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Comment by herf | Hacker News Reader

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. ;)

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I would play this demo for days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuHy9geQPB0

>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

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.

> 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.

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.

Zork. I'm not a gamer.

What 2D applications you use that don't make use of textures, alpha blending or transparency? ;) Good luck doing CAD without them!

I specifically said I don't do CAD. My IDE doesn't need all those special effects. Nor does my web browser - I'm happy with what lynx can do as a web browser for most things since I want information not pretty.

As a broke teenager, I came to have a G400 much later on in its lifecycle (c. 2007-2008). It did indeed have amazing analogue output quality (kids these days think VGA is inherently blurry, but it can be pretty much indistinguishable from DVI/HDMI if your graphics adapter has a good RAMDAC and you connect the monitor with a high-quality cable). However, my experience with the 3D drivers was pretty consistently terrible. I suspect the card was getting much less QA attention by that point, because one driver release would have broken OpenGL support, the next would break Direct3D, and so on. Very obviously not consumer-focused cards. I remember it extremely fondly nonetheless! Multi-monitor support was not common then, and that card was extremely formative to my lifelong thirst for desktop real estate.

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