I remember thinking the Matrox cards in the 90s (Millennium, G400) had super-solid drivers, and their 2-D image quality was amazing. Interestingly, at the time, we were doing software 3-D rendering and NVIDIA RIVA TNT was much slower for bitblt. I guess they've fixed that by now. ;)
Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
21–30 of 82 posts
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#22Wow this is a deep dive, most people focus on the PC era. The Ultima/Impression were some of the very first commercial PCI cards, behind maybe NCR SCSI. Another interesting vendor in that era was Number Nine.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#23When I was building a linux PC in the late 90's, I bought a Matrox Millenium with the memory expansion to 8MB which could do 1600x1200 with 24 bit color. That was an awesome card for the time, and an incredibly stable analog signal, which Matrox was known for - other cards at the time would get fuzzy, shimmer, or have ringing / ghosting. At the time, for good support you needed to *buy* an X11 server for accelerated…
Yeah, I wanted a Matrox so bad at that time because you could also do dual monitor on some of those cards. I had a sick NEC with a degauss button and trinitron style horizontal lines and a shit packard bell monitor. I wanted to do dual monitors so bad with both, despite the resolution asymmetry. Some matrox also had connection points for antennas and video capture. They were truly workhorse cards. But they sucked at…
I remember people I knew wanting the Matrox because it was possible to have duel screen on Linux. They usually had a huge grin on LAN parties, once they got their breath back from carrying two heavy CRT monitors and a PC tower. Good times.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#24I have a friend whose wife has strong sight challenges. He once swapped a much newer and more powerful card with me for my last matrox card, iirc it was a millennium ii. The matrox utilities included with the drivers had one of the best desktop zoom systems ever delivered on windows and this was worth more to them than anything else.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#25I have some pretty fond memories of Matrox. Saw the Millennium at a trade fair, as pretty much the first sign that 3D will reach the PC segment (I also saw a SGI Onyx there).
And later I got one as pretty much the most solid Linux graphics card, which even was capable of going dual screen. And while I don't miss XFree86 modeline configs, it was nice when there wasn't just a GPU triopoly.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#26My first association when someone mentions Matrox is MPlayer and mga_vid kernel module. I had G200, and hardware YUV acceleration worked perfectly. Direct access to hardware from MPlayer, it worked very nice, in console with `-vo mga` and in X11 with `-vo xmga`, there was no difference at all.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I wanted a Matrox so bad at that time because you could also do dual monitor on some of those cards. I had a sick NEC with a degauss button and trinitron style horizontal lines and a shit packard bell monitor. I wanted to do dual monitors so bad with both, despite the resolution asymmetry. Some matrox also had connection points for antennas and video capture. They were truly workhorse cards. But they sucked at…
I remember people I knew wanting the Matrox because it was possible to have duel screen on Linux. They usually had a huge grin on LAN parties, once they got their breath back from carrying two heavy CRT monitors and a PC tower. Good times.
Maybe I misunderstood something at the time, but the mga X11 driver was weird. My understanding, at least at the time, is that it is/was possible to provide an X11 driver that would work regardless of the underlying operating system, providing features such as dual-head support.
This feels intuitively wrong to me now and I doubt that's how it worked. In any case I dutifully copies the Matrox provided X11 driver to OpenBSD and enjoyed multi-monitor support.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#28Memories! Back at university I got a G400 and, with the open documentation they released, was able to make a driver for BeOS. It worked but looking back it’s stark how much I have learned since then. One feature I particularly love is a dual head setup app using combo boxes instead of menus!
Th code is still online, in full early 2000s web styling. https://64kib.com/old_foft_site/
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#29This brought back some really fond memories. Prior to the dawn of 3D accelerators from 3Dfx, Rendition, and eventually of course Nvidia, Matrox VGA cards were the absolute dogs bollocks when it came to gaming performance. They were the cards to have in your PC, especially the 220MHz RAMDAC version of the Millennium.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#30Lesser known feature was that the Matrox MGA/G200 chips were capable of delivering "sync on green" via regular VGA cable. This was a specialized format were VSync/HSync weren't transmitted over dedicated pins, but encoded into the green signal. This was required by some (then) older workstation monitors. In the early 2000s, I managed to get a 20" SGI workstation monitor for 20€ at ebay (at times where 20" monitors were above 1000€) - because no one could use them with regular PC hardware. Using a single "sync_on_green" flag in my XFree86.conf file, and it would work flawlessly on my linux box.