Millennium G450 Specs

Although many of the specs of the G450 don't stray too far from the G400, there are some notable changes.

The G450's front side

Roll that die

The G450 has been built around a smaller die of 0.18 micron, instead of 0.25 micron. Similar to the die-shrinking manufacturing that is done for processors, a die-shrink for the video chipset can yield several benefits. Firstly, the G450 consumes less power, which correlates to the fact that the G450 does not run too hot. In fact, the G450 has no fan; it only has a heatsink. Secondly, a 0.18 die process is a more efficient manufacturing process in terms of how much material is used. Hopefully over the course of manufacturing thousands and thousands of cards, this cost savings is passed along to the consumer's bottom line, which is how much the G450 costs! Finally, the die-shrink allows Matrox to integrate quite a few new things onto the G450, that weren't integrated features on the G400.

DDR = Dance Dance Revolution

Another feature that can be noted immediately is the memory on the card. The G450 has 32 MB of SDRAM. However, the G450 is using DDR (double data rate) SDRAM instead of the SDR (single data rate) SDRAM that the G400 cards were using. This is coupled with a reduction in the memory bus. The memory bus used to be 128-bit, but now has been reduced to 64-bit. However, by using DDR SDRAM, the 64-bit memory bus should function as a 128-bit bus.

Here is a chart showcasing some of the key features:

0.18 micron die

256-bit DualBus architecture

64-bit DDR/SDR external bus to frame buffer memory

Full AGP 4X with multi-threaded bus mastering

Support for AGP 1X, 2X, and 4X

Integrated second RAMDAC

Integrated TMDS transmitter

32MB 6ns DDR SDRAM

Hardware support for Environment Mapped Bump Mapping

Vibrant Color Quality2 (VCQ2) rendering

Matrox DualHead Display Technology

High speed primary 360MHz RAMDAC with UltraSharp RAMDAC technology

Primary display resolution up to 2048x1536x32-bit

Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic filtering

Symmetric Rendering Architecture

32-bit Z-buffer including 8-bit stencil buffer

Speed indeed

Matrox has a reputation for being tight-lipped about the clock speeds of their video cards. The G450 is no exception. Using a variety of video utilities, it seems pretty likely that the core speed is running at 125 MHz. This is the same as the G400 card, which is a bit surprising, considering that the core has not increased in speed. We will have to verify this. Additionally, the Hyundai SDRAM on the card is rated at 6 ns. The math on the nanosecond rating would indicate 166 MHz. Again, this is the same as the G400, but slower than the 5 ns rated RAM on the G400 MAX, which was clocked at 200 MHz.