Matrox History: A Computer Graphics Also-Ran’s Second Life | Hacker News Reader

Matrox History: A Computer Graphics Also-Ran’s Second Life

tedium.co

103 pointsachairapart47 comments

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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!

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.

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

Matrox cards were awesome. With the right Trinitron monitor you could have 2048x1536 resolution @85Hz refresh rate. there would be no jitter or color irregularites to worry about. just pixels displayed as specified, no fuss, no muss.

If you could source the adapter cables and play with modelines deeper, a Matrox card could drive nearly any CRT you cared to hook up.

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.

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.

I remember buying a Matrox dual-head used around 2003 and being incredibly excited putting it into a frankentower alongside the integrated graphics and an old VGA card, giving me two "high resolution" monitors and two peripheral ones: https://www.jefftk.com/college-multihead-linux.jpg

The card wasn't well supported by Gentoo, and every time I rebuilt the kernel, which was surprisingly often, there was an awkward manual step involving copying over something for the HAL.

EDIT: found the docs -- https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-60278-start-0.html

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.

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

Some comments on 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.

Added my experience as a base level comment. Cheers!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 )

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I got my first computer in 1996. I knew very little about computers but I knew I needed a "3d card" for games.

I bought a Matrox Mystique at the store. I knew nothing about 3dfx, OpenGL, Direct3D. I just knew I needed a 3D card.

The only thing it ran were the games came with and a handful of titles. It never ran GLQuake at all which became my favorite game. Total waste. Was a lot of money for 14 year old me.

I learned my lesson and researched the shit out of everything I bought after that.

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.

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.

Back when 4MB was a whole universe

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Matrox reminds me of Sam and Max. Good times.

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.”

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

They meant Dorval, that's a suburb of Montreal.

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

People who live on Montreal would argue it is.

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

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