Pretty impressed with G400MAX

[Clevor]

I have a Geforce2 Ultra, Radeon 64 VIVO, Voodoo5 PCI, and G450, and recently put a used G400MAX through the paces. I am pretty astounded as to the graphics quality: very vibrant, intense colors, gamma a tad darker than the Voodoo5 but not as dark as the Geforce or Radeon, and clean, crisp visuals.

I find the MAX can handle games like UT, Gunship, Half-Life, Quake II, Kingpin, Superbike 2001, e.g., all the older games fine, but the QuakeIII engine games are a bit too much. NOLF really looks superb, with it's Lithtech engine. I am surprised that it runs games like NOLF, Kingpin, Gunship, Half-Life, and Giants faster and smoother than the Voodoo5. The textures and color of stones and walls and stuff is unexcelled, perhaps due to the ENBM. The Radeon visuals have been compared to it but is nowhere on a par. I also notice the games really load fast, and my 2D desktop is very crisp.

One area where the Voodooo5 reins supreme is the FSAA, which eliminates the jaggies and shimmering. But on games like Half-life, Gunship, NOLF, and Quake II, I will forsake this and play the games on the MAX for the vibrant color quality.

I have two questions:

1. How come none of the bumpmapping options can be turned on in Giants? Isn't the Matrox ENBM supported?

2. I also have a G400 32 DH. Where can I get explicit instructions on overclocking this to a MAX? It doesn't have the 5 ns ram so I presume it's a matter of luck pushing the OEM ram up there. Can a G400 really get up to MAX specs or only close?

[EvilDonnyboy]

My G400 32mb SH with 6ns Hyundai ram chips is runs at max speed with no extra cooling. It runs very hot, but it runs. With good cooling, I can get the G400 a good deal over MAX spec.

The easiest way to overclock the G400 is to use Powerstrip, which is pretty much self-explanatory.

The best oc'er for the G400's is MGATweak, downloadable <a href="http://www.murc.ws/cgi-bin/dl.cgi?site=8&dl=Mgat120b.zip">here</a>. It's more complicated, but it gives you the most controll over more things on the G400 than any other oc'ing utilities. It comes with a pdf file that explains everything.

[Nuno]

And Giants simply doesn´t support EMBM. It uses Dot3 product bump-mapping, wich only Kyro, Radeon and Geforces support.

[Bohrn]

kinda funny that you say Q3 based games are slow. I find other games to be a bit slower (Mech4, some flight sims, etc). But Q3, & Startrek Voyager:EliteForce both run great with my G400 and P3 running at 800(down from sig specs at the moment) Played whole single player of STV:EF on very high quality settings, and it was glassy smooth. Very nice. I use it to show people who dont think the G400 can cut it. And I have nothing overclocked at the moment.

[Clevor]

Maybe it's the BX!

To Bohrn:

To be fair, I am playing most of the games at 16-bit, though it may be more psychological, since it only boosts frames rates a bit on the MAX. But like the Voodoo5, I can hardly tell the diff between 16 and 32-bit on the MAX.

I dunno if it's the 1X AGP or something, but I dropped QuakeIII down to 800x600x16 with textures set to 75% and I had a hard time beating beating Crash on the intro frag match. Also Alice was rather slow, and Serious Sam (but that runs on some other engine).

Maybe it's your 440BX chip; those Intel chips excel at QuakeIII. That's why I am setting up a couple of BE6-II and P3B-F boards with overclocked cCOs. I am willing to bet I will get better frame rates on a 600E overclocked to 800 (133 FSB) than my A7V with 800 TB on a 100 FSB. Plus that Voodoo5 in my PCI slot ramps up all the way to a 1.4 gig processor.

If you look at the MadOnion database, a lot of top scores for a given processor speed use overclocked Pentium IIIs.

I still may play Giants on the MAX, because of the superb and clean colors. Quake II looks awfully good on a Voodoo5, especially with 2xFSAA, but it's a whole new game on the G400.

[xortam]

I found Q3A at 8x6x32 to be smoother and more responsive with my Max on my Gigger P!!! versus my P!!!/850 on a P2B-S.

[Clevor]

Tried it again.

I dunno, maybe my used card was sitting on the shelf too long and needed to be burned in. I retried QuakeIII at 1024x768x16, 16-bit textures, bilinear, and 75% texture detail and it played fairly well. Also Alice played acceptably at 1024x768x16.

This time I turned my 10 TSRs off. It looks to me the Matrox, like the Radeon, is very sensitive to TSRs running in the background.

What amazes me is this card came out in 1998-99 with 5 ns ram, and you would think by now, Matrox would have a card out that whups everybody else. If the G800 or whatever does comes out and can maintain the same 2D/3D image quality, stability with older games, and can do QuakeIII at 1024x768x32, everything maxed, and get >70 fps, and has FSAA at least as good as the Voodoo5, I'm a buyer.

But they may rest on their 2D laurels. They probably make enough money there.