By Andrey Vorobiev

This chip is presented by Matrox Millennium G450 DualHead 16 MBytes DDR SDRAM, AGP videocard.

Features:

• Matrox G450 chip, 126 MHz clock rate;
• 16 MBytes DDR SDRAM memory in 2 Samsung 6ns microchips, 162 MHz clock rate, 64-bit bus;
• Peak speed of scene drawing in multitexturing mode is 126 megapixels/sec and 252 megatexels/sec.

Doesn't overclock.

G450 cards have appeared as G400 line development. Actually it's the same chipset but designed according to 0.18 micron technological process, with integrated second RAMDAC with a higher 230 MHz clock rate (G400's DualHead has the second RAMDAC with 135 MHz only). G450 is positioned as the card for high-perfomance 2D systems that need very high drawing speed, 3D is unimportant. The review of these cards is here.

For the 20th of November'2001 the latest drivers version from Matrox is PowerDesk 6.72. Due to the fact that these cards cost less than $80 now, and also due to test platform changes, and also due to test platform changes there are several diagram blocks.

Results obtained on PIII - 1000:

Results obtained on PIII - 600:

Results obtained on PIII - 700:

Results obtained on PIII - 1000:

We can see no difference between 6.50 and 6.51 drivers, but 6.70 is just the worst. 6.71 version is rather ambigous. In the majority of cases 6.72 version was the best.

All 3D-quality problems, that occurred on G400/G400 MAX, are present here as well. So you can read about them on the Matrox G400 page. I shall just add that there were problems with Giants due to small amount of memory, what caused textures to disappear from time to time. There are also serious Z-buffer problems with 6.70 version in a number of games. 1280x1024 resolution was disabled in Serious Sam with this version as well.

Taking into account aiming of these cards at 2D market segment, this section will be archived in December and won't be updated since that time.

2D quality is traditionally perfect, like that of Matrox G400MAX. 1600x1200 gives a crystal clear picture.