new G450 again had support for AGP 4X, like some later-produced G400 boards. The 3D capabilities of G450 were identical to G400. Unfortunately, because of the identical core clock and due to lower memory bandwidth, G450 was slower than G400 in games. Marvel G450 eTV not only had a TV tuner, but also was a launchpad for Matrox's new eDualHead dual display enhancement. It added some new features to DualHead that worked with Internet Explorer to make pages show up on both screens at once. Matrox G550 MGA-G550 processor added a second pixel pipeline, hardware transform and lighting, and the HeadCasting Engine, a hardware implementation of a vertex shader for accelerated matrix palette skinning. It does this by improving on the 96 constant registers specified for by DirectX 8.0 to a total of 256. Despite the feature, it is inaccessible by DirectX driver. Matrox only supports HeadCasting feature through the bundled Matrox Digimask software, which have never become popular. On 2005-7-13, Matrox Graphics Inc. announced the availability of Millennium G550 PCIe, the world's first PCI Express x1 graphics card. The card uses Texas Instruments XIO2000 bridge controller to achieve PCI Express support. Unreleased products Findings within a release of Matrox graphics drivers (MGA64.sys v4.77.027) mentioned a never-released Matrox Millennium G800. The MGA-G800, codenamed Condor 2, would have been clocked at 200 MHz core with 200 MHz DDR memory (6.4 GB/s bandwidth). The chip had 3 pixel pipelines with 3 texture units each. It was also equipped with a hardware transform and lighting unit capable of processing 20–30 million triangles per second. Further speculation included a memory controller that could support DDR SDRAM and DDR FC-RAM, DirectX 8.0 compliance, and a faster version running at 250 MHz. These specifications are somewhat reminiscent of Matrox Parhelia, in that Parhelia is a 4 pipeline DirectX 8 GPU with 4 texture units per pipeline. Models References External links FiringSquad's Review of Matrox G400 last wayback archive of Matrox Guide to EMBM (Environment Mapped Bump Mapping) Matrox Millennium G450 at Digit-Life. Matrox Millennium G450 Review at Firingsquad. Matrox Users' Resource Center Tom's Hardware's Review of G400 Computer-related introductions in 1999 Graphics cards Graphics chips