#g400

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...

Like many gamers of a certain vintage mentioning DOS, Windows 98 or Windows XP will allow us to recall our favourite games and memories from the time

I am lucky enough to own quite a nice collection of retro hardware and games that I've built up slowly over the years. However a gap in my continuum of classics was during the Pentium III era.

I recently came across a sensibily priced PIII based Dell on eBay and decided to pull the trigger

Unfortunately due to the age of the machine the front panel was very brittle and needed some repair. Thankfully I had some plastic glue on hand after needed to repair my Trinitron monitor base recently.

The machine came running Windows XP which I felt was a bit too ambitious and not very period authentic. So I installed Windows 98SE along with swapping out the video card for a Matrox G400

I actually bought a Matrox G400 for my work computer back in 2000 as it allowed me to use dual monitors - which was a very rare thing in those days. It features a very fast RAMDAC allowing for high refresh rates and resolutions along with industry leading image clarity for the time.

Another reason for putting together this machine was to allow me to play some of my favourite Aureal A3D games. For those who don't know, this was a strong competitor to Creative Labs sound cards by providing the ability to simulate 3D environments in hardware on the card enabling very accurate 3D audio to be delivered.

Sadly Creative Labs crushed them not with superior technology, but just their sheer weight

Anyway, one such game I have fond memories of using this card with was Thief. So after adding the audio card, that game was also installed

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