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The technical reason to prefer Matrox cards was the sharp analog video output. You could do 1600x1200 without the pixels blurring. NVidia was a terrible blur, a

The technical reason to prefer Matrox cards was the sharp analog video output. You could do 1600x1200 without the pixels blurring. NVidia was a terrible blur, and ATI wasn't much better. Matrox cards were thus great for CAD and for people who wanted to use the default xterm font.

LargoLasskhyfv 8y ago
That may have been true for a time, but i could compare a G450 with one of the later cards from 3DFX, a Voodoo Banshee. Made no difference on a high end Hitachi 21 inch crt(something non Trinitron, don't remember what exactly). Two pages of DIN A4 next to each other in original size, without any eyestrain whatsover. Nice times :)
tempguy9999 8y ago
Yes, my first experience with a graphics card was a matrox G400. I still have it in fact. I still have a soft spot for matroxes for their sheer boringness. They did the job well and... that was that. Utterly reliable. Most kinds of tech should be totally boring. Yay for dull. Servers I've used, I think dell, claimed to come with G200 matroxes built in but they seemed totally to lack any hardware acceleration so it seemed to be pure software rendering, painfully slow and watching video was not possible. Someone elsewhere here said they were for IPMI use which makes sense. They made rotten desktops machines until you gave them a proper card. Should anyone quite reasonably wonder why I'd use a server as a workstation, they are reliable (read: so boring). Once I get them working they almost never play up.
- armitron 8y ago
  I have a Matrox millenium (best DOS card ever!), three G400 cards and one G400 Max. They worked incredibly well with Linux esp with multiple monitors. I had 2 of them in one tower, driving 4 monitors at once at some point. I fondly remember MPlayer && /dev/mga_vid. They also had great Linux framebuffer console support. Their RAMDACs were legendary. Those were the days.
  - mycall 8y ago
    Matrox Millenium with Topaz were great together for rendering in DOS.
- mjg59 8y ago
  Matrix licensed the G200 core to a bunch of BMC vendors, who in turn tied it to their own PLL setup and gave it (frequently) nowhere near enough RAM. The 2d acceleration should still have worked, but they left out the 3d unit. (source: I turned the G200 X11 driver into a basic KMS driver for Linux so we could drive the cards properly on EFI systems, and in the process discovered that at least one varient had a PLL calculation loop in the X11 driver that was guaranteed never to terminate, so it's quite possible that literally nobody ever tried to run graphics on some of these machines)
Twirrim 8y ago
Its 2D performance was also significantly better than the competitors.

LargoLasskhyfv 8y ago

That may have been true for a time, but i could compare a G450 with one of the later cards from 3DFX, a Voodoo Banshee. Made no difference on a high end Hitachi 21 inch crt(something non Trinitron, don't remember what exactly). Two pages of DIN A4 next to each other in original size, without any eyestrain whatsover. Nice times :)

tempguy9999 8y ago

Yes, my first experience with a graphics card was a matrox G400. I still have it in fact. I still have a soft spot for matroxes for their sheer boringness. They did the job well and... that was that. Utterly reliable. Most kinds of tech should be totally boring. Yay for dull. Servers I've used, I think dell, claimed to come with G200 matroxes built in but they seemed totally to lack any hardware acceleration so it seemed to be pure software rendering, painfully slow and watching video was not possible. Someone elsewhere here said they were for IPMI use which makes sense. They made rotten desktops machines until you gave them a proper card. Should anyone quite reasonably wonder why I'd use a server as a workstation, they are reliable (read: so boring). Once I get them working they almost never play up.

armitron 8y ago
I have a Matrox millenium (best DOS card ever!), three G400 cards and one G400 Max. They worked incredibly well with Linux esp with multiple monitors. I had 2 of them in one tower, driving 4 monitors at once at some point. I fondly remember MPlayer && /dev/mga_vid. They also had great Linux framebuffer console support. Their RAMDACs were legendary. Those were the days.
- mycall 8y ago
  Matrox Millenium with Topaz were great together for rendering in DOS.
mjg59 8y ago
Matrix licensed the G200 core to a bunch of BMC vendors, who in turn tied it to their own PLL setup and gave it (frequently) nowhere near enough RAM. The 2d acceleration should still have worked, but they left out the 3d unit. (source: I turned the G200 X11 driver into a basic KMS driver for Linux so we could drive the cards properly on EFI systems, and in the process discovered that at least one varient had a PLL calculation loop in the X11 driver that was guaranteed never to terminate, so it's quite possible that literally nobody ever tried to run graphics on some of these machines)

Twirrim 8y ago

Its 2D performance was also significantly better than the competitors.