Would you like to see Matrox back in gaming?
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tweakboy
Diamond Member
They were never in gaming to begin with. Unless you call side scrolling 2D or Doom 1 a game.
Matrox makes graphic workstation cards and not gaming cards. They said it themselves their market is for the consumer user. Using company made apps or Word or Outlook A lot of execs like to go dual monitor also. Matrox has nothing to do with gaming and no they will not start making GPU gaming cards. The Millenium I had 15 years ago was nice but times have changed. Just how IBM exited the hard drive making since all their drives were messed up and would brake down. Thanks and gb,
Matrox makes graphic workstation cards and not gaming cards. They said it themselves their market is for the consumer user. Using company made apps or Word or Outlook A lot of execs like to go dual monitor also. Matrox has nothing to do with gaming and no they will not start making GPU gaming cards. The Millenium I had 15 years ago was nice but times have changed. Just how IBM exited the hard drive making since all their drives were messed up and would brake down. Thanks and gb,
Even though they did offer products capable of gaming unlike what tweakboy seems to be saying, I never thought of them as a legitimate contender.
Their biggest and last shot at trying to do anything significant in the gaming sector was Parhelia and that was a huge flop.
Their biggest and last shot at trying to do anything significant in the gaming sector was Parhelia and that was a huge flop.
They attempted to get back into 3d gaming one time and their cards released were horrible and their drivers were buggy. They immediately went back to creating cards for business.
- Apr 23, 2000
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I hear what you are saying ,on the plus side they did have the best 2D image quality and as for drivers well ATi use to have bad drivers many years ago but they turned that around and have improved a lot over the years.
Matrox probably could make decent drivers but it would take them years to catchup with Nvidia/AMD on the hardware front, not to meantion the cost involved.
3dfx was the Pioneer that made 3D accelerated graphics catch on and take off. I bought a voodoo1, banshee, and voodoo2 back in the day. They stagnated rather incredibly after Voodoo2 though. The Vodoo3, 4, and 5 was essentially the voodoo2 core(s) with banshee's 2D graphics. If they would not have purchased STB and been so lavish with their corporate trips, who knows if they would have reattained their greatness.
Their commercials rocked too.
Their commercials rocked too.
Matrox was never really known for 3D gaming, at least I can't recall any time they were considered a contender. The GPUs people cared about were from Rendition (briefly, mostly for Mechwarrior 2?), 3DFX, nvidia and ATI.
Actually, back around the Banshee time frame they had some decent cards for gaming.
Of the cards available in that time, I went with Matrox (Millenium ?) card as it benched very competitively with what was available.
Being a Montreal native, and seeing the Matrox building everyday going to/from work, yes. It would be pure nostalgia seeing them with a gaming card.
MentalIlness
Platinum Member
- Nov 22, 2009
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Schmide
Diamond Member
- Mar 7, 2002
- 5,745
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Dude? Honestly stop making this crap up! Matrox was the first card to do surface displacement mapping! I guess you didn't go to the GDC 1999? There were many big presentations by Matrox.
Tsavo
Platinum Member
- Sep 29, 2009
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Matrox had really nice hardware construction wise. I had the Millenium II coupled to Voodoo II's in SLI...good stuff. Then I got a Voodoo 3 which seemed to be built on discarded cardboard in comparison the to MII.
I also briefly had a G200 and I don't remember a thing about it.
I also briefly had a G200 and I don't remember a thing about it.
FalseChristian
Diamond Member
- Jan 7, 2002
- 3,322
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My 1st 3D accelerator was a 8MB Matrox M3D using PowerVR. It was the 1st time that I ever saw a 3D accelerated game (GLQuake). It blew my mind!
solofly
Banned
- May 25, 2003
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Actually (sit down and let grandpa tell you a little story) Matrox was at the top of the gaming graphics market for a while.
Their G200 was competing head-on with the fastest cards of the time, and the G400 was actually the fastest card at its release... but it was eclipsed by the GeForce soon after.
Sure, Matrox wasn't on top for very long, but they have been there.
But what made Matrox special was that they were always innovating. They were the first to have bumpmapping (EMBM, as opposed to the dot3 that the GeForce offered later), they were the first to have vertex texturing (that's displacement-mapping for you who don't know what it is), they were the company that gave you dualhead, triplehead and quadruple-head.... And another thing is that they were always obsessed with image quality. Both in rendering quality (texture filtering, nicely dithered alphablending), and in the analog output signal of the card. My first GeForce was a complete shock after using Matrox cards for years, because of its blurry image quality.
Matrox was also an innovator in the acceleration of video decoding, being one of the first to offer hardware YUY2 conversion and bilinear-filtered upscaling. This made a huge impact on me at the time, because my lowly Pentium 133 could suddenly play a VideoCD (yes, we didn't have DVDs yet) at full framerate in 1024x768 (and possibly higher resolutions, but we didn't have a monitor capable of those)... And you got that smooth bilinear filtered look, instead of the blocky software scalers at the time. CPUs weren't fast enough to scale up to 1024x768, not even with ugly blocky scaling algorithms. So you were basically stuck in 640x480, unless you had a fancy card like the Matrox.
So yes, I would very much like to see Matrox back in the game. But I don't think it is going to happen. They fell way behind, and it seems impossible to catch up.
Their G200 was competing head-on with the fastest cards of the time, and the G400 was actually the fastest card at its release... but it was eclipsed by the GeForce soon after.
Sure, Matrox wasn't on top for very long, but they have been there.
But what made Matrox special was that they were always innovating. They were the first to have bumpmapping (EMBM, as opposed to the dot3 that the GeForce offered later), they were the first to have vertex texturing (that's displacement-mapping for you who don't know what it is), they were the company that gave you dualhead, triplehead and quadruple-head.... And another thing is that they were always obsessed with image quality. Both in rendering quality (texture filtering, nicely dithered alphablending), and in the analog output signal of the card. My first GeForce was a complete shock after using Matrox cards for years, because of its blurry image quality.
Matrox was also an innovator in the acceleration of video decoding, being one of the first to offer hardware YUY2 conversion and bilinear-filtered upscaling. This made a huge impact on me at the time, because my lowly Pentium 133 could suddenly play a VideoCD (yes, we didn't have DVDs yet) at full framerate in 1024x768 (and possibly higher resolutions, but we didn't have a monitor capable of those)... And you got that smooth bilinear filtered look, instead of the blocky software scalers at the time. CPUs weren't fast enough to scale up to 1024x768, not even with ugly blocky scaling algorithms. So you were basically stuck in 640x480, unless you had a fancy card like the Matrox.
So yes, I would very much like to see Matrox back in the game. But I don't think it is going to happen. They fell way behind, and it seems impossible to catch up.
Sylvanas
Diamond Member
- Jan 20, 2004
- 3,752
- 0
- 0
I was thinking of the past here at AT and the good old days of Nvidia,ATI,Matrox.
I miss them and I bet some of you guys do too,I really would like to see them come back into the gaming market but my heart knows that won't ever happen.
I would welcome anyone that could produce a competitive product to challenge AMD/Nv for the sake of competition= better. I'd also like to see a subjective test with a Matrox card and a modern day vid card to see if this 'they had better 2D' is true. IMO it's probably just placebo effect/nostalgia.
They really did have better 2D (together with ATi back when they still made their own cards).
But why compare with a modern card?
We have DVI now, which takes signal quality out of the equation.
Aside from that, the display output logic was integrated into the GPU itself, at around the Radeon 9700 era (when Matrox was already out of the race anyway), to cut out the middle-man... the OEM that messed up the signal quality by using cheap output filters.
So no, an old Matrox card won't be better than today's cards, but they certainly were better back in the day. Not sure why you would even doubt it, it was very common knowledge. Anyone who's ever tried running high resolutions/refresh rates on a poor videocard knows exactly what the added value of a Matrox was (or a good ATi for that matter). Blurry text, noise patterns running across the screen etc.
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Tsavo
Platinum Member
- Sep 29, 2009
- 2,645
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It wasn't placebo or nostalgia. Nvidia board partners had some pretty bad 2D back in the day. The Riva 128 was ugly inside and out. Cheap TNT's with crappy components put out the fuzz, too. Canopus had nice gear, though.
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