Matrox Mystique G200

• Intel Pentium II 400 on an ABIT BX6 Motherboard

• 64MB PC100 SDRAM

• Western Digital 5.1GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive

• AOpen 32X IDE CD-ROM Drive

• Windows 98 with all of the latest patches/drivers installed

The Super7 Test System AnandTech used was configured as follows:

• AMD K6-2/300, Cyrix M-II 300, Intel Pentium MMX 233 on an Iwill XA-100 Motherboard

• 64MB PC100 SDRAM

• Western Digital 5.1GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive

• AOpen 32X IDE CD-ROM Drive

• Windows 98 with all of the latest patches/drivers installed

The benchmark suite consisted of the following full version game titles

• Forsaken - Running the Nuke Demo

• Turok Dinosaur Hunter run with the '-benchmark' option

• Quake 2 v3.14 using Demo1.dm2 and Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs Crusher.dm2 demo

Ziff Davis' Winbench 98 was also used to test 2D performance

VSYNC was disabled during AnandTech's tests and was done so by using the following procedure:

Using the Windows 98 Registry Editor click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then Software, then Matrox, then Current Settings and add the following string value with a value of 0 (use a value of 1 to enable VSync): Flip On Vblank

Thanks to Craig from AnandTech Network Affiliate Cyrellis for pointing that out to me.

As you can tell, on the high end of things the G200 isn't the world's best Quake 2 competitor courtesy of the slow D3D Wrapper that was provided with the card.  Once the OpenGL ICD is released expend that G200 bar to come within 10 fps of the RivaTNT's performance under Quake 2.

Just edging out the i740 in terms of performance (not to mention image quality), the Pentium II 233 scores reveal that the G200's performance isn't all that bad in comparison to the TNT and especially not the i740 on the low end.  If you're looking for the worst case scenario benchmarks under Quake 2, then the Crusher.dm2 scores provide just that as they give you an impression of how poorly the card can perform.

In Direct3D the G200 is starting to give the Voodoo2 and the Riva TNT a run for the money, especially considering the $130 - $150 price range of the 8MB G200 and the superb image quality.

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