Under the hood
The G550 doesn't stray too far from its predecessor. In fact, the G550 is actually pin-compatible with the G450, so there aren't many radical differences between the two. Built on a 0.18-micron process, the G550 won't be requiring a Blue Orb, especially not at a core clock speed of 125MHz.

Interestingly enough, the G550 employs a custom T&L engine and a vertex shader. Don't get too excited, though; these specialized parts are really only there to enable HeadCasting. The answer to a question no one asked, HeadCasting is so irrelevant for business users that a PR blurb wasn't even included with the package that came with the G550.

To get a handle on the G550's theoretical performance limits, let's take a look at the chip's fill rate numbers.

Bumping up the number of textures per pixel from one to two from the G450 to the G550, Matrox manages to squeeze 500Mtexels/sec out of the G550. Compared to the competition (all dual-monitor-capable cards for the purposes of this review), the G550's fill rate is the lowest of the lot. Of course, the G550's clock speed is also the slowest.

How does the G550 do in the memory bandwidth department? Let's take a look.

With a waif-like 64-bit memory bus, the G550 design employs DDR SDRAM in order to keep pace with competing cards. The folks at Matrox didn't design the G550 to be a 3D performance leader; the chip's theoretical capabilities make that quite clear.

Our testing methods
The test system was set up with the following hardware:

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• MadOnion 3DMark 2000 Ver 1.1
• MadOnion 3DMark 2001 Build 200
• Vulpine GLMark
• Quake III: Team Arena
• Serious Sam v1.02
• SPECviewperf 6.1.2

The test system's Windows desktop was set at 1024x768 in 32-bit colour at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. Unless otherwise indicated, all tests were performed with all the visual options turned to their highest levels.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

Because the G550 is really only aimed at business customers, throwing a suite of 3D game benchmarks at it isn't entirely appropriate. We've included some benchmarks for comparison's sake, but for business customers, 3D scores aren't likely to be a big concern.

In something of a departure from how I traditionally review video products, the G550 spent a couple of weeks in my main workstation. I spend far too many hours a day in front of my work box, and I rarely play games. It's the perfect environment for the G550 to prove its "business" mettle.