Review of the Matrox G400 MAX

Summary

Jumping into the fray with great DirectX performance and innovative new features, the G400 MAX has shown its merits. The "not so hot" OpenGL performance is something that Matrox will need to change if they hope to completely dominate the competition. If Matrox is able to overcome this issue, we're confident that they'll have a technically complete product that will put them in a technically very advanced position. Let's hope that Matrox won't need as much time for fixing the OpenGL-ICD and bringing it up to speed as it required for the OpenGL-ICD of the G200. We all remember that it took forever.

G400MAX is a good performer in D3D, especially in 32 bit color mode it's clearly ahead of its competition and this has not only been achieved by its flexible way of handling the Z-buffer bit-depth, but also by its extremely fast 2x 128 bit deep memory interface. The dual-head option is a commendable feature, which will certainly be seen in other 3D-chip solutions as well. G400 supports 3DNow!, so even K6-X-owners can take advantage of it. Only the OpenGL-gaming performance is not quite what it should and probably could be yet, so here I'd expect Matrox to do a decent amount of work in very short time to make G400 and especially G400 MAX become worth its pretty massive price tag.