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Manual
Matrox Software CD
DVI to HD-15 adapter
HD-15 to RCA / S-video adapter
The Card

As usual with Matrox, the manual is well thought out and full of all the solid info that you would expect and need. (For the record, I didn’t receive a hardcopy of the manual, so I perused the PDF version which, from past experience, are almost if not exactly the same as the ones you get in the box. In fact, the PDFs are almost always more up to date.)

To allow for full use of the card, Matrox includes the two adapters standard in the box. If you don’t have a DVI monitor, no worries mate, you can use the DVI to HD-15 adapter which affords you the ability to hook up a standard analog monitor (HD-15 is the technical term for “the thing my monitor plugs into” :p ). The second adapter plugs into the first one and provides RCA and S-Video outputs.

Impressions

As to be expected, the image quality is superb. Colours are vibrant and crisp; textures are clear, defined, and certainly not “smudged”; images and text are sharp and there are few, if any, “skips” when scrolling through large documents (a personal peeve of mine that I have noticed occur even on a Geforce2 Ultra). This is a testament to the delicious 2D quality Matrox is known for.

The driver support is quite good and provides quite a few options for tweaking display settings and all that jazz. Take a peak:

Matrox has gone all out with display configuration as there quite a number more options on this screen than can be found on most other cards (certainly more than the Geforce line). A screen similar to this is also available for the second display, providing for even more configuration madness.

HeadCasting Engine

The process of making your own DigiMask (which is the name of the 3D heads that the HeadCasting Engine supports) is rather long and detailed and if you are really interested, take a look at the DigiMask website. Here is a DigiMask of myself that I created (I even took the pictures!)

I was pretty impressed with how it turned out because I pretty much just whipped through the process. Having a digital, 3D version of my head is kind of creepy actually. (By the way, I don’t actually have a Pony Tail – the glasses are similar to ones I wear though). Geez, I never realized how much I looked like a crack dealer.

Honestly, I find it odd that HeadCasting is the major feature that Matrox is pushing and promoting for the G550. It is too impersonal and impractical for business purposes which makes it more of a novelty than anything else. With digital video streaming leading the way towards full (or near “full”) motion video conferencing, there is little need for “HeadCasting”. It’s impressive that the that the “HeadCasting” can function over a 56Kbps connection, but really, are there businesses out there that still use dial-up modems anyway?