Will Dual Head Be Enough To Survive?
Even with the G400 chip Matrox was not able to provide top performance. Let me clarify something - the Matrox chips are not bad at all, as they support all standards and the 3D features which are important today. They just lack the required performance for fast 3D game flow at high resolutions. When the G400 MAX was released in summer 1999, it was definitely fast enough to beat 3Dfx's Voodoo3 cards, but could not top the performance of a TNT2 Ultra. As you can imagine, the recent chips from nVIDIA and ATI are playing in a different league. 3Dfx performed the jump to faster 3D performance far too late. By using several graphics chips on a single graphics card, today's Voodoo 5 solutions are fast but expensive to produce. nVIDIA was the first to realize how the market would develop. Today they have products both for the performance user and with a good price/performance ratio.
Even though the Matrox cards are not able to compete with other chips in terms of pure 3D performance, they can still be recommended. The most important catchword is Dual Head, which means that you can attach either two monitors or one monitor and a TV. nVIDIA is now launching a similar concept, but the graphics card will require a second RAMDAC. In contrast, Matrox integrated the second RAMDAC directly into the graphics chip, which reduces the cost for the graphics card. In addition, Matrox is the only company, which integrated a TV encoder into the chip, making the G450 a decent basis for video and TV freaks.
