Dawn of the New Millenium

Although it has a few limitations, Matrox's Millennium II offers a jump to 16 MB at a price that means business.

David Em

Rather than having to mortgage your house so you can afford to do CAD, desktop publishing, and 3-D design on your Windows NT machine, you can use Matrox Graphics' new Millennium II 64-bit MGA graphics accelerator, which offers a price/performance breakthrough. For just a fraction of the cost of a proprietary Silicon Graphics workstation or a high-end solution, such as Intergraph's RealiZm 3D, the new Millennium allows standard PCs running NT to effectively handle high-end rendering and design.

The PCI board comes i n a $299 4-MB base configuration that's upgradable to 8, 12, or 16 MB of dual-ported Window RAM (WRAM) memory. The 8-MB version outputs 24-bit, 1280- by 1024-pixel resolution at 85 Hz, and up to 1800 by 1440 pixel s in 16-bit color at 70 Hz. A 250-MHz RAMDAC provides flicker-free refresh rates at most resolutions and color rates.

At the heart of the Millennium II is Matrox's new MGA-2164W processing engine. The 2164W features faster 2-D performance and 3-D Gouraud shading through the use of full scatter/gather PCI bus mastering, which enables the graphics accelerator to process rendering commands and geometry calculations in parallel with the CPU. The engine also does both x and y full-screen video interpolation, which lets it retain full-screen quality when scaling to high resolutions.

I tested the 8-MB card on a Dell 200-MHz Pentium Pro outfitted with 32 MB of RAM. Once it's installed, the Millennium II's Monitor Control Panel lists over 250 specifi c monitor profiles to choose from. It recognized my NEC MultiSync XP21 right off the bat, but there was no profile in the database for my ultrahigh-resolution ViewSonic P815 monitor.

As a result, the P815's resolution capabilities were not immediately accessible when I connected it. I ran the card at 1280 by 1024 pixels in 24-bit color at a rock-solid refresh rate of 85 Hz, but when I tried for 1600 by 1200, the card bumped down to an unacceptable 60 Hz. After a half hour of poking around the Monitor Control Panel's deep, yet unintuitive, tweaking features, I called a Matrox technician for help. A full hour later, I finally reset the refresh rates correctly.

I had excellent results working with a variety of 2-D Windows paint and image-processing applications, including Fractal Design's Painter 4.0, Adobe Photoshop 4.0, and Macromedia's xRes 3. Screen-refresh rates and updates were exceptionally fast and hassle-free at 1280 by 1024 in 24-bit color. However, at 1600 by 1200 with 24-bit color, the 72 -Hz flicker rate becomes noticeable.

I tested double-buffered 3-D performance with Kinetix 3D Studio Max. Here the card generated perspective-correct 3-D texture mapping with a 32-bit z-buffer. Accordingly, I had good results with rapid updates for wireframe, shaded, and textured preview ports. I saw a few artifacts on rapid screen redraws, but they were minor. Matrox includes AutoCAD, Direct3D, and Heidi drivers, and OpenGL support is currently under development.

The Millennium II's video engine plays back full-motion, full-screen video with DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectVideo, and ActiveMovie support.

Power 3-D users doing highly inten-sive geometric calculations might opt for costly board solutions, such as the Oxygen 402 from Dynamic Pictures and Intergraph's RealiZm 3D. But the Millennium II remains a solid, all-in-one solution for cost-conscious midrange 3-D users, as well as 2-D users at all levels.

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Product Information

Millennium II.....................$299

 (for Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95)
Matrox Graphics, Inc.
Dorval, Quebec, Canada
Phone:    800-361-1408 or 514-969-6320
Internet: 
http://www.matrox.com

Enter 1006 on Inquiry Card.

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Ratings

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Small Can Still Be Accommodating

photo_link (27 Kbytes)

Despite its small, 3-1/2- by 7-inch footprint, the Millennium II is still large enough to accommodate matrox's MGA-2164W engine.

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David Em (Sierra Madre, CA) is a digital artist and writer. You can contact him at davidem@earthlink.net .