Matrox has been developing high performance video hardware for a while now and have grown accustomed to racking up the awards. But a few years back, when the whole 3D accelerator war started, they were left out in the cold with their feature lacking, slow performing Matrox Mystique and later their m3D (based on the PCX 2 chip from VideoLogic). However they got back in the race with their G200 which was released just over a year ago. The G200 wasn't the fastest kid on the block but impressed hardware reviewers and consumers alike with its superb visual quality and for the time, high performance true color rendering, and of course it offered stellar performance and quality in an area where Matrox has never fallen short, 2D.

Now that the G400 is actually shipping, it's time for us to take a look at what it has to offer. In this review we've chosen to compare it to the Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 TNT2 Ultra (default clocked at 175/183MHz), which is the G400's closest rival in terms of features, performance and price.

The G400 board we tested came fitted with 32MB of high-speed SGRAM (166Mhz), a 300Mhx RAMDAC, and a core clock of 125Mhz. Now 125Mhz might not sound like much but the G400 puts it to good use as our benchmarks, found later on in this review, will show.

The G400 architecture is based on the previous G200 architecture but adds a more optimized "3D Rendering Array Processor", a 256bit dual bus (there was a 128bit dual bus on the G200) and a second rendering pipeline to enable two pixels per clock. The G400 also supports AGP 2x and 4x and Multi-threaded Bus Mastering for optimum performance and comes with improved VCQ2 rendering technology to ensure even more vibrant colors than it's predecessor. The G400 also has excellent support for Windows via a highly optimized and feature rich 2D core, it supports a whole host of video features for excellent MPEG2/Video playback, scaling and so on.

In terms of performance the 125Mhz G400 has a peek fill rate of some 250Mpps and is capable of showing a few million triangles on screen per second just as we've come to expect from today's video accelerators.