January 2002 3Digest - Matrox G450 Matrox G550

This chip is presented by Matrox Millennium Matrox Millennium G550 32 MBytes DDR SGRAM, AGP videocard.

Features:

Matrox G550 chip, 125 MHz clock rate;
32 MBytes DDR SGRAM memory in 2 Samsung 6ns microchips, 162 (324) MHz clock rate, 64-bit bus;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 250 megapixels/sec and 500 megatexels/sec.

Doesn't overclock.

This is the latest Matrox's development, these cards are just appearing on the market now. We've observed Matrox G550 in out review, thus all interested may read more information there. I'll just say that this board, like its predecessors, is designed for a business market sector, and the greatly improved 3D core (according to specifications) didn't lead to any perfomance boost. I.e. a videocard'2001 from Matrox is at the level of G400 two years ago (not mention G400 MAX). They have improved the core, but things are right where they started. It's not even the fault of pared down memory bus (NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 has the same features: 2 pipelines, 4 TMUs, 128-bit SDR- or 64-bit DDR memory), it's something else. There's an opinion that caches were pared down (or just thrown out) to make the production cheaper. There are not so many differences from G400 DualHead by means of 2D-sector aspects. And I can't understand the point of releasing old product under new cover.

As all family of Matrox SOHO videocards has almost left the class of perfomance 3D-accelerators and is now positioned by the manufacturer for 2D-graphics market, we cancel reviewing these cards from the angle of 3D-graphics.

For the 20th of January 2002 the latest drivers version from Matrox is PowerDesk 6.82.