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Matrox G-550 Graphics Card - Review

John McIver

The Matrox G-550 DualHead is a later, and slightly lower cost version of the popular Matrox G-450 graphics card. Despite the lower price, the performance is claimed to be slightly improved over that of the G-450. The "DualHead" designation refers to the card's ability to independently drive two separate monitors at the same time.

The graphics board itself is implemented as a single, small AGP card. The board is dominated by a large graphics processor chip, hidden under a substantial aluminium heat sink. Unlike similar boards this one does not have a cooling fan fitted. There are two monitor connectors on the card, one being a standard 15 pin VGA connector and the other a square DVI digital connector. To attach to a second monitor this DVI connector can be fitted with a small adapter (supplied with the card) to convert it to another 15 pin VGA output. The board tested was fitted with 32 megabytes of DDR memory.

Installation

Supporting software is supplied on a single CD disk. When the CD is inserted into a CD-ROM drive (assuming "Autorun" is enabled in Windows) it will automatically look for the presence of a Matrox graphics card in the computer.

The normal procedure for installing a new video card in an existing computer system is to first set the graphics driver to be a standard Windows VGA one, then power down the system and replace the graphics card. On powering the system up again, Windows should detect this hardware change.

In the case of the Matrox card this process was followed. The system restarted using the standard VGA driver, then the supplied Matrox driver CD was installed. It autostarted and detected the presence of the Matrox card, initiating the driver/software installation process. The setup process then ran without any problem.

Display Properties screen with the Matrox dual screen (DuaHead) configuration.

This installed the driver, a copy of Matrox PowerDesk (a useful utility program for managing several aspects of the graphics software) and Microsoft DirectX 8.0. A number of other software items could also be optionally installed, including on-line documentation.

Operation

With the card running successfully some real-time OpenGL programs were tested. Initially there appeared to be problems with both the DirectX and OpenGL drivers. Although the necessary files for both were present on the review computer, they were obviously not being used by the card when running the real-time applications. Matrox techical support indicated these should have become active immediately upon installation, and their suggestion was to obtain a more up to date set of drivers from the Matrox web site, if they were available.

A little more playing around, before resorting to obtaining later drivers, found the problem. The hardware OpenGL acceleration only takes effect when the card is running with 16-bit or 32-bit colour depths. When using 24-bit colour, as we had been, the hardware acceleration is not available.

With this problem addressed, the card performed well in real-time replay of rendered images. It was found during further testing the card ran noticably faster in 16-bit mode than 32-bit mode, for OpenGL applications.

DualHead settings screen, showing the available options.

Testing in 3D Studio MAX 3.1 with the internal DirectX drivers, we found that setting 24-bit colour for the display caused 3D Studio to object to the DirectX drivers, though everything worked fine in 16 and 32 bit colour.

Performance

Our basic test procedures have been summarised in another document. <link to VTEST.TXT>

The card was tested in a Pentium III (833 megahertz) computer system, fitted with 256 megabytes of system memory.

For the Matrox G-550 using the supplied Matrox drivers, replay rates in the "Vampire" real-time simulation program (using OpenGL) were;

• 60 to 80 fps in 32-bit colour in partial screen window

• 70 to 90 fps in 16-bit colour in partial screen window

• 50 to 70 fps in full screen (1024 x 768 in 16-bit colour) 

• 45 to 55 fps in full screen (1024 x 768 in 32-bit colour) 

(Note: "fps" here is frames per second)

The display quality was good, though there were some very minor incorrect colour effects visible in part of the replay.

In 3D Studio MAX 3.1 the display quality and performance were very good, with no visible difference between the Heidi, OpenGL and DirectX drivers, apart from the issue already mentioned that 24-bit colour didn't work with DirectX or OpenGL.

To give some guidance as to what this means in terms of relative performance, this card was very slightly slower than an Nvidia GeForce card for the "Vampire" demontration program when it was running in a partial Window, but slightly faster when running full screen. Overall, the 3D graphics processing power of the Matrox G-550 and a GeForce card would be very similar.

Dual Monitors

The DualHead technology is one of the more impressive features of this card. The ability to make practical use of two separate monitors is a great feature. Even if the second monitor is only an old low resolution unit it can still be very usefully employed.

While current versions of Windows support the use of dual monitors, this requires that two separate graphics cards be fitted to the computer system. With the Matrox G-550 there is dual monitor support using only a single graphics card. The way the system is set up is very practical, with several options offered.

The second monitor can be used as additional screen real estate, as a place for floating menus, thereby keeping them off the main screen area.

DualHead "zoom" settings options.

The system can optionally be set up to offer a copy of the main screen, or a closeup view of part of the main screen. This latter arrangement, for typical 2D CAD drawing applications, should be very helpful. The ability to have a close up view of where you were picking entities in a drawing file is very useful. The view can be set to centre itself about the mouse cursor, so the magnified image will move as the mouse moves on the main screen.

All dual screen modes can be set up with a user-defined "hot key" combination so the display can be easily enabled or disabled at any time.

Overall, DualHead is a great feature from Matrox, which is both very practical and well implemented with the G-550.

Conclusion

In summary, the Matrox G-550 is a good quality graphics card at a reasonable price. It should be used in 16 or 32 bit colour mode for best effect and to make full use of its hardware acceleration. Running in 24-bit colour mode can effectively disable the hardware acceleration available, possibly without the operator realising it.

The hardware acceleration is very good, and on a par with a typical GeForce card, which is a slightly cheaper card to buy. 

However, for CAD applications, if a second computer monitor is available to you, the DualHead feature of the G-550 makes this more than enough reason to prefer the Matrox.

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