Matrox Millennium G450

Final Words

The G450 is by no means a savior for Matrox, instead it's simply protecting a territory that they have worked so very hard to acquire.

It is very simple to compare the G450 to NVIDIA's GeForce2 MX and say that the latter is the clear winner, however the two chips are most definitely geared towards different audiences.

For 3D performance, that includes gaming performance as well as high end 3D rendering, CAD, etc... the GeForce2 MX is a clearly superior solution to the Matrox G450. The G450, which will begin shipping this month, provides performance below that of cards that began shipping over a year ago. The GeForce2 MX, on the other hand, with its powerful T&L unit that can truly come in hand in professional OpenGL applications does nothing but offer the best performance possible at that price.

And while NVIDIA's TwinView is a step in the right direction, it lacks the maturity and the flexibility of Matrox's DualHead. Only recently was TwinView supported by NVIDIA with the Detonator3 drivers, and even then the support only comes under Windows 9x/2000, there is seemingly no TwinView support for Linux users. Matrox has historically had solid Linux drivers, and later on this week we will be taking a look at support for the G450 under Linux to illustrate a commonly overlooked area that Matrox has been excelling in quite well.

As far as functionality goes, Matrox's DualHead is superior to what we have seen thus far from NVIDIA with their TwinView. NVIDIA will most likely continue to improve TwinView so that one day it may be just as feature-filled as what Matrox is currently offering, but then we raise a question of when.

So if you want the performance today, you go to NVIDIA, and if you want the features offered by DualHead, the Millennium G450 is the perfect solution for those that felt the Millennium G400 was a bit too expensive just for multi-monitor support.