Introduction
While there was a lot of noise from Videologic and NVIDIA about their upcoming new wonder 3D chips and while nobody really remembers anymore what NVIDIA’s RIVA ZX chip was for again, while the PC market place seems to be in some kind of recession, while the poor users out there are looking for clues on which CPU or 3D card to buy, while some graphic chip manufacturers seem to slowly disappear and while I was for a short moment taking my eyes away from 3D stuff back to CPUs and motherboards, while …. well nobody really expected it anymore … , Matrox suddenly reappeared out of 3D Nirvana with what they think a 2D/3D graphic chip has to be like. They are calling this new baby ‘G200’, what a pathetic name for a chip that is meant to get Matrox back into the big news.
Now a preview of a new 3D graphic chip on Tom’s Hardware Guide wouldn’t be done by me if I wouldn’t be convinced that you want to know how it compares to the rest of the gang. Hence all major and well performing 3D chips for AGP were tested again and Tekram threw in a RIVA ZX board, so that we can start remembering this chip as well.
Let’s quickly remember what’s currently state of the art in the 2D/3D arena. The best 2D performance so far was delivered from 3DLabs with the Permedia2 and good old Matrox and their Millennium II. Whilst the Permedia 2 offers a good OpenGL performance for professional applications under NT and some kind of 3D gaming abilities, the Millennium II was quite a disappointment when it first appeared, simply due to it’s almost complete lack in decent 3D abilities. However, the Millennium II had and has still its fans, as it is pretty much the only 2D card still that offers a very good picture quality for big monitors at highest resolutions and true color. The Permedia2 is already getting out of breath when reaching 1280×1024, because in this mode you can forget true color already, due to the cheaper SGRAM it’s using. The picture quality of the Permedia2 is also unable to satisfy owners of 21 or 24″ monitors and even Number Nine’s Ticket to Ride chip can’t beat the Millennium’s 250 MHz external RAMDAC and its quality.
In the 3D field the fronts are clear. ‘Voodoo2 over everything’ is what it sounds from everywhere, but not everyone is willing or able to spend a lot of money for an add-on card with 3Dfx’s famous Voodoo2 chip, so that there’s a lot of room for other companies to play. In this field there’s currently quite a mess, NVIDIA’s RIV128, Intel’s i740, ATI’s Rage Pro Turbo and Rendition’s Verite 2×00 are fighting for customers and the people who are willing to buy one of these 2D/3D solutions don’t really know who to believe, since there are too many different things to consider. Matrox will enter this market with the G200 in June, but they don’t want to add to the mess, they want to clear the fronts by showing who’s really boss in this field. This takes more than quantity in form of high frame rates, it also takes a lot more quality than what we used to see in 3D gaming. G200 is supposed to deliver all that and if the price is right it may bring Matrox back into big business.
I want to give an overview over the 2D/3D or 3D chips that are currently available on the market, including the ones that will be available soon and also not forgetting what is coming a couple of months down the road. There will be a quick 2D evaluation and a larger 3D gaming evaluation. As soon as I will get NT drivers for the G200 I will add NT and professional OpenGL application performance as well.
2D Performance
The office application performance of modern graphics cards is not as important as it used to be anymore. The office application performance of graphics cards as well as CPUs has nowadays reached a level that is higher than what the average user requires. The CPU as well as the graphical subsystem are today mainly busy waiting for a user input, the user is rarely waiting for the CPU or graphics cards anymore. Hence the pure Winstone score doesn’t really say it all anymore. What *is* important for people who sit in front of their screen a lot however is the quality of what they are looking at. What counts here is the speed and quality of the RAMDAC as well as the speed of the video RAM, which directly translates into the highest resolution at true color.
Let’s first have a look at the Winstone 98 results:
System:
- Supermicro P6DBS BX Pentium II motherboard
- Intel Pentium II Deschutes CPU @ 400 MHz
- IBM DHEA-36480 IDE HDD, Intel bus master drivers 3.01
- 64 MB SDRAM Corsair PC100
- Windows 95 OSR 2.1 w/USB supplement
- screen mode 1024×768, 32 bit color, 85 Hz refresh rate
Drivers:
- NVIDIA RIVA 128 and RIVA ZX 4.10.01.0242
- Intel i740, Real3D Starfighter, 4.10.01.0189
- ATI Rage Pro Turbo, 4.10.01.2318
- 3DLabs Permedia 2, Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro, 4.10.01.2255 – 0198
- Matrox G200, 4.10.01.4000
- Matrox Productiva G100 and Millennium II, 4.10.01.3820
The leaders in 2D are the Fire GL 1000 Pro and the G200. Although the expectations were asking for a new miracle, the G200 2D performance is at the top level of current 2D performance, not above it. However the 2D picture quality is far from what the Fire GL 1000 Pro can deliver as are the supported screen resolutions at true color. Please also don’t forget that the G200 is still in beta.
3D Performance
When I am talking of 3D performance right now I mean 3D gaming performance. Most of you certainly know why I don’t believe in 3D Winbench anymore, so that I am using four different current 3D games for my 3D performance evaluation instead. Acclaim’s Forsaken, Rage’s Incoming, Acclaim’s Turok and Id’s Quake II were run with each card at two different resolutions with two different CPUs to get the idea of what the 3D performance of each chip is like. Unfortunately there wasn’t an OpenGL driver for the G200 ready for testing yet, so that we’ll have to wait on the G200’s Quake II evaluation until Matrox sends one over to me. Please remember that the G200 is still beta, so the results can and most likely will still improve.
ForsakenMark Results
Incoming Frame Rates
Quake II Massive1 Frame Rates
Turok TMark
Overall Results
The overall result for each card running in a Pentium II 400 system, weighing each benchmark equally looks like this:
As you can see, the G200 scores 84% of a Voodoo2 chip and leads far ahead of every other current 2D/3D chip. Using slower CPU’s makes the G200 look even better, which you will realize when you have a look at these two charts:
You can see that the G200 doesn’t gain that much from a CPU faster than a Pentium II 233, this means also that it doesn’t lose a lot from its score with a Pentium II 400, so that with a Pentium II 233 the G200 scores well over 90% of the Voodoo2. We should also not forget that the G200 is at a pretty high level already, which is a lot of good news for owners of slower CPUs as well. However, it will mean that there won’t be much of a gain in frame rates with CPUs faster than a Pentium II 400, unless the game is very complex and hence depending more on the CPU than on the 3D accelerator.
One of the down sides of the G200, if you wish, is it’s decrease in performance when switching to a higher resolution.
The decrease in frame rate is higher than what a single Voodoo2 or an i740 produce. The extremely low result of the dual Voodoo2 SLI configuration is mainly due to ‘clipping’, simply because the CPU can’t deliver enough data to feed two Voodoo2 cards, so that higher resolutions are running at almost the same frame rate.
3D Quality
Now the frame rate alone doesn’t really tell us the real deal. What’s also required is a good 3D quality to go with a good frame rate. If you want to have a look at screen shots before you read my own opinion about it, please look here:
Screen Shots of RAGE’s Incoming
Please take a close look at two areas, the smoke cloud over the cooling towers and chimneys and the sky in the background. If the smoke isn’t displayed properly, you can either see a strange rastering or colors other than the white that it should be. If you can see a lot of banding of the background sky you can see that the rendering wasn’t done very well.
You cannot see each detail due to the fact that these pictures are JPEGs, hence compressed. If you want to see the real deal, you will have to download the uncompressed BMP file to see all details.
Matrox G200
It’s pretty obvious when you look at the all the pictures, the G200 shows by far the best quality in Incoming. If you have a look at the BMP file you won’t see any banding of the sky at all, the clouds will be white and hardly rastered at all. The trick with the smooth sky is due to the 32 bit rendering of the G200, which then is converted to 16 bit color by dithering. Rendering in 16 bit in the first place cannot offer such a good result. Unfortunately does this version of Incoming not support anti-aliasing, so that the G200 can’t show its abilities here. You can see the ugly saw like appearance of the chimneys due to the lack of this feature.
3Dfx Voodoo2
The days when 3Dfx was the leader in 3D quality are over. In some games the i740 is already looking better than Voodoo2, now the G200 doesn’t only offer a better 3d quality, it also offers competitive frame rates. Back to the picture: The rendering of the sky is done pretty well, however the smoke clouds can’t really impress me.
Intel i740
For some strange reason the Starfighter is giving a green glare to the smoke clouds. The sky shows some obvious banding as well.
3DLabs Permedia 2
The Permedia 2 is showing some quite impressing image quality actually, slight banding of the sky, slight rastering of the clouds. If it only weren’t that slow running incoming on a Permedia 2.
ATI Rage Pro Turbo
We are getting to the bottom area of the 3D image quality. The Rage Pro can’t convince with it’s strong banding of the sky and the ugly clouds. It’s not running fast either …
NVIDIA RIVA 128 and RIVA ZX
The ugliest in this comparison is definitely NVIDIA’s RIVA. not only that the clouds look like rainbows and the banding of the horizon is horrible, but the green lines of the HUD are extremely blurry as well. RIVA may be pretty fast amongst its competitors, but the image quality is pretty much the poorest around nowadays. Please don’t forget that the RIVA ZX offers the same quality as RIVA 128.
Screen Shot’s of Quake II
The OpenGL driver for the G200 isn’t ready yet, so that I couldn’t run Quake II on the MGA-G200 yet. Matrox is working on a OpenGL ICD though and it will hopefully be finished before cards with this chip will hit the shelfs in June 98.
The real question currently is if there’s anything that is better or faster than Voodoo2 in Quake II. At the moment I’ve got to answer with a clear ‘no’, although the i740 already looks better in Quake, particularly at 1024×768. However it’s pretty much unplayable at this resolution with the i740.
The screen shots were taken from the to multi players well known Tokay’s Tower level, a good level for heavy slaughtering.
Please have a close look at the floor of the level where the player stands on, especially where the far grenade lies.If MIP-mapping works properly, you shouldn’t see a chaos of different colored pixels. Also look at the two corridors you can see to spot a serious difference between the contenders, again due to MIP-mapping. The inner walls of the tower also show some serious difference, that’s what looks pretty horrible with the Voodoo2 at 1024×768 actually.
Intel i740
Real3D is currently the only manufacturer of i740 boards that come with an OpenGL ICD for Windows 95, the others will have to play Quake II under NT. The quality is better than what Voodoo2 has to offer, particularly at a resolution of 1024×768. Alas even a Pentium II 400 isn’t powerful enough to reach playable frame rates at this high resolution with an i740. Anyway, the i740 is showing the way, the MGA-G200 will follow it … the times when 3Dfx was the leader in 3D quality are definitely over, at least for now.
3Dfx Voodoo2
It’s pretty obvious, Quake II still looks very good on a Voodoo2.
3DLabs Permedia 2
The Permedia 2 seems to lack of color a bit, making it look a little odd in the comparison. The corridors and the walls look pretty alright, the floor of the level seems a little bit chaotic in the background though.
ATI Rage Pro Turbo
The picture of the Rage Pro, taken with the beta2 version of ATI’s OpenGL driver, looks a lot better than what the first beta had to offer. However, please compare the corridors to the picture of the i740 above. What a difference!
NVIDIA RIVA 128 and RIVA ZX
Mister Ugly is again NVIDIA’s RIVA chip. At least it can deliver pretty decent frame rates, but please what do you think of the tower walls, the corridors and the ladder ? Doesn’t it look horrible compared to the i740 picture?
Conclusion
As already said, unfortunately there isn’t an OpenGL driver ready for the G200 yet. However, from what I saw in all the games I’ve tested, G200 beats every 3D chip currently available and this includes Voodoo2. The 32 bit rendering capabilities of the G200 as well as the abilities of full scene anti-aliasing, which is not supported by any game I know yet, easily beat the hell out of the 3D abilities of any actual 3D accelerator. The RIVA still doesn’t look too great, the ATI is pretty much the same but slower, the Permedia 2’s 3D performance is that low that nobody even cares about its 3D quality and even the i740 doesn’t live up to the standards of the G200. Voodoo2 is fast, but the lack of several 3D features can be noticed and it’s only a question of weeks to months until it won’t be the quality leader in Quake II as well anymore.
