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The Specifications Spin
Well, the hardware is certainly no slouch, but what does this mean to you? The chipset can only support up to 32 MB of RAM onboard, and the memory pathways are only 64 bits wide, so the performance will be limited by memory bandwidth. Matrox hasn't really designed this card to be a 3D monster, however, so they took certain sacrifices in the design of the card to decrease costs and improve 2D performance in other areas. Nonetheless, the chip supports hardware-accelerated Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping, Vertex Skinning, a 32-bit Z-buffer, and trilinear and anisotropic texture mapping. However, the chip is clearly lacking hardware texturing and lighting. It may not be the fastest chip on the market, but she at least draws very pretty pictures.
Matrox also claims to have the industry's best DVD decoding with DVDmax. This will be a pretty strong comment in today's market however, with Matrox's arch-nemesis ATI making beautiful waves with its Radeon chipset. Matrox will have some pretty big shoes to fill with a statement like this, and I'm excited to see what Matrox has to offer us.
Matrox's key field has always been excellent 2D. What's that, you ask? Well, Matrox's cards have always been known to have superior image quality in even the highest of resolutions at 32-bit color. What's more, the G550 is twice as powerful, being able to supply the same image quality to two different monitors at the same time. Matrox was first to market with a multi-monitor solution, and the concept has since been "innovated" by other companies, such as NVIDIA and its TwinView. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, of course, and hopefully more cards in the future will not only implement this feature, but make indisposable use of it as well.
One final note of comment on these specifications is the operating system support. While newer cards support newer OSes, they often neglect support for legacy operating systems, since, obviously, nobody uses them anymore. Businesses don't always have this option, however. Sometimes you have that one key application that makes your entire department come together, and it just won't work in Windows 98. The corporate system wins out again, with a nex-gen card that still respects the needs of businesses. Matrox has also committed Linux driver support with the G550, which is clearly an excellent step. One is hopeful, of course, that Matrox will work together with its customers in developing open-source drivers, but even if not, giving official support for Linux demonstrates Matrox's commitment to corporate users who wish to implement Linux on their work systems. If Matrox were to take advantage of this opportunity with an open market, they could also tweak their drivers and deliver support for Solaris, IRIX, and other flavors of everyone's favorite non-Microsoft OS.
The heart of the matter - Matrox's G550 video processor
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