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The MG400 is a phenomenal board which blazingly
fast performance and has all major 3D functions available that you would like to
see in a High performance videocard.
The card has three exceptional features
that separates it from the mainstream of graphics cards.
First of all, DUAL Head
display, unfortunately i received a single-head version, however,
if you choose to buy the somewhat more expensive version of the card,
then you have the ability to use two monitors with your card. There
are already some games that support using two screens.
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000
- Microsoft Flight Simulator '98
(currently available at retail)
- Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator
(currently available at retail)
- Extreme Wing Chun VR from Zen Tao
Interactive
- Renegade Racers from
Interplay/Promethean Designs
- Wild Metal Country from DMA
Design/Gremlin Interactive
- War Monkeys from Silicon Dreams
- Silent Hunter 2 from SSI
- Star Trek: Armada from Activision
Imagine the possibilities here. Will it
be widely supported in games and applications ? In all honesty no, I
do not believe so.
The second and probably mostly spoken
of feature of the G400 is Environment Mapped Bump Mapping.
I'll try to explain EMBM here. All textures have a "flat"
surface, which tends to give them a very static look, what bump
mapping does is give these textures "bumps" that make the
surface have inconsistencies and lumps like real floors would have in
real life.
EMBM uses multiple light sources to
reflect light in different directions to make it look and give it a
much more realistic feel and look than embossing. This technique will
be used in other new cards and although they call it different (Cubic
environment mapping) is already
integrated into the GeForce from nVIDIA.
Seeing is believing, describing with
words is always harder, so here are some pics that shows off EMBM:
 |
 |
| Expendable |
Expendable
with EMBM |
 |
 |
| Slave
Zero |
Slave
Zero with EMBM |
Last but certainly not the least new feature that sets the card aside from others is VCQ˛.
VCQ˛ means Vibrant Color Quality, it is a method that
processes 32-Bit color and improving the quality by decreasing
streaking, banding, and other weird artifacts. The result is a very
mystic picture/image. A lot of games can benefit from this nice
feature.
Here's an example from Forsaken with
VCQ˛
What's in the Box
When the GA-MG400 will be released you'll get of course one MG400, a
very well written manual, and some bundled games like NFS 3, Superbike
WC, Future Cop L.A.P.D., and populous the beginning. That's a nice set
of games you are getting practically for free with the card.
Installation
Installation ran without any problems, insert the MG400 and boot up.
When prompted to install default drivers choose no. Insert your CD-Rom
and install the drivers as explained . After a reboot
you are set to go. (Don't forget to install the DirectX 7 drivers).
I have also tried reference drivers
from Matrox. The MG400 was detected and i could actually install it,
however, after a reboot the system did not recognize the card properly
and well ... normally I work in a 1600x1200 resolution so i was stuck
in 640x480. That didn't seem very usable to me. So, stick to
Gigabyte's drivers with this one people.
Coming up benchmarks
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