully Open GL drivers will be available shortly after you read this article. I was hoping to at least get some Quake 2 bench numbers using the Direct 3D GL Quake wrapper that is on Matrox’s site, but I was unable to get them working correctly (most likely due to my seriously loaded Quake 2 directory). So in all fairness to the G200, I won’t post Quake 2 results on the card until a Full Open GL ICD is available. As far as other games are concerned however, the G200 performed very well indeed. In the X benchmark, I got 75.25 FPS at 640x480, 64.85 FPS at 800x600, and 50.29 FPS at 1024x768. In the Forsaken bench, I got 59.28 FPS at 640x480, 43.14 FPS at 800x600 and 35.14 FPS at 1024x768. All posted numbers were taken on a P2 300 with 128 Meg of ram. These numbers are far better than I really expected to see from a offering from Matrox and I was pleasantly surprised by this fact. The visual quality for gaming is the best I’ve seen yet period. The card renders beautifully and in Direct 3D based games, I found myself using the G200 rather than my hefty Quantum X-24 (reviewed earlier this week). I tried out several games other than Forsaken and X and found that the G200’s quality was excellent on those games as well. Jedi Knight looked great and so did Grim Fandango. Even 2D games like Curse of Monkey Island looked cleaner than my Stealth 2 G460 and the G200 definitely had more capabilities as far as available resolutions and color depths.
The highs of this video card were the good Direct 3D performance, low cost (MSRP $149.99) and great image quality in both 2D and 3D at all resolutions. The Lows of this card were few, really my only gripe was the lack of a true Open GL ICD, and hopefully that will soon change. The Bottom line is this: If you are looking for a 2D/3D card that performs well or just looking for a 2D card to pair with a Voodoo 2, this is the card that you want! With an MSRP of $149.99 this is definitely the best 2D/3D card for the money that I’ve seen yet.