Another improvement for the G450 is a faster secondary RAMDAC speed for better Dual-Head support. This allows the secondary monitor port on the G450 to use a 1600x1200 display, up from 1280x1024 with the G400. So with one G450, a user could theoretically have 2056x1536x32bpp on their primary screen and 1600x1200x32bpp on their secondary screen. That comes to 5,078,016 pixels being pushed by a single video card. Not too shabby. That's a spreadsheet even Alan Greenspan would find useful.

The primary RAMDAC remains at 360MHz, which is more than ample. We know of no monitor that can do the bleeding eye 2048x1536@85Hz@32bpp resolution and refresh rate that the G400 and G450 can mange. The closest we have seen is the same resolution at 75Hz. As for crisp, clear and bright visuals, the G450 pleases our eyes just as much as the G400. In other words, the G450 is the equal of the best.

We did run into some disappointments with Dual-Head inside of Windows 2000. Matrox tells us that Windows 2000 does not allow a single video card to do different resolutions on different monitors. This means that, if you want 800x600 on one monitor and 1600x1200 on the other, you're out of luck unless you're willing to use Windows 98. It appears that, when Microsoft wrote the multi-monitor code for Windows 2000, they didn't do the best job. They may have been better off buying Matrox's design seeing as it works quite well under Windows 98.