E3 1999 Coverage

Guillemot

Nothing particularly new was to be found at the Guillemot booth, but we did get some interesting information on their upcoming cards. Their Ultra TNT2 will be clocked out of the box at 175/200 and the standard TNT2 at 135/150. Looks like they're poised to go head to head with Hercules and take out the rest of the TNT2 competition.

Matrox

Matrox was of course touting the upcoming Millennium G400 and G400 Max. These two cards feature the new G400 chipset from Matrox that offers a number of new and unique features. Most prominent are the two focused on in the booth - bump mapping and Dual Head. Bump mapping was of course from the tech demo that they've been showing everywhere (a variety of screen shots are available from the official Matrox G400 page). Dual head was used in two different ways. The most useful was the use of DVD on a TV from one of the outputs and the Windows desktop on the monitor output. The other was a flight simulator demo running with the standard cockpit view on one monitor and other camera angles on another.

Most importantly, however, was the demo of Quake 3 that ran quite well and showed that Matrox does in fact have a working ICD. It was playing reasonably fast in full 32-bit color up to 1024x768. The visuals looked absolutely beautiful under this old build of the ICD - newer ones are faster and more stable according to Matrox. Super 7 users rejoice - a full team is working on Super 7 compatibility and 3DNow! and K7 optimizations are already being worked into the drivers.

Unfortunately, we also learned that there is no ICD available under NT at this time, but that they are working on it. On the brighter side, they will be ready with full Windows 2000 support upon its release from Microsoft.

We were also assured that G200 users have not been forgotten. Thanks to similarities in the two chips' architectures, Matrox claims it will be easy to work backwards from the G400 ICD to produce a fully functional ICD for the G200.