The benchmarks show the GA-MG400 falling far behind the GA-660 Plus in both Normal and High Quality modes at all resolutions in Quake III Arena. While we expected the GA-MG400 to come in second, we were surprised by the size of gulf between the two cards. In our experience, Matrox G400 powered cards tend to perform better than that. One the positive side, the GA-MG400 had little performance drop going from 16-bit to 32-bit color.

A little bit of searching turned up the probable culprit for the speed gap and kaleidoscope effect. The current GA-MG400 driver, version 1.0, is a version 5.26.021 Matrox PowerDesk driver modified by Gigabyte. Unfortunately, Matrox PowerDesk driver is version 5.41.008. So the Gigabyte driver is several months out of date. Since then, Matrox has improved their driver compatibility and speed significantly. We have seen the kaleidoscope effect before at higher resolutions, but not with current drivers. To make things even worse for the GA-MG400, Gigabyte does not include Matrox's recent TurboGL driver, which gives a significant boost to OpenGL scores in certain games like Quake III Arena. This double whammy caps the GA-MG400's 3D performance in the knees. When we loaded on Matrox's own drivers, things went smoothly until we rebooted, at which point we were greeted with a machine that could only boot to Windows 98 in Safe Mode. In other words, they don't work.

And to add insult to injury, the GA-MG400's current drivers would not work properly, or even close to properly, with 3DMark 2000. The helicopter test somehow not only managed a Timothy Leary color scheme; it had a strobe light effect as well. It was quite the magical mystery helicopter tour. Afterwards we loaded up on the vitamin C, but as a benchmark it was useless. So instead of running 3DMark 2000, we ran...