Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
abortretry.failI 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
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?
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.
Had the Millennium. Wanted the Riva TNT. I had also file-deleted both of those from my brain.
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.
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.
G400 was the first gfx card I cared about - dual head Debian bliss...
As an aside, I always found the clown on the Matrox boxes creepy - never made me want to buy the graphics card.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
great read. I was with 3dfx however, yet for 2D matrox was the reference.
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.