5 ms·

Matrox: Graphics for Professionals

193 points by BirAdam 1mo ago

bch 1mo ago
G400 was the first gfx card I cared about - dual head Debian bliss...
d3Xt3r 1mo ago
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.
- SV_BubbleTime 1mo ago
  Had the Millennium. Wanted the Riva TNT. I had also file-deleted both of those from my brain.
- rbanffy 1mo ago
  I’m not quite sure what their functionality is nowadays, but I remember Matrox parts being popular as minimal VGA controllers on servers.
brainless 1mo ago
Somewhere around early 2000, I used to work part-time with a local video editing agency. Matrox video capture cards were the really high bar, other than Avid. At least that is what I remember. We had a couple of Matrox capture cards, expensive for our tiny budget. Other than that and a few 3D cards also around that time, I forgot about Matrox.
zdw 1mo ago
When 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 graphics support. I forget which one I paid money for, but within a few years it wasn't necessary as open source had caught up.
- prescriptivist 1mo ago
  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 3D and were lapped in the Boot mag benchmarks for Quake 3D et al. I ended up with a 3D Labs Permidia 3D card anyway because I couldn't afford a Diamond or Voodoo and ended up turning textures off fully on Quake 3d in the end. Fun times, shout out Hard OCP.
  - torh 1mo ago
    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.
    - mrweasel 1mo ago
      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 OpenBSD and enjoyed multi-monitor support.
      - inigyou 1mo ago
        There was nothing underlying X servers until about 2010. The X server was the lowest layer.
        mrweasel 1mo ago
        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.
philxor 1mo ago
I had the original Matrox Millenium. Just threw out the old box a couple years ago when my parents sold their house. I remember driving like 50 miles to CDW will call to get it and being amazed at the 3D demo programs. I kept it for awhile but eventually got a 3DFX Voodoo card. And then a Voodoo Rush card that was a complete POS.
beached_whale 1mo ago
My first pc had some trident video card that failed right away and the local shop replaced with a millennium (g200, I think). I definitely got the better end of that one. It was 3d accelerated and came with some 3d text art tool that made animated text gifs in the software too.
hkhanna 1mo ago
I had the Matrox Marvel G200-TV I think in the late nineties. That graphics card was a beauty. It even let me watch TV on my computer as long as I threaded a coax cable up to my bedroom!
pstuart 1mo ago
Matrox Mystique for my first build. Free MechWarrior and plenty of time burned there. Good times. It can be startling how thousands of dollars of premium gear can become e-waste in short order.
LeBit 1mo ago
Je me souviens de passer régulièrement près du siège social dans le west island lorsque je travaillais à Montréal. Matrox était connu pour faire d’excellentes cartes pour le médical. Malheureusement, 3dfx était trop en avance pour les jeux.
hedgehog 1mo ago
I had I think a G400 and G450 in my desktop at work at different points around 2001 and my recollection is they had a reputation for high output quality (DAC and such).
abirkill 1mo ago
Founded 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 household name have lasted 50 years and are still majority-owned by all or some of the founders?
- hosteur 1mo ago
  SAS Institute is another. 50 years this year. And the founder still owns it fully.
danans 1mo ago
As an aside, I always found the clown on the Matrox boxes creepy - never made me want to buy the graphics card.
- airspresso 1mo ago
  It gave the card an aura of mystique (pun intended) and I remember really wanting it. I guess that means they succeeded in making a statement with it.
Animats 1mo ago
I had, briefly, some Matrox card with 3D acceleration on a DOS PC. It drove a PGA (Professional Graphics Adapter) monitor, a standard that predated VGA and went nowhere. The monitor was quite good but useless with anything else. For a time in the 1980s, I was writing drivers for graphics boards, and later doing 3D animation software. I tried a lot of graphics boards from now-forgotten vendors. Texas Instruments had the first PC RGB monitor and display that could display white text without color smear. The Wang Professional Image Computer was incompatible with everything else in PCs, with a different card form factor, a different monitor interface, and a different memory/device address layout that allowed 720KB of memory instead of 640KB. Plus their own version of DOS. Fujitsu lent me a prototype Fujitsu Sapphire, which never worked right. When I went to return it to their location in Sunnyvale, they'd moved out, shutting down their 3D graphics business. Dynamic Pictures had a decent 3D board, the Oxygen 202, that worked with NT 3.51. It took a while to get that working, but eventually it worked and I got 3D work done.
kerm1t__ 1mo ago
great read. I was with 3dfx however, yet for 2D matrox was the reference.
heshiming 1mo ago
I had a Millennium II PCI card. I remember its 32bit color mode (which not every card had at the time) was much faster than 24bit. Even though the card was expensive, it didn't have Direct3D acceleration like my classmate's Riva TNT (or 2?). So gaming wasn't impressive at all. At the time we were playing Need for Speed 2, I remember the image wasn't noticeably different than a 3DFX Voodoo. However, when Need for Speed 3 Hot Pursuit came out, Riva TNT could do realistic shading and reflection-like environment mapping on cars which was indeed a leap. One other thing I remember is that the graphics card had memory slots on it, like a socket for a chip. I think it was called 'WRAM', and its price was much more expensive than the card itself.
terhechte 1mo ago
In 2004 I was working in digital signage for museums and for one of them we needed to drive 16 displays from one computer. The article mentions this card: > On the 17th of December in 2004, the company announced the QIP LP PCIe where the QIP meant Quad Information Display. This was the industry’s first PCIe x16 graphics card, and it was a derivative of the Parhelia. [...] The card could drive four displays with a maximum resolution of 1600 by 1200 per display, I think we had 4 of these in one system and it was the only card on the market that allowed for this. We ran this on Linux and getting the bios set up correctly to support this was a nightmare. My memory is fuzzy though
herf 1mo ago
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. ;)
- rasz 1mo ago
  >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
  - mrweasel 1mo ago
    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.
  - bluGill 1mo ago
    > 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.
    - embedding-shape 1mo ago
      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.
      - bluGill 1mo ago
kev009 1mo ago
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.
- EvanAnderson 1mo ago
  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.
- unixhero 1mo ago
  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 https://www.octave.com/about/about
raggi 1mo ago
I have a friend whose wife has strong sight challenges. He once swapped a much newer and more powerful card with me for my last matrox card, iirc it was a millennium ii. The matrox utilities included with the drivers had one of the best desktop zoom systems ever delivered on windows and this was worth more to them than anything else.
mhd 1mo ago
I have some pretty fond memories of Matrox. Saw the Millennium at a trade fair, as pretty much the first sign that 3D will reach the PC segment (I also saw a SGI Onyx there). And later I got one as pretty much the most solid Linux graphics card, which even was capable of going dual screen. And while I don't miss XFree86 modeline configs, it was nice when there wasn't just a GPU triopoly.
gen2brain 1mo ago
My first association when someone mentions Matrox is MPlayer and mga_vid kernel module. I had G200, and hardware YUV acceleration worked perfectly. Direct access to hardware from MPlayer, it worked very nice, in console with `-vo mga` and in X11 with `-vo xmga`, there was no difference at all.
foft 1mo ago
Memories! Back at university I got a G400 and, with the open documentation they released, was able to make a driver for BeOS. It worked but looking back it’s stark how much I have learned since then. One feature I particularly love is a dual head setup app using combo boxes instead of menus! Th code is still online, in full early 2000s web styling. https://64kib.com/old_foft_site/ https://64kib.com/old_foft_site/
yankcrime 1mo ago
This brought back some really fond memories. Prior to the dawn of 3D accelerators from 3Dfx, Rendition, and eventually of course Nvidia, Matrox VGA cards were the absolute dogs bollocks when it came to gaming performance. They were the cards to have in your PC, especially the 220MHz RAMDAC version of the Millennium.
littlecranky67 1mo ago
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 were above 1000€) - because no one could use them with regular PC hardware. Using a single "sync_on_green" flag in my XFree86.conf file, and it would work flawlessly on my linux box.
- pjmlp 1mo ago
  PS2Linux required monitors able to do sync on green, which caught many that managed to get it, in for a surprise.
  - wolrah 1mo ago
    Same with the early Xbox VGA mods.
- ErroneousBosh 1mo ago
  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.
  - a96 1mo ago
    My memory says Sun used composite sync in the 13W3. I do remember making some cable mods as well to use monitors across Sun, Sgi, and a few other machines. Some used H+V, some C, some SOG. Maybe thankfully I no longer remember which ones were which after all.
    - ErroneousBosh 1mo ago
einpoklum 1mo ago
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.
fas_tm 1mo ago
Funny 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
- Yokolos 1mo ago
  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.
  - fas_tm 1mo ago
    You’d be surprised how expensive this stuff is. Current X.mio5/DSX LE5 cards are roughly in the $4–8k+ range depending on configuration, and support/SDK contracts can easily add thousands per year. Broadcast hardware is a very different market from consumer GPUs.
- BirAdam 1mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - fas_tm 1mo ago
    All good, it was an interesting read! I just wanted to add that these days Matrox is a very specialized topic, especially on the broadcast/AV side
fithisux 1mo ago
I wish they were cheaper.
- speed_spread 1mo ago
  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.
Theodores 1mo ago
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 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.
- rasz 1mo ago
  >OpenGL first real Matrox OpenGL driver shipped with G400 in 2000
felixfurtak 1mo ago
No mention of their ridiculous head casting product.
- BirAdam 1mo ago
  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.
tycoon666 1mo ago
The G200 had good open source Linux drivers back in the day
lproven 1mo ago
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.
- altcognito 1mo ago
  > 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.
georgeecollins 1mo ago
When 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.
- qingcharles 1mo ago
  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.
- jasonwatkinspdx 1mo ago
  I was just a teenager and enthusiastic LAN party participant back then, but also was learning the basics of 3d modeling, animation, and gamedev. The pre 3DFX era was kinda interesting. The first hardware accellerated game I saw was VQuake on the Rendition Verite 1000 or whatever the branding was. It blew me away. When the Voodoo1 came out I was shocked by the framerate, but thought it looked ugly compared to the Rendition version. Technically the Verite had worse texture filtering, but I was used to the aliasing and thought the Voodoo looked overly smoothed. Back when 2d acceleration mattered Matrox was king. And you could always trust it'd drive even the most picky CRT at whatever refresh rate. You also could get the capture card with the Matrox Millenium and turn a Win95 pc into a legit video editing station, all be it hilariously limited vs today. I worked with a non profit briefly that did stop motion animation production with this setup. I was the first with a TNT2 at the big LAN party group in my area. The Voodoo2 SLI setups were still faster, but with the TNT2 you could do 16 bit color with a tweaked color map for id engine games, and it looked absolutely killer.
- rtra 1mo ago
rasz 1mo ago
>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.anandtech.com/show/195/4 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 G400 was surprisingly good, but it went downhill from there :( Only ATI could keep up with Nvidias aggressive release cycle.
matroxmemories 1mo ago
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.
BiraIgnacio 1mo ago
TIL about yet another once great tech or innovation originated in Canada!

193 points by BirAdam 1mo ago

bch 1mo ago

G400 was the first gfx card I cared about - dual head Debian bliss...

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.

SV_BubbleTime 1mo ago
Had the Millennium. Wanted the Riva TNT. I had also file-deleted both of those from my brain.
rbanffy 1mo ago
I’m not quite sure what their functionality is nowadays, but I remember Matrox parts being popular as minimal VGA controllers on servers.

brainless 1mo ago

Somewhere around early 2000, I used to work part-time with a local video editing agency. Matrox video capture cards were the really high bar, other than Avid. At least that is what I remember. We had a couple of Matrox capture cards, expensive for our tiny budget. Other than that and a few 3D cards also around that time, I forgot about Matrox.

zdw 1mo ago

When 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 graphics support. I forget which one I paid money for, but within a few years it wasn't necessary as open source had caught up.

prescriptivist 1mo ago
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 3D and were lapped in the Boot mag benchmarks for Quake 3D et al. I ended up with a 3D Labs Permidia 3D card anyway because I couldn't afford a Diamond or Voodoo and ended up turning textures off fully on Quake 3d in the end. Fun times, shout out Hard OCP.
- torh 1mo ago
  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.
  - mrweasel 1mo ago
    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 OpenBSD and enjoyed multi-monitor support.
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      There was nothing underlying X servers until about 2010. The X server was the lowest layer.
      - mrweasel 1mo ago
        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.

philxor 1mo ago

I had the original Matrox Millenium. Just threw out the old box a couple years ago when my parents sold their house. I remember driving like 50 miles to CDW will call to get it and being amazed at the 3D demo programs. I kept it for awhile but eventually got a 3DFX Voodoo card. And then a Voodoo Rush card that was a complete POS.

beached_whale 1mo ago

My first pc had some trident video card that failed right away and the local shop replaced with a millennium (g200, I think). I definitely got the better end of that one. It was 3d accelerated and came with some 3d text art tool that made animated text gifs in the software too.

hkhanna 1mo ago

I had the Matrox Marvel G200-TV I think in the late nineties. That graphics card was a beauty. It even let me watch TV on my computer as long as I threaded a coax cable up to my bedroom!

pstuart 1mo ago

Matrox Mystique for my first build. Free MechWarrior and plenty of time burned there. Good times. It can be startling how thousands of dollars of premium gear can become e-waste in short order.

LeBit 1mo ago

Je me souviens de passer régulièrement près du siège social dans le west island lorsque je travaillais à Montréal. Matrox était connu pour faire d’excellentes cartes pour le médical. Malheureusement, 3dfx était trop en avance pour les jeux.

hedgehog 1mo ago

I had I think a G400 and G450 in my desktop at work at different points around 2001 and my recollection is they had a reputation for high output quality (DAC and such).

abirkill 1mo ago

Founded 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 household name have lasted 50 years and are still majority-owned by all or some of the founders?

hosteur 1mo ago
SAS Institute is another. 50 years this year. And the founder still owns it fully.

danans 1mo ago

As an aside, I always found the clown on the Matrox boxes creepy - never made me want to buy the graphics card.

airspresso 1mo ago
It gave the card an aura of mystique (pun intended) and I remember really wanting it. I guess that means they succeeded in making a statement with it.

Animats 1mo ago

I had, briefly, some Matrox card with 3D acceleration on a DOS PC. It drove a PGA (Professional Graphics Adapter) monitor, a standard that predated VGA and went nowhere. The monitor was quite good but useless with anything else. For a time in the 1980s, I was writing drivers for graphics boards, and later doing 3D animation software. I tried a lot of graphics boards from now-forgotten vendors. Texas Instruments had the first PC RGB monitor and display that could display white text without color smear. The Wang Professional Image Computer was incompatible with everything else in PCs, with a different card form factor, a different monitor interface, and a different memory/device address layout that allowed 720KB of memory instead of 640KB. Plus their own version of DOS. Fujitsu lent me a prototype Fujitsu Sapphire, which never worked right. When I went to return it to their location in Sunnyvale, they'd moved out, shutting down their 3D graphics business. Dynamic Pictures had a decent 3D board, the Oxygen 202, that worked with NT 3.51. It took a while to get that working, but eventually it worked and I got 3D work done.

kerm1t__ 1mo ago

great read. I was with 3dfx however, yet for 2D matrox was the reference.

heshiming 1mo ago

I had a Millennium II PCI card. I remember its 32bit color mode (which not every card had at the time) was much faster than 24bit. Even though the card was expensive, it didn't have Direct3D acceleration like my classmate's Riva TNT (or 2?). So gaming wasn't impressive at all. At the time we were playing Need for Speed 2, I remember the image wasn't noticeably different than a 3DFX Voodoo. However, when Need for Speed 3 Hot Pursuit came out, Riva TNT could do realistic shading and reflection-like environment mapping on cars which was indeed a leap. One other thing I remember is that the graphics card had memory slots on it, like a socket for a chip. I think it was called 'WRAM', and its price was much more expensive than the card itself.

terhechte 1mo ago

In 2004 I was working in digital signage for museums and for one of them we needed to drive 16 displays from one computer. The article mentions this card: > On the 17th of December in 2004, the company announced the QIP LP PCIe where the QIP meant Quad Information Display. This was the industry’s first PCIe x16 graphics card, and it was a derivative of the Parhelia. [...] The card could drive four displays with a maximum resolution of 1600 by 1200 per display, I think we had 4 of these in one system and it was the only card on the market that allowed for this. We ran this on Linux and getting the bios set up correctly to support this was a nightmare. My memory is fuzzy though

herf 1mo ago

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. ;)

rasz 1mo ago
>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
- mrweasel 1mo ago
  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.
- bluGill 1mo ago
  > 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.
  - embedding-shape 1mo ago
    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.
    - bluGill 1mo ago

kev009 1mo ago

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.

EvanAnderson 1mo ago
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.
unixhero 1mo ago
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 https://www.octave.com/about/about

raggi 1mo ago

I have a friend whose wife has strong sight challenges. He once swapped a much newer and more powerful card with me for my last matrox card, iirc it was a millennium ii. The matrox utilities included with the drivers had one of the best desktop zoom systems ever delivered on windows and this was worth more to them than anything else.

mhd 1mo ago

I have some pretty fond memories of Matrox. Saw the Millennium at a trade fair, as pretty much the first sign that 3D will reach the PC segment (I also saw a SGI Onyx there). And later I got one as pretty much the most solid Linux graphics card, which even was capable of going dual screen. And while I don't miss XFree86 modeline configs, it was nice when there wasn't just a GPU triopoly.

gen2brain 1mo ago

My first association when someone mentions Matrox is MPlayer and mga_vid kernel module. I had G200, and hardware YUV acceleration worked perfectly. Direct access to hardware from MPlayer, it worked very nice, in console with `-vo mga` and in X11 with `-vo xmga`, there was no difference at all.

foft 1mo ago

Memories! Back at university I got a G400 and, with the open documentation they released, was able to make a driver for BeOS. It worked but looking back it’s stark how much I have learned since then. One feature I particularly love is a dual head setup app using combo boxes instead of menus! Th code is still online, in full early 2000s web styling. https://64kib.com/old_foft_site/ https://64kib.com/old_foft_site/

yankcrime 1mo ago

This brought back some really fond memories. Prior to the dawn of 3D accelerators from 3Dfx, Rendition, and eventually of course Nvidia, Matrox VGA cards were the absolute dogs bollocks when it came to gaming performance. They were the cards to have in your PC, especially the 220MHz RAMDAC version of the Millennium.

littlecranky67 1mo ago

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 were above 1000€) - because no one could use them with regular PC hardware. Using a single "sync_on_green" flag in my XFree86.conf file, and it would work flawlessly on my linux box.

pjmlp 1mo ago
PS2Linux required monitors able to do sync on green, which caught many that managed to get it, in for a surprise.
- wolrah 1mo ago
  Same with the early Xbox VGA mods.
ErroneousBosh 1mo ago
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.
- a96 1mo ago
  My memory says Sun used composite sync in the 13W3. I do remember making some cable mods as well to use monitors across Sun, Sgi, and a few other machines. Some used H+V, some C, some SOG. Maybe thankfully I no longer remember which ones were which after all.
  - ErroneousBosh 1mo ago

einpoklum 1mo ago

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.

fas_tm 1mo ago

Funny 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

Yokolos 1mo ago
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.
- fas_tm 1mo ago
  You’d be surprised how expensive this stuff is. Current X.mio5/DSX LE5 cards are roughly in the $4–8k+ range depending on configuration, and support/SDK contracts can easily add thousands per year. Broadcast hardware is a very different market from consumer GPUs.
BirAdam 1mo ago
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.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- fas_tm 1mo ago
  All good, it was an interesting read! I just wanted to add that these days Matrox is a very specialized topic, especially on the broadcast/AV side

fithisux 1mo ago

I wish they were cheaper.

speed_spread 1mo ago
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.

Theodores 1mo ago

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 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.

rasz 1mo ago
>OpenGL first real Matrox OpenGL driver shipped with G400 in 2000

felixfurtak 1mo ago

No mention of their ridiculous head casting product.

BirAdam 1mo ago
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.

tycoon666 1mo ago

The G200 had good open source Linux drivers back in the day

lproven 1mo ago

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.

altcognito 1mo ago
> 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.

georgeecollins 1mo ago

When 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.

qingcharles 1mo ago
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.
jasonwatkinspdx 1mo ago
I was just a teenager and enthusiastic LAN party participant back then, but also was learning the basics of 3d modeling, animation, and gamedev. The pre 3DFX era was kinda interesting. The first hardware accellerated game I saw was VQuake on the Rendition Verite 1000 or whatever the branding was. It blew me away. When the Voodoo1 came out I was shocked by the framerate, but thought it looked ugly compared to the Rendition version. Technically the Verite had worse texture filtering, but I was used to the aliasing and thought the Voodoo looked overly smoothed. Back when 2d acceleration mattered Matrox was king. And you could always trust it'd drive even the most picky CRT at whatever refresh rate. You also could get the capture card with the Matrox Millenium and turn a Win95 pc into a legit video editing station, all be it hilariously limited vs today. I worked with a non profit briefly that did stop motion animation production with this setup. I was the first with a TNT2 at the big LAN party group in my area. The Voodoo2 SLI setups were still faster, but with the TNT2 you could do 16 bit color with a tweaked color map for id engine games, and it looked absolutely killer.
rtra 1mo ago

rasz 1mo ago

>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.anandtech.com/show/195/4 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 G400 was surprisingly good, but it went downhill from there :( Only ATI could keep up with Nvidias aggressive release cycle.

matroxmemories 1mo ago

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.

BiraIgnacio 1mo ago

TIL about yet another once great tech or innovation originated in Canada!