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Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

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Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

#42

Post by rasz »

herf wrote: post #21

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. ;)

>super-solid drivers

maybe because they had limited support for many features?

>Millennium

no textures, alpha blending, transparency, bilinear filtering

>G400

slow but ok, but its predecessor G200 only got OpenGL driver 2 years later with release of G400

Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

#43

Post by rasz »

Theodores wrote: post #36

Can anyone recall how well Matrox performed with early implementations of OpenGL, from the days before DirectX was taken seriously? At the time I worked in broadcasting and we had a lot of respect for Matrox, however, I can't recall exactly how they lost relevance for us, in the broadcast-adjacent market, when we would still be running 3D Studio in MS-DOS. Windows 95 came along with OpenGL, and, if I remember, Matrox…

>OpenGL

first real Matrox OpenGL driver shipped with G400 in 2000

Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

#44

Post by mrweasel »

inigyou wrote: post #38
mrweasel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Op…

There was nothing underlying X servers until about 2010. The X server was the lowest layer.

Looking at a few old mailinglists agrees with you. Apparently the mga_drv and mga_hal_drv could just be copied to any system running XFree86, at least Linux and the BSDs, and would let you utilize dual-head support.

Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

#45

Post by rbanffy »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #2

That was an interesting read. Unfortunately I never has the pleasure of owning a Matrox. I got really close to buying a Millennium G200 back in the late 90s, but decided to go for the RIVA TNT instead. Was in the nVidia camp (with brief stints in Intel and ATi) until I swithed to ATi/AMD for good around 15 years ago.

I’m not quite sure what their functionality is nowadays, but I remember Matrox parts being popular as minimal VGA controllers on servers.

Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

#46

Post by unixhero »

kev009 wrote: post #22

Wow 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.

Number Nine was amazing. But even more amazing was the computer integrator / producer that shipped their computers with Number Nines. The company Intergraph.

I think the remnants are here now[0]:

0, https://www.octave.com/about/about

Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

#48

Post by mrweasel »

rasz wrote: post #42
herf wrote: post #21

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. ;)

>super-solid drivers maybe because they had limited support for many features? >Millennium no textures, alpha blending, transparency, bilinear filtering >G400 slow but ok, but its predecessor G200 only got OpenGL driver 2 years later with release of G400

The G200 and G400 are two of my absolute favorit graphics cards from my early computing years, but if you needed any reasonable 3D performance or feature set, they weren't a great choice. However, if you just needed a stable graphics card for a desktop/developer machine it was one of the most stable and well supported cards, followed by the ATi Rage 128.

Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

#49

Post by speed_spread »

fithisux wrote: post #35

I wish they were cheaper.

You got what you paid for. They probably wished they could make cheaper cards too but it was never their primary focus and so eventually went back to making only expensive specialized cards where 3dfx, Nvidia, ATI and the like couldn't touch them.

Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

#50

Post by pjmlp »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #30

Lesser 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 we…

PS2Linux required monitors able to do sync on green, which caught many that managed to get it, in for a surprise.
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