Before I was a Linux type I was a Windows expert, and when I went freelance
in 1996, I built myself a fairly serious NT 4 rig: Pentium II 450, 192MB of
RAM (I think), and dual Matrox Millennium cards so I could drive dual 14-15
inch CRT (glass) screens as a single big display.
I think I kept those cards, as a pair, in my next 3 or 4 PCs – I know I was
still using them about a decade later, because when I switched from SUSE to
Ubuntu in 2004, Ubuntu's very screen-config tools couldn't configure 2 GPUs
and so I had to keep SUSE around for several years in dual boot. Every time
I made some screen config change or whatever, I booted into SUSE, set up my
Matrox cards and then copied `/etc/X11/xorg.conf` into my Ubuntu partition,
then I could reboot into Ubuntu and use them.
Ubuntu finally caught up around release 6.06 or something.
I didn't stay on two 14" displays for long... then two 15", then a 17" plus
a 15", then the widescreen luxury of dual 17" Idek Iiyama displays. :-)
I stopped playing video games much decades ago, so I never cared about what
3D performance was like. Nor did 99% of my consultancy clients. As 3D cards
gradually became the norm, I used to install the free Microsoft-advertising
version of the Computer Artworks "Organic Art" screensaver:
https://cuttlefish.org/archive/earlysites/artworks/organic-art/index.html
... just so the 3D card had something to do. It looked impressive, and when
Windows 2000 was new, watching how smoothly the screensaver ran was quite a
treat. When the app first came out it was like a slideshow.
What was good news for me was when LCD flat screens started to appear: lots
of people and companies started throwing out even high-end high-quality CRT
screens, and big ones too. For years I ran a pair of 21" Trinitron displays
which cost a fortune new. I filled my garage with good quality CRTs just as
spares. I had a small and rather sickly cat and she vomited a lot. There is
a nice big warm flat space on the back of a big CRT ideal for a cat to take
naps on. She killed dozens of monitors, by vomiting into them, but I had so
many spares that for several years I simply didn't care. I sent them to the
recycling and grabbed another one from the spares.Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
51–60 of 82 posts
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#52I 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
> no textures, alpha blending, transparency, bilinear filtering
Gimmicks that are even today way overused. The world would be better off without them.
Note that I am not into 3d games, and while someday I mean to learn CAD that day is far in the future. If I was into either of those things the features you name would be important. However since I'm not those things are useless gimmicks - YMMV.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#53Before I was a Linux type I was a Windows expert, and when I went freelance in 1996, I built myself a fairly serious NT 4 rig: Pentium II 450, 192MB of RAM (I think), and dual Matrox Millennium cards so I could drive dual 14-15 inch CRT (glass) screens as a single big display. I think I kept those cards, as a pair, in my next 3 or 4 PCs – I know I was still using them about a decade later, because when I switched fro…
> Before I was a Linux type I was a Windows expert, and when I went freelance
in 1996, I built myself a fairly serious NT 4 rig: Pentium II 450, 192MB of
RAM (I think), and dual Matrox Millennium cards so I could drive dual 14-15
inch CRT (glass) screens as a single big display.
Just to get the timeline right -- the PII 450 wasn't released until 98, so I'm assuming this is about when you mean. I always thought it would be awesome to get a Matrox card but settled for the ATI cards (I can't remember when I got my first dual display but I remember that Matrox made quad head cards pretty early.
> For years I ran a pair of 21" Trinitron displays which cost a fortune new.
These things were so heavy.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#54When I was working on early 3D video games in the 1990s, all these companies would give you prototype 3D cards to make sure what you made was compatible. This was pre-direct X. On Battlezone, many of us had different video cards to maintain compatibility. I had a G200. It wasn't the fastest card, but I always thought it looked great.
Later we got to demo early builds on pre-release TNT2 cards and it caused a panic for us because our game had always been graphics limited, and the graphics pipeline was built to be very steady. Incredibly smart programmers wrote our renderer from scratch in those days. Suddenly the frame rate was really fast, and choppy, because the hit from physics and AI between frames caused stutters. After that NVIDIA dominated.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#55Funny to see Matrox discussed mostly as a piece of PC graphics history, I actually work with Matrox cards almost every day. In the broadcast world they're still very common. X.mio/DSX cards are widely used for professional SDI I/O, video servers and channel-in-a-box systems, and Matrox also has dedicated M264 hardware accelerators for H.264/AVC encoding and decoding. The current flagship X.mio5 family is basically hi…
That's crazy. Apparently they still have at least 500 employees and make $500 million a year in revenue. Last time I encountered a Matrox was the G400 I had in my PC in 1999. It's no wonder they're talked about in the past tense when they exited the consumer hardware space over 20 years ago.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#56No mention of their ridiculous head casting product.
I did mention classes of other products, but this was more a history of the company’s GPUs. My work focuses on computing, and not so much on AV.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#57Funny to see Matrox discussed mostly as a piece of PC graphics history, I actually work with Matrox cards almost every day. In the broadcast world they're still very common. X.mio/DSX cards are widely used for professional SDI I/O, video servers and channel-in-a-box systems, and Matrox also has dedicated M264 hardware accelerators for H.264/AVC encoding and decoding. The current flagship X.mio5 family is basically hi…
Yeah, I have a few lines to that toward the end without going into the other product lines. I focus on computing history, and not on AV.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#58>Millennium
no textures, alpha blending, transparency, bilinear filtering
>Mystique ... transparency lookup table
no alpha blending, transparency, bilinear filtering. "Transparency Lookup Table" was a corpo speak code for color keying and a checkerboard mask that would stipple half the texture on top of whatever was there before
> G200. These cards supported ... OpenGL ... use of an OpenGL to Direct3D wrapper which hurt performance
Hurt compatibility first, performance second. Proper OpenGL driver shipped long after 2000 when G200 was already obsolete
>G200 ... performance was good
Performance was good for last place in benchmarks https://web.archive.org/web/20240907223521/https://www.anand...
> it still couldn’t beat the Voodoo 2, but it was fairly competitive with the RIVA and S3 Savage 3D.
How could it be competitive with cards half its price? or cards 2x as fast at same price point?
MATROX G100 8MB $99 April 1998
MATROX MILLENNIUM G200 8MB $230 August 1998 https://assets.hardwarezone.com/2009/reviews/video/g200/g200.html
optional DVD Upgrade Module (Hardware MPEG2 decoder) for G100/G200 $79 April 1998
STB Velocity 128 4MB $129 June 1998
S3 Savage 3D ~$150
Creative Labs Graphics Blaster TNT 16MB $169 September 1998, $125 November 1998
Diamond Viper V550 16MB $200 September 1998
Creative Labs 3D Blaster VooDoo2 8MB $229 June 1998 and dropping fast after TNT release
Diamond Monster 3D II 8MB $249 June 1998 and dropping fast after TNT release
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#59I 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. ;)
As a broke teenager, I came to have a G400 much later on in its lifecycle (c. 2007-2008). It did indeed have amazing analogue output quality (kids these days think VGA is inherently blurry, but it can be pretty much indistinguishable from DVI/HDMI if your graphics adapter has a good RAMDAC and you connect the monitor with a high-quality cable). However, my experience with the 3D drivers was pretty consistently terrible. I suspect the card was getting much less QA attention by that point, because one driver release would have broken OpenGL support, the next would break Direct3D, and so on. Very obviously not consumer-focused cards. I remember it extremely fondly nonetheless! Multi-monitor support was not common then, and that card was extremely formative to my lifelong thirst for desktop real estate.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#60Lesser 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…
Sync on green could be done with the ATI Mach 64 as well. I picked up a 20" SGI monitor (if memory serves, it was made by Hitachi) on the "free" table around 1999 on my university campus.
I got it working, but the one I had was pretty limited - it did a specific resolution at 60 Hz (I may have the details wrong - it was a long time ago). I never ended up using it, as I had a newer 17" DEC Trinitron from an old Alpha 3000/300LX that I also got super cheap, and it was a much better screen.