I didn’t know how spoiled I was as a teenager. My dad bought us a custom build pc from Ncal computers in Pleasanton CA. It had a matrox card, and we got a decent 17” monitor. I think eventually I even did dual monitor with it.
Reading this thread makes me realize what I probably took for granted at the time. And soon when my friends got 3dfx cards, I thought I was missing out even.
Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
61–70 of 82 posts
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#62Before 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 wou…
Yes they were. I worked for a small computer company and decided to buy my own 21” monitor for work and was impatient and I spent $75 (back when that was ridiculous) having it FedExed halfway across the state so I could get it a couple of days sooner.
I’ve used a big monitor setup ever since (part of my sign-up incentive for my current job was a 30” monitor) and currently have two 16:10 30” monitors.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#63When 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…
You mean the one from Xi graphics?
That's Accelerated/X right. I had a Matrox Millennium card in my PC when I discovered Linux and remember trying that. Made a lot of difference.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#64I 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. ;)
I would play this demo for days
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#65Lesser 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.
Same with the early Xbox VGA mods.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
What 2D game you play doesn't have textures, alpha blending or transparency in any way? Seems like pong might be one of the few that fits your criteria.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#67When 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 fo…
I remember the same. My whole game dev company went to one game developer show and everyone came back with a couple of GPUs each. Two out of the three games we were writing were 2D only.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
What 2D game you play doesn't have textures, alpha blending or transparency in any way? Seems like pong might be one of the few that fits your criteria.
Zork. I'm not a gamer.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#69TIL about yet another once great tech or innovation originated in Canada!
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#70Before 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 wou…
Oh my! Well, from faint 30-years-on recollection, it was the end of '96 so I guess I needed to save up for it. Thanks for the correction!
Ordinary relatively cheap consumer Matrox cards could be paired up. I couldn't afford a fancy dual-output card, but I could afford 2 second-hand Matrox Millennium cards, and that did the job fine. At that time, Matrox was about the only brand of (parallel PCI) graphics card where the drivers could handle multiple cards. You couldn't do it with ATI or S3 or any of the other commodity GPUs back then, but any old Matrox with any other of around the same generation worked. They could have dissimilar amounts of memory and things and it still worked.
About 20 years later, I was working at SUSE in Prague, and we had lots of old nVidia cards available in the office spares pile, and lots of spare LCDs around the 22" - 24" size range.
Two screens was easy: most nVidia pro-range cards can drive 2 outputs.
I had the desk space and available screens, so I decided to try 3.
Then the nightmare began.
Nouveau doesn't care: if it's nVidia, it'll drive it.
But nVidia's own drivers are tied to specific GPU generations, but those generations are not marked on the card or in the easily-accessible specs anywhere. It's mostly a case of installing the card, booting Linux, seeing what the driver describes the GPU family generation as, and then Googling to try to find which of the random pile of cards to hand is a matching GPU family and generation.
I never got 3 screens working together adequately, and the combinations crashed my OS often.
For emergencies I kept a Windows partition and its behaviour with mismatched cards is quite funny in an annoying way.
1. Boot
2. Identify first card
3. Work out matching driver for card 1, download it, install it
4. Reboot
5. Find second card
6. Work out matching driver for card 2, download it, install it
7. Card 1 now does not work. So...
8. Work out matching driver for card 1, download it, install it
9. Reboot
10. Second card now does not work.
11. Work out matching driver for card 2, download it, install it...
It would sit there taking 10min or so per loop until you pulled the plug.
With Linux, it's just a case of:
Human IDs GPU; manually installs driver; sees if both cards work.
The answer is, generally, "no", so:
Swear, remove one card, substitute, try again.
Eventually I went to the IT department who gave me an elderly, huge, AMD card. 2 full length slots, 2 cooling fans, and a decade old so rubbish performance by 20-teens standards. But, 4 display outputs, and use any combination you want -- and native FOSS drivers, so no need to manually install anything.
Joy, peace, and calm descended.
Then a couple of months later, COVID... and working off a little Dell laptop with only an Intel onboard GPU and one external screen. I did in the end get 2 external screens and the built in screen working, but only using an X11 desktop that didn't do much fancy 3D rendering (Xfce) because it didn't have enough VRAM for triple-head and compositing.