Gigabyte GA-MG400 Matrox G400 AGP

Vibrant Color Quality2

Taken from our G400 & G400MAX Review

One of the most marketable features the G200 carried was its Vibrant Color Quality (VCQ) rendering, interestingly enough, VCQ isn't really a technology at all, rather a system Matrox defined. The G400, naturally, is back with a new "version" of VCQ rightfully entitled Vibrant Color Quality2 (VCQ2). VCQ2 offers the same advantages the original VCQ rendering system offered, which was basically the ability to render all scenes with 32-bit accuracy internally, then dither the final image down to 16 bits of color per pixel. This gave Matrox the best looking 16-bit rendering available at the time, needless to say that the G400 renders all scenes internally with 32-bit accuracy and then dithers them to 16 bits of color per pixel provided that you are set to render in 16-bit color mode.

If you're not running in 16-bit mode, then you have the option of enabling what Matrox likes to call VCQ2. Basically VCQ2 is a combination of a 32-bit color mode, a 32-bit Z-Buffer, and the same 32-bit accuracy performed with all internal calculations. This combination provides for the absolute best possible visual experience available in a game, unfortunately for Matrox, the G400 isn't the only chipset with this capability. The NVIDIA Riva TNT2 is also capable of achieving the same image quality in this case, the only limiting factor here is the design of the board and the RAMDAC which will make the picture look somewhat (albeit barely noticeable) less crisp as that of a G400. Matrox also boasts support for what is known as Stencil Buffering, or the ability to render only the visible part of a scene, a performance booster in ideal cases.

Matrox can't claim that they're 100% unique with the idea behind VCQ2, but since the term is copyrighted, they can always claim that no other company has VCQ2. Bottom line? Don't get fooled by the marketing, you're not getting anything special with VCQ2, NVIDIA has had this for a while now.