auron wrote:

what's interesting is that according to gona's compatibility matrix, matrox cards past the original millennium have tearing issues in duke3d and quake: https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

This depends on the BIOS version IIRC.

Scali wrote:

The Matrox Mystique was my first 3D accelerator. As a 2D card it was quite decent. Good performance in DOS and Windows, and exce […]
Show full quote

The Matrox Mystique was my first 3D accelerator.
As a 2D card it was quite decent. Good performance in DOS and Windows, and excellent display quality. Especially the acceleration for video playback was quite good for the time (it had support for hardware-accelerated YUV overlays with bilinear filtered upscaling). The VBE implementation was a bit limited, so using UniVBE is recommended in some cases.
As a 3D card it is rather limited. It has no bilinear filtering, which is an interesting tradeoff that Matrox made. The result is that the 3D performance itself is quite good, but it looks more 'software rendered' than other accelerators. However, if you compare it to an S3 Virge, which was targeting the same market at the time... The Virge did have bilinear filtering, so it looked nice and smooth, but performance was very poor, sometimes even slower than software rendering.

From what I recall, the stability of the 3D rendering was excellent, with good subpixel/subtexel accuracy, and it also had a decent implementation of dithered 'alphablending'. Tomb Raider played very well on it.
For Direct3D games you really want the 4 MB model. I had the 2 MB model, which was too limited for most Direct3D games.

@scali
the MGA 100 is not compatible with the mystique stuff? it's perhaps a "generic" d3d renderer?

I love the matrox mystique, it's a excellent card. the build quality is fine so is the vga output. Lot's of drivers for different OS (Win3x/9x/OS2/NT..)
It's much much faster than my RageIIc onboard on my Scovery-212 system and it has some acceleration in amithlon (picasso96 screenmodes, nice!)
Beside the MSI games there are some Direct3D titles that support the mystique directly. If you know more, please let me know!

- DirectX2 ResidentEvil1
- DirectX3 Dungeon Keeper D3D
- DirectX3 POD
- DirectX5 WingCommander5 D3D
- DirectX6 ResidentEvil2

What I am not fully aware of is the real difference on "software-rendering" vs. "direct-draw" vs. "direct3d" on such a card.
Visually it's all the same because there are no exclusive features visible in direct3d.

A good example is POD...there is:
- PODMMX (=mmx and windows)
- WINPOD (=windows direct-draw?)
- POD3D3 (Pod D3D3)
- POD3D5 (Pod D3D5)

One recommendation:
- If you choose 8Bit mode in Dune 2000 you get really smooth scrolling (agp cards like rageIIc, RagePro can do that in 16Bit) No other strategy-game has that smooth scrolling (C&C series, ...)

Doc