Matrox Millennium G550

None of the “enthusiasts” were particularly looking forward to this card. They were waiting for the G800, but something didn’t work out with it, and a little later it became clear to everyone that Matrox was leaving the bloody 3D arms race, led by that time by NVIDIA and ATI. In fact, the only difference between the G550 and the G400/G450 is the introduction of support for digital monitors: the G550 now has DVI.

 

 

Characteristics of Matrox Millennium G550

0.18 micron technology, no active cooling required
64 bit SDR/DDR interface with memory, capacity 8 - 32 MB
AGP 1x-4x
Two integrated display controllers
Two integrated RAMDACs with different characteristics:
Main RAMDAC - 360 MHz (resolution up to 2048x1536 @ 32bpp)
Optional RAMDAC - 230 MHz (resolution up to 1600x1200 @ 32bpp)
Two integrated TDMS transmitters for digital interfaces (resolution up to 1280 x 1024 @ 32bpp)
Integrated signal encoder for TV output
Core clock speed 126 MHz
Memory clock speed 166 MHz (2.5 GB per second for DDR memory)
Hardware support for overlays for playing DVDs and other video materials, including smooth transitions between frames
Hardware 2D acceleration in accordance with Windows 2000 GDI and DirectDraw 8.0 specifications
T&L with Matrix Palette Skinning support
Improved "HeadCasting™ Engine" vertex shaders (DirectX 8.0 shaders, but with the number of available constants increased from 96 to 256, allowing up to 32 matrices for skinning and vertex animation)
No pixel shaders
Two pixel pipelines with two texture units each
Bilinear, trilinear and anisotropic texture filtering
AGP texturing
EMBM embossed texture mapping
Support Windows ® XP, Windows 2000 Windows Me Windows 98 Windows 95 Windows NT® 4.0 and Linux
DirectX 8.0 and OpenGL 1.2