The Matrox Millenium 1 4Wram and Matrox Millenium II 8Wram comparison
June 5, 1998
Last addendum Thursday, July 30, 1998
I know, you'll probably tell me that this is not the most up to date graphic card available right now but this card is really not interestless so I thought it could be a good idea to publish a review of it by comparing it to its predecessor.
So, to really have a good idea of the Mill II performances when compared to the Mill 1 I didn't hesitated on the Benchmarks I used and this is with a great pleasure that I present this review to you.
Even if I had some problems during the initial installation I wouldn't say that this card is a problem to install because the problems I had were mostly caused by a mistake I did on the first try.
The installation CD included with this card contain's no less than 7 different applications including: a Netscape plug-in, Picture Publisher, Colorific, Simply 3D, Compcore Softpeg, Kais Power Tools 3D, and Vream Wirl.
An add-on daughter card, the "Rainbow Runner" is also available for the Mill II to enhance the MPEG play and another ad-on card "Rainbow Runner TV" can also be added. This TV tuner card also includes a PC/TV output jack.
The tests
All the tests were performed using the following setup:
Motherboard: AOpen AP58
CPU: AMD K6-233mhz
Memory: 32mb SDram (Hyundai)
HDD: Quantum Fireball ST3.2A
CD-ROM drive: AOpen CD-936E
OS: DOS 6.22
Win95 4.00.950a
All the tests were conducted using Matrox driver version 4.00.370 and were performed using a screen definition of 1024 X 768 with 256 colors.
WinBench98 Business Wimmark Graphics Benchmarks results
The first Benchmark I used to run on these graphic cards is the "Business Winmark Graphics" from the Winstone98 CD. Let's have a look at these results to establish our firsts conclusions.
By looking at these results we can clearly see that the Mill II exceed the old Mill 1 performance by more than 32% on the "Business Winmark Graphics" test ! The same advantage goes to the Mill II for the "Business Browser Graphics" where the Mill II overtop the Mill 1 by close to 5%. The "SS/Database Graphics" is again won by the Mill II with a gap of more than 68% ! The "Business Tasks Switching Graphics" Benchmark show's an advantage of 16.4% for the Mill II and finally the "Business WP Graphics" test is once again won by the Mill II by a gain of more than 28%. All this is clearly showing to us that Matrox really did their homework very well when they designed this graphic card !
The WinBench98 DirectDraw Animate Benchmark
In this suite of tests both cards were tested upon their capacity to support DirectDraw and the ease they had to perform under these tests.
As we can see, here again the gaps in favor of the Mill II are amazing and many times they are over 200% ! However, on some of these tests we can see a few values only matching those of the Mill 1 or just a bit under them but not by significative margins. However, the Mill 2 is by far offering a much better support for DirectDraw functions than the former Millenium. As a matter of fact the old Millenium graphic card doesn't support most of then DirectDraw calls.
Wintune 97
Even if I never really considered this Benchmark very seriously I thought that it would be a good idea to include its results here only for the sake of the comparison.
Matrox Millenium 1 4Wram
Matrox Millenium II 8Wram
Again, the Mill II has won this match by a good 14% of advance over the Mill 1 which is confirming the very easily distinguishable superiority of the Mill II under Win95.
Screen filling tests under DOS (FPS)
Of course we all know that the preceding tests are mostly static tests and if the reveal very excellent performances for the Mill II when used for office applications they don't give any idea about how well is performing these cards when used to play games !
So, in this 3D era I thought that it would be a good and interesting idea to learn more about this card when used to play games because this is a very amusing way to use a graphic card.
So, in order to get a good idea about how was performing the Mill II under the DOS mode when used to play games I used the good old Quake 1.06 to measure it frame rate per second because FPS is one of the most important rating for a graphic card when playing games.
I must admit immediately that I have been very deceived ! As a fact the Mill II doesn't perform any better than the old Mill 1 ! However, we must take into account that none of these cards is really supporting 3D other than for CAD applications ! So, it is not a great surprise to lear that the Mill II couldn't make any better than the Mill 1 and the results were about 35fps for the 320 X 200 mode, and 13.4fps for the 640 X 480 mode. The only place where the Mill II did a better job than the Mill I was under the 800 X 600 resolution mode because the Mill 1 has only 4mb of memory installed while then Mill II that I was using was equipped with 8mb of memory so this is why this mode could only be supported by the Mill II.
Conclusions
In conclusions, the Matrox Mill II graphic card is a very good performer for 2D applications and even the more exacting users will sure be pleased with this card for their office and CAD applications. However, the Mill II just can't be seriously considered to play 3D games.
In other words, this card could be used in a top notch system for its 2D capabilities where a 3D card would be installed specifically for 3D gaming. Such a setup is now becoming more and more popular nowadays where a lots of 3D specialized cards have emerged and will continue to emerge for the more demanding users !
For additional information: Matrox
After I published this review I received a message from Adam KUjawski saying that my comparison was of practically no value because I used to compare an 8Wram graphic card against a 4Wram graphic card. The point of his argument was that because the required frame buffer space being possibly less than 4MB, the drivers could have been taking advantage of the unused memory for bitmap caching and such as he pointed.
So, to make sure that this was not the cause explaining the best performances of the Millenium II with 8Wram of memory, I used to take off the 4Wram memory add-on module and performed all the above tests again.
All the results I had for all the above tests were perfectly reproduced in every cases and absolutely no performance decrease has been observed for any of them when using the Millenium II witth only 4Wram of memory. In other words it doesn't matter to use the Millenium II with 4 Mb or 8 Mb of Wram memory as it keep's outperforming the Millenium (1) by very large margins under Win95! Sorry Adam but you missed your point here ! I always knew that the amount of memory installed on a graphic card had no influences on its overall performances but on the number of colors and screen resolutions supported. However, I used to do these additionnal tests for the sake of complementary informations only.
Adam also pointed that I should have used some different versions of drivers to make my tests and I agree with him. So, because this could have given some very interesting results I will download the latest driver available for the Millenium II and I will do some more test to see if there are any improvements. As soon as I will have finished these additionnal tests I will update this review again.
Addemdum 2
Like promissed I did some tests using some different driver version for this graphic card. The drivers I used to test were version 4.10.013.800 and 4.10.013.810. The comparison with the standard driver included on the CD which (version 4.10.01.3700) gave the following results. Driver version 4.10.013.810 gave the worst results with performance ranging from 5% to 15% lower than driver version 4.10.01.3700 while driver version 4.10.013.800 was closer to the original driver with a performance decrease of only 1% to 3%. So, for my setup, driver version 4.10.013.700 gave the best overall performances.
Specifications
|
|
| Optimized 64-bit PCI graphics board
|
| Optimized for Intel Pentium® II |
| Fast Windows, 3D and
video at up to 1920 x 1200 resolution |
| Exclusive dual-ported WRAM memory
|
| High performance 250 MHz RAMDAC |
| Feature-rich drivers for Windows
NT 4.0 |
Memory Upgrades (sold
separately)
|
| • |
4, 8, or 12 MB memory modules
available for increased resolutions, colors, and speed. |
| • |
Upgrades sold separately. Video
and memory upgrades cannot be used together.
|
|
Power your PC to the next level of
performance - see what memory adds
to your card! |
| Maximum
2D Resolutions and Colors |
| Colors |
4 MB |
8 MB |
12 MB |
16 MB |
| 256 |
1920 x 1200 |
1920 x 1200 |
1920 x 1200 |
1920 x 1200 |
| 65K |
1920 x 1080 |
1920 x 1200 |
1920 x 1200 |
1920 x 1200 |
| 16.7M |
1280 x 1024 |
1920 x 1080 |
1920 x 1080 |
1920 x 1080 |
| Maximum
3D Resolutions and Colors |
| Colors |
4 MB |
8 MB |
12 MB |
16 MB |
| 65K |
1152 x 864 |
1920 x 1080 |
1920 x 1200 |
1920 x 1200 |
| 16.7M |
800 x 600 |
1152 x 864 |
1280 x 1024 |
1280 x 1024 |
