Matrox M3D.
Graphics Accelerator Card Review
Graphics Card Review - Part 2
November 1998
Matrox, Voodoo, ATI and others all want your cash for some serious eye candy - but who's worthy enough to earn your folding green stuff?
Ultimate Race
Reviewed: Matrox M3D Graphics Accelerator Card
November 1998
The card comes with some 20 pieces of software, mostly games demos, but with one full game Ultimate Race, recoded to take full advantage of the new Power VR chipset. The demo of Ultimate Race that I saw running in the shop where I purchased the card had been the clincher, so I opted to load that first. Wow! I was not disappointed I can tell you. Super smooth frame rate, 640x480 resolution in 16bit colour, fully textured polygons and good racing fun is what Ultimate Race is all about. Well, a purchasing success it would seem. For a tad over £100 I had turned my machine into something better than a Nintendo 64, and got a free game to boot. Yes, that’s right, you heard me correctly, nothing on the Nintendo 64 is better than Ultimate Race. OK we will never see Mario 64 on the PC (not officially anyway), but 3D graphics are so good these days that the Playstation looks positively ancient in comparison. In a year’s time, if no new generation console has turned up then PC’s will be far ahead of dedicated games machines.
Onto the rest of the software. Well, this is where things started to go a bit pear-shaped. Some of the software just refused to work, including the touted-like-a-full-priced-game first episode of MDK. I hadn’t liked MDK when it turned up originally almost a year before, but was curious to see what a Power VR chipset would do for the mediocre graphics. Well, I was never to find out. Other games ran, but performed so badly, I couldn’t tell I had the M3D in my PC. Moto Racer was the worst culprit, I was getting about 8 FPS at full whack, making controlling the bike almost impossible. I think I would love this game though if it would run at 20 FPS plus. Terracide looked good, keeping the frame rate high by keeping the polygon count low, the game’s winding tunnels helping to this end.
The remainder of the software was updates and patches for existing games to make them compatible with the Power VR chipset, including some GL drivers to let you run GLQuake (that 3D specific version I mentioned earlier). Quake impressed, letting me play in a 640x480 16bit colour environment at about 15fps (sometimes slowing to a crawl though). Sound got a bit choppy at times, as it did on Quake II (not included with the M3D), which worried me, and continued to be a problem even when I did some technical refining. Well, all in all the Matrox M3D is excellent value for money. I now have 8MB of graphics memory and very good graphics capabilities, but less games are supported than with 3DFX. That may change, but right now, I feel a bit like a Sega Saturn owner in Electronics Boutique. I would say wait, but chipsets seem to get upgraded 3 or 4 times a year these days, so I’ll say try before you buy.
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