The Mystique G200 and it´s G200 chip are the answer from Matrox to other second generation entertainment 2D/3D cards from Rendition, nVidia, 3Dfx and other...

In the past, none of the Matrox cards delivered enough 3D performance to consider it a gaming card and it´s best point was that it had the best 2D available and the most stable drivers out there but don´t think thit matters that much for a gamer.

Matrox has learned a lot since then and with the new G200 chip it´s delivering fast 2D/3D without compromise and excellent visual quality.

Here are some of the G200 chip features:

• 128 bit DualBus Graphics Chip

• 32-bpp "True Color" support for both 2D and 3D applications

• Options for up to 16MB of SDRAM or SGRAM depending upon the implementation of the chip

• 100 million pixels per second fill rate

• .35 micron die-size enabling high core speed and low cost

• Single clock cycle rendering of Bi-linear Filtering

• Full hardware accelerated DVD and MPEG 1 and 2 playback

The Mystique G200 costs just $149 which is very cheap for a 8mb card and comes equipped with the following features:

• High 2D/3D performance

• 230 Mhz RamDAC

• 8mb SDram (exp. to 16)

• 3 game Bundle: Full versions of Incoming, Tonic Trouble and Motorhead

• TV-Out feature

• Maximum 3D Resolutions with Z-buffer enabled:
  1024x768x32bpp (8mb)
  1600x1200x32bpp (16mb)

• Maximum 2D Resolutions:
  1800x1440x24bpp (both 8mb and 16)
  1600x1200x32bpp (both 8mb and 16)

Notice that Matrox also offers the Millenium G200at the same retail pricewhich major differences are: it´s RamDAC (250 Mhz) which help displaying very high resolutions like 1600x1200 at high refresh rates, also it has other faster type of memory (SGram instead of SDram) but it doesn´t carries any TV-out feature, so... we can say it´s more orientated to the professional or corporate user who wants the best 2D quality and speed possible.

The Mystique TV-out is excellent, it supports resolutions up to 1024x768x32bpp , which is a step further than the standard 800x600.

What really impressed me was the visual quality of this card, being the best in the market, yes...not for a lot, but when using high resolution like 1024x768 and all colors (32bpp) at playable frame rates, there is nothing better.

You can consider a pitfall the lack of an OpenGL driver for Quake2 but Matrox said it´ll be available in a month or two, for the moment you can use a D3D wrapper, but it´s slower and looks ugly

now.... what everybody was waiting for, the benchmarks !!!!
Notice that I didn´t make any Quake 2 benchmarks because the D3D wrapper wouldn´t show what this card is capable of.

Incoming:
   800x600x16:    43.8
   800x600x32:    29.1   
   1024x768x16:  30.4
   1024x768x32:  17.9

Forsaken:
   800x600x16:    67.4
   1024x768x16:  41.0

Test machine:
Pentium II 266
64mb ram
Hitachi CD-rom 24X
Quantum Fireball 6.4 Gb
Matrox Mystique 8mb
Win95 OSR2

Conclusion
Again.... for $149 for the 8mb version, this is the best 2D/3D card solution available, adding another 8mb will let you enable triple-buffering which should give you a just slightly slower single Voodoo2 performance but also consider that the next generation cards from other manufacturers are coming with promisses of a much better performance.

Go to 3D Spotlight !