Matrox Millennium G450 Under Linux

Conclusions

What can we say? The cheaper NVIDIA GeForce2 MX beat the Matrox G450 in every category tested. The only redeeming value of the G450 is Dual Head. For some, that will be the killer feature that may cause you to pick the slower card for your own machine, however this probably doesn't apply to most users out there. We were extremely surprised to see the G450 lose to the GeForce2 MX in 2D performance. Given NVIDIA's stress on 3D acceleration, we did not expect to see much optimization in their drivers for 2D.

Still, the progress 3D acceleration has made under Linux in the last year is tremendous. We're looking forward to the DRI 2 and future supported products from Matrox and NVIDIA. Maybe someday you'll be able to have a three headed monster of a computer running a hardware accelerated window and file manager.

Related Links

• Matrox G450 Review - AnandTech's full review of the Matrox G450
• NVIDIA GeForce2MX Review - AnandTech's full review of the NVIDIA GeForce2MX
• Matrox - Manufacturers of the Millennium G450
• NVIDIA - Manufacturers of the GeForce2 MX
• Red Hat - Linux distribution used in these tests
• XFree86 - The X11R6.4 implementation used for these tests
• DRI - The direct rendering implementation used by XFree86
• Precision Insight - Initial designers of DRI, site includes a lot of DRI information