Matrox G400 MAX Retro Review

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[stevecps]

I used to beta test all the Matrox cards from the G200 through the Parhelia - loved those days, back when computers were proper fun!

[edsiefker]

This really is an excellent card. Stable, good 3d for the era, and highly DOS compatible. My G400 just barely out performed my Voodoo 2 SLI, with more colors. Great choice for a 98 build.

[cerevor]

The music is 200 years older. I like classical music, but nothing would make a retro video look old like the moonlight sonata.

[Astfgl]

This video made me shed a tear for Matrox. ;(

[leroyrs]

The G400 Max was awesome. Still have it. When I made an upgrade from an old Erazor II to Matrox I realized the much better 2d quality the G400 Max had. I used it for a pretty long time. Next upgrade was a Geforce 3 TI500 from Hercules.

[guspaz]

Amusingly, when I worked at Matrox, guess what videocard was in the workstation they assigned me? If you guessed a Matrox graphics card, you'd be wrong! Nope, they gave me an nVidia Quadro. This was in 2007, so it was long after Matrox was successful in the graphics card market, but it's not like we weren't still making graphics cards, the Matrox Millenium P690 came out in 2007, so they released graphics cards before, during, and after I was working there. But nope, nVidia graphics card, because apparently we didn't eat our own dogfood.

To be fair, I didn't work in the Matrox Graphics division, I worked in the Matrox Imaging division, where we made machine vision products. But still, you'd think, right? We also kind of hated the machines in the test cluster that had certain Matrox cards (like the G400 in particular), because the drivers didn't work well with VNC, which was a headache, but at least there they wanted to have a variety of configs tested, and that did include some Matrox cards.

While they fell out of the limelight, Matrox never stopped making graphics cards, they just focused more on business use. They kept making Parhelia-based cards for a while (the P-series like 2007's Millenium P690 mentioned earlier) and did a few die shrinks along the way. They kept doing that until 2008 when they released the M-Series (focused on quad display support), and in 2014 they switched to AMD GPUs on their own cards.

[OjStudios]

Matrox cards had superior 2D quality compared to Nvidia or Ati offerings. Had G450 Millenium maaaany years in use.

[dpwellman]

Matrox and ATI had traded blows for best 2D engines on the market. In the very early 1990s, any serious "workstation" class machine (x86-- not sgi, Sun, or DEC, etc) had a Matrox card. When 3D became more important, ATI was able to eventually respond to the nVidia juggernaut with R200, but Matrox Parhelia was too little too late.

[HoldandModify]

The reason you bought Matrox cards, back in the day, was for their superior image quality and 2D performance. Far before the 3D era arrived. Even then, I kept my Matrox and added a 3DFX card using the loop back connector.

[rcarkk]

I had a G400 SH 16Mb back in the day. Very good card, very competitive with the TNT2 and Voodoo 3 3000 in direct 3D. It was only slower in OGL. I have bought some Matrox cards over the years. Bought a G400 Max wich is now artifacting, then another G400 Max that is still working perfectly, one G400 DH 32MB that stopped working, and another G400 DH 32 MB, that still works perfectly. The G400 performance is very similar to the TNT2 Ultra in Direct 3D at 32bit. Very good cards indeed for 1999. I still have a Matrox Millennium II 4MB to pair with my Voodoo 2 SLI cards and a Matrox G200 8MB, that was competitive with the Voodoo 2.

[danielschoenherr]

The relative abundance might be attributed to G-405Plus Dual Heads being standard OEM on the Dell Dual PIII workstations of the day. (Win2K) Which were coming off lease right when AGP and dual high quality analog out, indeed big high res CRTs and fast wide SCSI storage were all of them ancient history. More specifically 2004 & by the pallet load. BTDT that's where all off mine came from, earlier Matrox products could be prodded into SynconGreen internally (much earlier versions like the MGA+.) Routinely ran these 1640x1280 on both sides never faster than 75hz even when the last gen CRTs could go there. I never knew about the fast RAMDAC up top all these years, so I salute you PhilsComputer

[fatcatmskru]

Huh i played Expendable too those days, deeply forgotten memories, thanks for reminding😊👍

[AceGA]

I had one of these. What a neat, if oddball card. I loved the old Matrox full page ads in PC Gamer.

[Just_a_Lad]

Ah, I forgot how awesome Expendable was. They do make games like this every once in a while for mobile platforms but not nearly good as Expendable. Such a great game.

[samthemultimediaman]

Still got my Matrox Millennium G400 Dualhead 32mb! it was my very first AGP card it played many hours of Deus EX!!

[tHeWasTeDYouTh]

Environment Mapped Bump Mapping was only used on a few games .damn what a waste. RIP Matrox. I am still waiting on the Matrox G800!

[Cybornut]

Watching your channel is like being a young kid all over again!

[cybercat]

I had this Card! Back then it was an absolute ripper

I'm 16 and listen classical music since i was 5 yo. It's the only genre that i listen today. Thanks for remembering me of these wonderful Beethoven pieces, Paul! Also, i have one Matrox G450, but i can't use it because of a break in the AGP slot which unables me to install the card on my P4 HT board.

[MaskedGEEK]

I had a G400 back in the day. Can't remember if it was dual head or not but it certainly had 32MB of VRAM. Was a great little card. My only problem I had with it was with Aliens vs Predator 2. Most of the game played fine with very good frame rates, but on the Predator's opening mission, if you changed vision mode and looked at an area where the skybox was visible the G400 would really struggle and fps would drop to the single digits. But if you looked anywhere where the skybox wasn't on screen, yeah the frame rate was fine.