I remember I had a Matrox Millenium in the late 1990s... it managed to driver a 1600x1200, 24-bit graphics mode on a Eizo T57S, which was not happy about it but could still manage it somehow, IIRC. Other people opted for 3D-graphics-oriented cards around that time, but they couldn't manage that IIRC.
Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#32Lesser 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…
Back then some friends and I got hold of some lovely 20" Sun monitors that were sync-on-green only but none of our cards supported it.
No matter! A transistor, a couple of diodes, and half a dozen or so resistors soldered into a DE15 plug shell made the "sync plunger" that cured all your woes.
I probably still have a couple lying around. I could still just about draw the circuit from memory, not much good in these HDMI days.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#33Funny 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 high-density professional video I/O: 12G-SDI variants for UHD workflows, plus newer 25GbE versions for SMPTE ST 2110/IP environments. Very different market from the old Millennium/G400 days, but Matrox is definitely still around
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#34When 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?
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#35I wish they were cheaper.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#36Can 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 and OpenGL wasn't the combination you needed.
For the office PCs it was embedded graphics that ended them in my neck of the woods, with graphics being whatever Dell/AST/Compaq supplied.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#37Founded in 1976 by Trottier and Matić, and according to the article and Wikipedia, since 2019 has been owned 100% by Trottier. There's no indication that the founders lost majority ownership at any time, and although they sold off one division in 2019, it appears that Trottier still owns 100% of the remaining two divisions today. That's pretty remarkable, isn't it? How many tech companies that had a period of being a…
SAS Institute is another. 50 years this year. And the founder still owns it fully.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Op…
There was nothing underlying X servers until about 2010. The X server was the lowest layer.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#39When 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 had dual Trinitrons around that era, to this day when I build myself a new computer desk I massively over build it (the latest one I can stand in the middle without noticeable flex..) because I lived in slight dread that the spacetime warping monitors would crush the one I had at the time.
Re: Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
#40Wow 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.
I haven't thought of Number Nine in years, but the mention reminded me that the BIOS on some of their cards displayed a Beatles lyric quote during boot.