G400 and Quake 3

Why does dual head matter?

Now, this dualhead business may or may not be impressive at first, but it also has implications for gaming. Matrox had a demonstration of a flight simulator running that supported dual displays. On one monitor was the usual in-game cockpit view of a plane in flight. On the second monitor the game displayed two windows - one showed a map of the flight plan the plane was on and the second showed a third person camera of the plane in flight! Such technology could have real implications for other games as well. I can imagine an RTS where the “mini map” isn’t so mini anymore. Seeing how expensive displays are, it probably isn’t likely to catch on and proliferate that well though.

Expendable with bump mapping

G400 and Quake 3

Bah bah, technology, how well does it play Quake 3? Matrox did have one station set up with Quake 3 test (purportedly an older build than the one everyone else has) setup. The board was a G400 Max I think (someone told me G400 regular, another person told me G400 Max), powered by a P3 500. The box was running Quake 3 at 1024 x 768 with 32 bit color and everything on. I was pleased to see that it ran at a very playable framerate. When they weren’t looking I turned on cg_drawfps and noticed that the rate hovered right around 30-40 fps or so. Interpolating from Brian Hook’s framerate tests, I could tell that at the very least, the G400 Max will be competitive with the Voodoo 3 and TNT2 in terms of frame rates. It's too bad that the machine was not hooked up to another Q3 machine - it's the battles where the real stress testing takes place.

And without bump mapping

Open GL with the card

Matrox representatives stressed that a full Open GL ICD would ship with the card, and that the one I was looking at was merely a beta. My take is that if they can make even further framerate improvements to what I saw, then there’s no doubt in my mind that the G400 Max will be a legitmate competitor with 3dfx and NVIDIA’s offerings. With the added value of environmental bump mapping and dual head technology, it's logical for people to start taking Matrox seriously as a real giant in the 3D gaming industry.