For many years Matrox has been a pattern-maker in the quality graphics cards world. Nowadays, in many offices you will surely find some Matrox graphics cards, new or older ones. By the way, the PC we are now working on is equipped with Matrox Millennium II graphics card as well.

When G100, G200 and G400 came out, Matrox won recognition among the gamers. Millennium G400 and G400 MAX brought Matrox to the peak of its popularity. The company gained leading positions in the high-performance gaming graphics sector. Cards from Matrox sported excellent graphics quality, which differed them favorably from other competitors.

Time passed. Rivalry companies improved the 2D quality of their graphics solutions and even made a tremendous dash forward in 3D technologies. After the arrival of Matrox Millennium G450 it became clear that Matrox's name would sink into oblivion in the gamers world, unless a miracle (say, G800) occurs.

Meanwhile, thanks to the G450 office series supporting DualHead technology, Matrox managed to once again prove that it deserves the reputation of a brilliant "business" graphics card maker. These cards were helpful for all those who needed to work with two displays at a time. As for the 3D core, which G450 cards inherited from Matrox Millennium G400, it allowed the tired users to relax playing some catching gaming stuff after work as well.

Some more time passed. Matrox took no decisive moves, and its competitors began to manufacture "dual-head" products of their own. These were NVIDIA GeForce2 MX and ATI RADEON VE. The card from NVIDIA was mostly targeted for gaming needs, while ATI RADEON VE was a real menace for Matrox. Featuring a more up-to-date 3D core it also boasted no poorer range of functions and splendid graphics quality.

This way, Matrox faced the urgency to create something brand new. Otherwise, it risked to be ousted from the PC graphics card market.

On June 19, Matrox announced its new G550 graphics chip and a line of Matrox Millennium G550 graphics cards.

Matrox G550 Chip

The key specs of G550 chip look as follows:

• 0.18-micron manufacturing technology;
• 125MHz core frequency;
• 166MHz graphics memory frequency;
• 64bit graphics DDR SDRAM;
• Two integrated RAMDAC (360MHz and 230MHz);
• Two integrated TMDS-transmitters;
• Integrated TV-encoder;
• DualHead technology support.

3D core:

• Two pixel pipelines with two texturing units each;
• Tri-linear and anisotropic filtering support;
• EMBM support;
• HeadCasting Engine.

As a whole, these characteristics look pretty "yummy", especially the HeadCasting Engine, which is worth discussing in detail.

HeadCasting Engine is based on the Matrix Palette Skinning technology. In G550 it is implemented in the hardware. Matrix Palette Skinning technology serves to cast animated objects. That's how it works:

• An object (say, a human hand) is "split" into wholesome segments (for example, finger phalanges, i.e. bones), which are to be transformed. These transformations can be described with a single function called "bone matrix".
• In order to prevent unnatural distortions in the border areas transformed by different matrixes, the polygon vertexes are transformed by both matrixes. Each vertex is assigned two weight coefficients, which characterize its transformation flexibility for these matrixes.
• In general case, the object should not necessarily be presented as a skeleton-like structure. It may represent a set of bone matrixes and vertexes with weight coefficients.

This technology allows creating animated objects quite easily. Of course, the more bone matrixes we use, the more complicated and real the object animation is.

Matrix Palette Skinning can be carried out perfectly with the help of vertex shaders. The vertex shaders specs in DirectX8.0 include 96 registers for constants storing, but G550 features even more: good 256 registers, which allow the chip to use up to 32 bone matrixes per object and up to 4 bone matrixes per vertex. Matrox used the chip features to create an animated human head. That's where the name of the technology, HeadCasting Engine, comes from.

HeadCasting Engine is designed to help the users to communicate interactively. The communication is arranged in such a way that a highly detailed model of a human head is animated synchronously with the speech flow. The LIPSink technology is exactly the one responsible for this synchronization. For visual communication of the kind the users should only send two photos (full-face and half-face) to Matrox, and soon they will get a 3D model of the photographed head:

Photos				3D Head Model

Surely, for high-quality communication each of the "interlocutors" should have a Matrox Millennium G550 graphics card. If one of them doesn't have this graphics card, he'll have less detailed head model.

If you asked what we personally think about HeadCasting Engine, we would have to admit that we aren't that happy about the idea of speaking human heads. However, we shouldn't disregard the fact that 3D graphics technologies gain more and more popularity in many aspects of the human life, and in Internet as well, that is why HeadCasting technology has every right to exist. It is very likely to be demanded mostly among the corporate users.

Unfortunately, HeadCasting Engine is incompatible with DirectX8 vertex shaders even though it can be regarded as a kind of advanced vertex shader itself. The trouble is that it supports Matrix Palette Skinning only. Moreover, the hardware support of Matrix Palette Skinning will most probably be implemented only in HeadCasting applications. And the last thing worth mentioning here: nowadays the T&L unit of G550 stays disabled in the driver, and we have absolutely no idea when it will be enabled in future.

Now that we're through with G550 characteristics and features, it's high time we took a closer look at Matrox Millennium G550 graphics card itself.

Matrox Millennium G550: Closer Look

Matrox Millennium G550 is built on a green textolite and features a small daughter card with a VGA-Out:

   

We wonder why Matrox engineers have chosen this configuration. It goes without saying that longer conductors and extra connectors may tell negatively on the overall image quality provided by the card. The connector serving to transfer the video signal to the external card is similar to that implemented on SUMA graphics cards with SIF:

Under a passive heatsink you'll find Matrox G550 graphics chip:

This graphics card is equipped with 32MB graphics memory (64bit DDR SDRAM). These are SAMSUNG memory chips with 6ns access time:

The card is shipped with two adapters - DVI-to-VGA and VGA-to-S-Video+RCA:

The core frequency makes 125MHz, the graphics memory works at 166MHz like that of Matrox Millennium G450. Although the core of G550 is more complicated than the core of G450, G550 still features passive cooling. In fact, it needs no active cooling whatsoever: we noticed no overheating even in case of the hardest working conditions.

Matrox Millennium G550 Features

As we read on Matrox web-site, Matrox Millennium G550 is positioned first of all as a DualHead solution for those who care about 2D image quality in the first place; then as a means of introducing 3D technologies in the communications sphere, and at last, as a gaming graphics card. We have already said a word about the 3D communications, and a little bit later we'll see how things stand in games. Now let us find out what Matrox Millennium is worth in multi-display systems.

In this respect, Matrox Millennium G550 differs from Matrox Millennium G450 only by its DVI interface that allows connecting digital displays. As a result, the following display options are available:

• Analog display + analog display;
• Analog display + TV;
• Analog display + digital display;
• Digital display + TV;
• Digital display + digital display.

Working with two displays, G550 supports DualHead Clone, DualHead Multi-Display, DualHead Zoom and DualHead DVDMax modes, which are already traditional for Matrox products. We checked G550 working in all these modes:

Dual Head Clone mode:

DualHead Multi-Display mode:

DualHead DVDMax mode:

DualHead DVDMax mode with a TV-set:

DualHead Zoom mode:

The settings for these modes can be changed in the "DualHead" bookmark in the desktop properties:

Clone mode settings:

Zoom mode settings:

Multi-Display mode settings:

DVDMax mode settings:

Besides, in the right corner of the system tray you'll find Matrox MultiDesk and Matrox QuickDesk icons.

Matrox MultiDesk:

Matrox QuickDesk:

Matrox QuickDesk eases the adjustment of the desktop functions, while Matrox MultiDesk enables you to create and manage as many virtual desktops as you wish:

We should admit that Matrox developers have brilliantly implemented all the DualHead modes. However, Matrox' competitors, such as NVIDIA and ATI, offer similar solutions as well. In order for you to get a better idea of the today's multi-display graphics cards and their features, we put them together in a "modest-sized" table :). Apart from Matrox G550, it contains Matrox G450, ATI RADEON VE and NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400:

As we can see, Matrox Millennium G550 and G450 seem to boast the richest set of functions, whereas ATI RADEON VE and, of course, NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 have a more powerful 3D core. Compared with its predecessor, Matrox G550 has more advanced architecture (namely, G550 has two pipelines with two texturing units each), so that it proves quite fast in 3D applications. We'll focus on this issue a bit later, after we say a few words about our testbed and 2D performance.

Testbed

During this test session we made use of the following testbed:

• AMD Athlon 1200MHz (133MHz FSB) CPU;
• EPoX 8KTA3 (VIA KT133A) mainboard;
• 256MB NCP PC133 SDRAM;
• Fujitsu MPE3084AE 8.4GB HDD.

Software:

• Windows 98 SE build 4.10.2222 A;
• Windows 2000 SP2;
• DirectX8.0a;
• Quake 3 Arena v1.27g;
• ZD WinBench 99 v1.2.

For Matrox Millennium G550 we took 6.70.008 driver for Windows 98 and 5.70.010 for Windows 2000.

For Matrox Millennium G450 we took 6.21.003 driver for Windows 98 and 5.31.003 for Windows 2000.

For ATI RADEON VE we took 4.13.7109 driver for Windows 98 and 5.13.01.3211 for Windows 2000.

NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 graphics card was tested with 14.70 driver for Windows 98 and Windows 2000.

2D Performance and Image Quality

We tested the 2D performance of Matrox Millennium G550 in Business Graphics Winmark and High-End Graphics Winmark from ZD Winbench 99 testing set. We checked the card's performance in Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000. Then we compared the results with what Matrox Millennium G450, ATI RADEON VE and NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 showed:

It's hard to point out what tell on the performance in ZD WinBench 99 tests most of all. It can be a well-optimized driver, or the memory subsystem, or the GDI window drawer. But whatever the truth, Matrox Millennium G550 overran its G450 predecessor. We would've been strongly surprised if it hadn't, though.

As far as 2D quality goes, we cannot make any definite comments: the VGA-Out located on the daughter card was supposed to lead to worse graphics quality, but we noticed no quality worsening on the display. We had ViewSonic P775 and Hitachi CM776ET displays. Yet we'll give you no guarantee that you'll get the same thing with other displays.

3D Performance and Image Quality

We checked the abilities of Matrox Millennium G550 in Quake3 Arena (in normal and high-quality modes). For a better comparison we took the same Matrox Millennium G450, ATI RADEON VE and NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 graphics cards.

The results were a sheer disappointment for us. Matrox Millennium G550 turned out two times slower than GeForce2 MX 400, though it has similar architecture (except the T&L unit). We can excuse this slip, as the core frequency of GeForce2 MX 400 is almost two times higher (200MHz of GeForce2 MX 400 versus 125MHz of Matrox G550). On the other hand, Matrox Millennium G550 is only 20-25% faster than its G450 brother. Indeed, for a card with a two times greater fillrate the progress is too modest.

Apparently, the architecture of the texturing units and memory controllers of G450 and G550 is just the same, but the two times faster texturing speed is very memory-hungry. If the texture cache of G550 had not been enlarged, the outcome is rather simple to explain then.

This test sample was provided with beta-drivers, so we can excuse the fact that Quake3 didn't run under Windows 2000. But it was a bad shock for us when we saw the inadequate work of Matrox G550 EMBM. We could never expect to discover such a bug in a Matrox chip, which used to boast perfect hardware EMBM implementation.

See yourself: below we placed some screenshots from BattleZone II and 3DMark 2001. The left-side screenshots belong to Matrox G550 EMBM, those on the right side - to ATI RADEON VE EMBM:

Battle Zone II:

Matrox Millennium G550	ATI RADEON VE

3DMark 2001:

Matrox Millennium G550	ATI RADEON VE

Besides, according to Matrox G550 specifications, it should support anisotropic filtering. The reality appeared totally different. This support was either not implemented at all, or led to such a dramatic performance drop, that the developers decided not to enable it in the driver, just in case

Hopefully, better optimized drivers will eventually help to improve all these bugs, and the 3D performance will go up, too. But still, the 3D core of Matrox G550 doesn't have much to be proud of.

Conclusion

Matrox Millennium G550, a new series of dual-display graphics cards, proves to be more convenient than the G450 series thanks to its digital display support.

HeadCasting is an interesting technology. Both the idea and implementation are good, but we cannot say for sure whether it will become really popular.

We are completely satisfied with G550 2D quality, though its 3D core is obviously poorer than that of ATI RADEON VE and NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400.

Please, mind the fact that both ATI RADEON VE and NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 are "lite" versions of high-performance gaming chips enhanced with multi-display support. Matrox G550 in its turn has evolved from G450, which is an originally "office", not gaming chip. So, Matrox Millennium G550 is good for work, but it's no game wizard.

Highs:

• Multi-display support;
• HeadCasting support (a potentially popular technology);
• Excellent 2D quality;
• Digital display support;
• TV-Out;
• Quality mounting.

Lows:

• Poor 3D performance;
• Inadequate EMBM work;
• Ill-optimized drivers;
• Too high price.