
Matrox History: A Computer Graphics Also-Ran’s Second Life - achairapart
https://tedium.co/2019/04/23/matrox-graphics-history/
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chaoticmass
I'll recount this story just for the sake of nostalgia.

Over the summer of 2001 or so I was having fun just writing little programs in
VB5 while staying at my Dad's house. I wrote a flashy looking MP3 player
(basically a front end for Windows Media player I embedded into the project)
which made extensive use of native Windows GUI API. All the animations were
smooth and fast. I felt pretty good about myself. When summer was over I went
back home and found that my MP3 player animations didn't run smooth on my PC.
Slow, janky, lots of flickering. What the hell? Turns out my Dad's PC had a
Matrox card in it and was massively faster at 2D rendering than my PC.

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souprock
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.

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tempguy9999
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.

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armitron
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
Matrox Millenium with Topaz were great together for rendering in DOS.

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ryandrake
Wow, nice article. My first real job out of university was to help improve
Matrox’s lagging-behind OpenGL driver for the G200 through G450. Most of this
driver’s development was done in the Boca Raton FL office (across from the old
IBM building). Great team, great memories. This is where I cut my teeth on
performance programming topics like hand coded assembly, page faults, cache
hits and misses, etc. Lots of Quake ‘beta testing’ done after hours :) What
really sank their 3D ship was it took too long to get Parhelia out, which the
article touches on. I didn’t get any whif of them not being serious about 3D
and wanting to give up—the damn chip just took too long and NVIDIA got there
first.

We actually barely got the G450 OpenGL driver competitive with the competing
GeForce (or was it the TNT2?), at least on the major games, but it was also
too late.

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jedberg
My nostalgic Matrox story -- I was maybe 12 when I got a Matrox card that I
needed support for. I called the support number and waited on hold for about
45 minutes, then talked to the rep and got my problem solved!

Of course this was 1989, when the phone company charged you for long distance,
and _really_ charged you for calls to other countries. I had _no idea_ that
you could call another country without dialing a bunch of numbers, so I just
assumed it would fall under our domestic long distance plan.

I could have bought another video card for the price of that phone call!

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antod
Reminds me of updating the AutoCAD DOS video drivers for an S3 card back in
the early/mid 90s. Our choices were Compuserve or dialing the company's BBS
(calling the US from NZ). I think even with the international toll call we
still chose the BBS on price, but it was still a very expensive download for a
small firm.

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brandonmenc
The G450 dual-head card was _the_ card to have for Linux in the early 2000s,
imo.

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tamentis
I remember having to compile drivers to get a /dev/mga device file that would
be used to play videos with mplayer smoothly, which had a dedicated output
option for mga at that time.

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jamiewildehk
I had a G450 hooked up to my big old CRT using mplayer to watch my terrible
anime shows. Nothing could touch the quality of Matrox on a CRT.

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jandrese
Most of the time I run into Matrox cards today it's a cut down G200 in a
rackmount server designed to run only a primitive text console. Sometimes a
poor soul will attempt to get X up on those things only to discover that the
hardware is so crippled that it can't do better than 800x600 without artifacts
and crashing. It's really kind of impressive that OEMs have managed to source
a part that is so much worse than the card you could buy off of the shelf for
$50 in 1997.

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rayiner
It's integrated into the IPMI controller and not meant to do anything more
than a remote management console.

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Zenst
Some comments on
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578858)
from people who worked at Matrox in their hayday of being a competitor in the
3D graphics race. Hopefully they will spot this and add some more.

~~~
ryandrake
Added my experience as a base level comment. Cheers!

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ThJ
You often come across Matrox products when you look for video capture cards
and the like. I was surprised the first time I saw a Matrox video capture card
in the Amazon listings, because I thought Matrox was dead, and it was a name I
hadn't seen since the mid-90s.

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bluedino
I remember using them for 4, 6 and 8 display systems in the early 2000's,
right around when people were just starting to use dual monitors.

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yurymik
In the mid 2000-s we were researching what video card to use for a product
with very long life time and extremely tedious certification. Once completed,
you can't replace one component with another without invalidating the
certificate. While both Ati and Nvidia would offer better performance and
features, Matrox was the only supplier promising to keep stock for the next 10
or so years.

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astrodust
ATI had an infuriating tendency to make their cards as impossible to identify,
visually, as possible. Two different cards of the same model sold a year apart
might have little in common.

Matrox may not have had cutting-edge cards, but you could at least tell what
card you had.

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patrickg_zill
Not only that but they would change the behavior of a chip between revisions,
so drivers for one revision, if they didn't take into account the changes,
would suddenly stop working even though you bought the same ( but unknown to
you, newer) version of the card.

(source: me, who worked at a company that made commercial Linux drivers for
Matrox, ATI,NeoMagic etc. chips )

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snowwindwaves
I have just spent 4 or 6k on a matrox card and little device that will
send/receive KVVVM over fibre. To be used in a power station so the computer
can sit in a rack on the other side of the room instead of on the desk beside
the 3 monitors. Not why it is worth that much money not to have a tower on or
under the desk. Maybe somebody accidentally unplugged the tower once.

~~~
sbr464
How well did it work out? For complex viz/performance specifically.

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protomyth
Matrox was the easiest card to get working with most anything. I had one in my
NeXTSTEP box and it was amazing. I miss something that had such support.

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nickpeterson
Boy I wish there were more quirky workstations available these days.

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paddy_m
I had a matrox card on my 486 dx4 120. This would have been around 95-97. I
remember matrox being the best for 2d acceleration. Back then the voodoo cards
were brand new and rare.

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laythea
It seems by focusing on 2D and not 3D applications, Matrox have successfully
"dodged a bullet", in terms of the competition out there for 3D. Good move.

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mycall
I can't believe how Black Magic has been eating Matrox's lunch lately, but I
still love Matrox's SDK. One of the best.

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agumonkey
Back when 4MB was a whole universe

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classichasclass
The GXT135P console graphics card in my IBM POWER6 server is a rebadged Matrox
G450.

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01100011
They also make SDI video cards for studio video applications. I worked on a
DVR-like device which used their 8-port SDI card for I/O. They have an
interesting graph-based API. The cards work well enough I guess.

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jefft255
I used one of their camera this year. Cool API for classical 2D vision, there
was an onboard intel computer to perform processing on the camera itself. Did
not turn out to be well suited for what I wanted sadly.

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SlowRobotAhead
Whew, a lot of nostalgia in here. I forgot I had a Matrox Millennium.

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EliRivers
The company I work for as I type fits and ships Matrox cards into Dell servers
for our customers, and routinely write software to give them a damn good
thrashing. They are good cards.

~~~
walterbell
Do those Matrox GPUs support IOMMU/VFIO passthrough to Windows or Linux VMs?

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reilly3000
Matrox reminds me of Sam and Max. Good times.

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pimlottc
TL;DR

 _“Today, we have three basic areas of strength,” Trottier said. “With
computer graphics, we’re strong in display walls and public information
displays. With television production, when you watch any sports on the nightly
news, sports or election results, our cards are in the bowels of what you see.
We’re also strong in machine vision. The latest flavor there is deep learning
and we’re getting into that via the algorithms we’re developing.”_

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mzkply
Quebec is not a suburb of Montreal but actually the province (Canadian
equivalent of a U.S. State) in which Montreal is.

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stdbrouw
> the company is based in Quebec, _in_ a suburb of Montreal

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dekhn
absolutely _loved_ my Matrox cards during the 2D era. Great quality and speed.

