Most of you want a graphic card that performs well in 2D
and in the same time has great 3D performance. Most cards only perform really well in
either 2D or 3D so a while ago the only way to get both great 2D and 3D performance was to
get 2 different cards. But the Millenium G200 from Matrox is different from most cards as
it is supposed to handle both 3D and 2D well according to Matrox. So I decided to take a
look at the card and see if this is true or not.
A year ago there was only one card that a home user could get for a reasonable price if
he was looking for a card that performed excellent in 2D. This was the Matrox Millenium
and also after that it was the Matrox Millenium II. Now has some manufactures made cards
that can compare with the Millenium II and there is even cards out there that beat the
Millenium II at 2D performance. So the only thing for Matrox to do was to release a new
card that perform better then the cards that are out on the market at this moment. So what
did then Matrox come up with? Well they invented a chip called MGA G200. This chip is used
in both the Millenium G200 and the Mystique G200. The Millenium G200 was intended for
business users and the Mystique G200 for home users and the gaming freak.
So what is then the difference between the two cards? If we take a first look at the
cards so can we see that the Mystique G200 has support for a TV-Output but it has only got
a RAMDAC at 230Mhz and SDRAM for the video memory. The Millenium G200 has a RAMDAC at
250Mhz and the TV-Output has probably been removed here to compensate the higher cost of
the 250Mhz RAMDAC. But I don’t really think that this does any harm to the normal
user. Actually how many really use their TV-Output for more then just the testing to see
if it works or not. Not many I think. The Millenium G200 also has SGRAM to boost the
performance even a bit further.
