I recently put together a Pentium III era machine with a Matrox G400 graphics card and Aureal Vortex 2 sound card.

For a short time Matrox went head to head with NVIDIA and 3dfx via their RIVA TNT2 and Voodoo 3 cards respectively.

From looking at the reviews from the time you can see it was a very close race.

I used a Matrox G400 in my work computer back in 2000, but I'd never used it for 3D gaming so I was excited to explore it's abilities.

I thought I'd start with some Matrox tech demos, which made me fondly remember the era where hardware companies typically made such things to highlight the unique features of their cards.

For instance the G400 featured environment-mapped bump mapping in hardware, which no other cards at the time featured.

Unfortunately the reef demo refused to work, as it didn't seem to detect the configuration of my monitor correctly. I tried manually editing the settings file, but I wasn't able to get it to run.

Thankfully the next tech demo did run and showed off the bump mapping support, which would have been very impressive to witness 20 years ago.

But how powerful are the 3D capabilities of the G400? Let's run the Final Reality benchmark to find out

I think the card and machine is general is actually a little too powerful for this benchmark, but from pure nostalgia I always enjoy running it.

So I moved on to 3DMark 99 which is from the correct era and little more demanding

It was nice to enjoy the bump mapping tests which I thought still looked impressive today. Is that 3DMark score good? Ah, that's synthetic benchmarks for you.

So how does the card manage when playing actual games? I installed Solider of Fortune to find out

Although the game runs smoothly, there is some artifacting at times such as the floor flashing black which can be quite distracting.

This does leave me wondering if I should continue with the G400 or try one of it's competitors from the time.

I ordered some case stickers from Geekenspiel to give me an alternative 3D card option...

3DMark2001 is a relic from the golden age of PC 3D gaming

Graphics cards (i.e. GPUs) are mind bogglingly more powerful now than 20 years ago, however I found the late 90's and early 2000's era to be a far more interesting period of graphics history to live through.

Going hand in hand with this period of furious innovation and experimental in 3D graphics was the benchmarking software.

Certainly you could and should run your Quake time demo, along with Unreal Tournament and other era appropriate games. However every gamer at the time was likely also familiar with the 3DMark series of benchmarks.

These were preceded by the Final Reality benchmark, but it was with 3DMark that this series hit it's stride.

If you watch (or have already seen) the demo above I hope you'll twig The Matrix reference and the Max Payne vibe.

This is due to 3DMark being created by Remedy, formed by a group of demo scene developers who then went on to create Max Payne, Alan Wake and Control. All graphical powerhouses of games.

Perhaps this is why the obvious joy of playing with the sheer raw power graphics cards of the day offer is obvious when watching the 3DMark benchmarks.

The benchmark element is almost a side-benefit of a series of explorations of the new gaming worlds that were then just becoming possible to create on computers of the era.