Yeah, they haven't been focusing on the gamer/consumer market for a long time now.

3D Graphics Cards have become really REALLY boring with just AMD and nvidia putting out refresh after refresh.

On one hand I love how everything is standardized nowadays but on the other hand I miss the exciting early days of 3d acceleration 😉

snorg wrote:

So I thought I'd check and see if Matrox is still around because I haven't seen diddly from them in ages, and it looks like their website is still active.
I guess they just do multi-monitor 2d products now? I didn't see any 3d stuff.

That's all they've been doing for a long time, specialised multi-monitor solutions and commercial KVM type stuff.

They're out of the game for consumer graphics now that picture quality is basically a moot point.

Back in the day when people were still using analogue connections (D-SUB) and tube monitors, Matrox had a clear edge in picture quality. I remember when the Millennium G400, Voodoo3 and TNT2 were pretty much neck-to-neck in performance. However, an increase in the resolution of your desktop beyond 1024x768 and it soon became clear for roughly the same money Matrox was giving you a double deal compared to the other two.

With DVI and HDMI the picture quality (not rendering quality, mind you) now completely depends on the monitor.

Times change. Matrox was smart enough to recognize that they could not keep up with nVidia and ATI. They found their niche and have stuck to it. Kudos.

I do remember in the 2D DOS days that Matrox was the go-to card to have. I would brag about my one-two combo of Matrox and VooDoo. I still have a few PCI versions laying around.

I also have a whole pile of G200 AGP cards laying around the office. Perhaps I should ebay them some day.

I think it was right after the G400 and G400 MAX that they started laying people off, because they started to realize they just couldn't keep up. People were expecting the next big thing from them for a few years until the Parhelia came out.
The Parhelia was not meant to compete in terms of performance though, but be a relatively fast card with triple monitor support. At least that's how I view it in retrospect. Certainly an odd beast. I'm pretty sure they had no desire to compete with Nvidia or ATi at the time.

I certainly feel nostalgic about Matrox. My dad had a Millennium II on his Pentium II workstation (this was in 1997!) and I'm also quite fond of the Mystique.

F2bnp wrote:

I think it was right after the G400 and G400 MAX that they started laying people off, because they started to realize they just couldn't keep up. People were expecting the next big thing from them for a few years until the Parhelia came out.
The Parhelia was not meant to compete in terms of performance though, but be a relatively fast card with triple monitor support. At least that's how I view it in retrospect. Certainly an odd beast. I'm pretty sure they had no desire to compete with Nvidia or ATi at the time.

I certainly feel nostalgic about Matrox. My dad had a Millennium II on his Pentium II workstation (this was in 1997!) and I'm also quite fond of the Mystique.

Parhelia also has such nice things like Edge Anti-Aliasing, where you can have very smooth edge without sacrificing frame rate too much because you only anti-alias polygon edges. Is that what became MSAA in other cards?

No, MSAA is a bit different. Unlike FSAA, not everything is supersampled, but it is not specific to edges. Also, edge anti-aliasing is done by older cards as well, although I'm not sure if you could just flip a switch on the control panel and have it work on every game. But it is present in the Rendition Verite V1000 for example, VQuake makes good use of that.

3dfx has edge AA too. Look at the 3dfx logo that plays when you start a Glide game. I'm not sure if any games used it though.

Matrox's Fragment AA is neat in that it's fast and it's very good at eliminating poly edge aliasing. But it has problems. It misses polygon intersections like older edge AA solutions did too (ex Verite and N64), and it has problems with stencil shadows.

Parhelia was certainly meant to be a decent gaming card but it came too late. Even when it did launch it had some problems that needed to be fixed in a new chip revision.

Mystery wrote:

Yeah, they haven't been focusing on the gamer/consumer market for a long time now.

3D Graphics Cards have become really REALLY boring with just AMD and nvidia putting out refresh after refresh.

On one hand I love how everything is standardized nowadays but on the other hand I miss the exciting early days of 3d acceleration 😉

intel is upping thier game some.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris … i74950hq-tested

Tomb Raider 3Dfx does Edge-Antialiasing actually! We found out in another thread, I think it was d1stortion that linked to an old message group with people bragging about their shiny new Pentium Pro and Lara's titties 🤣

Matrox also have a pro video division for video capture and editing plus they sold cards for medical devices (reading x-rays on a high res monochrome monitor for example). So they sold some hardware into high value areas.

If I had to guess I would say a short lived boom in gaming cards was just icing on the cake for them while they made a living selling hardware in other areas. They have been around for a long time. I do wonder how long they will be around since demand for their products in the other niche areas is probably dying out.

F2bnp wrote:

Tomb Raider 3Dfx does Edge-Antialiasing actually! We found out in another thread, I think it was d1stortion that linked to an old message group with people bragging about their shiny new Pentium Pro and Lara's titties 🤣

That would've been me 😜

Here is the thread with screens: Tomb Raider. Which version is he playing?

Hehe sorry about that, got it mixed up 😁.

The 3Dfx logo splash has always looked gorgeous , no wonder it does edge-antialiasing!

Found this while sorting through a box of random parts I got today.

https://imageshack.com/i/n8vf42j Never seen a Matrox and scsi combo before on a single card.

F2bnp wrote:

No, MSAA is a bit different. Unlike FSAA, not everything is supersampled, but it is not specific to edges. Also, edge anti-aliasing is done by older cards as well, although I'm not sure if you could just flip a switch on the control panel and have it work on every game. But it is present in the Rendition Verite V1000 for example, VQuake makes good use of that.

I see.

swaaye wrote:

3dfx has edge AA too. Look at the 3dfx logo that plays when you start a Glide game. I'm not sure if any games used it though.

Matrox's Fragment AA is neat in that it's fast and it's very good at eliminating poly edge aliasing. But it has problems. It misses polygon intersections like older edge AA solutions did too (ex Verite and N64), and it has problems with stencil shadows.

Parhelia was certainly meant to be a decent gaming card but it came too late. Even when it did launch it had some problems that needed to be fixed in a new chip revision.

Too bad, it looks very nice with 16x Edge AA - and the frame rate doesn't suffer as much.

I wonder why Edge AA isn't adopted anymore. You can still combine it with other methods of AA; MSAA or SSAA for everything else, and Edge AA for polygon edges that do not intersect.

F2bnp wrote:

I think it was right after the G400 and G400 MAX that they started laying people off, because they started to realize they just couldn't keep up. People were expecting the next big thing from them for a few years until the Parhelia came out.
The Parhelia was not meant to compete in terms of performance though, but be a relatively fast card with triple monitor support. At least that's how I view it in retrospect. Certainly an odd beast. I'm pretty sure they had no desire to compete with Nvidia or ATi at the time.

I certainly feel nostalgic about Matrox. My dad had a Millennium II on his Pentium II workstation (this was in 1997!) and I'm also quite fond of the Mystique.

The original GeForce came out around the same time as the G400 and the Radeon 9700 hit store shelves around the same time as Parhelia so Matrox really didn't have enough time to establish a foothold in the market with either one. nVidia and ATi ran away with it from there. Parhelia was also an inferior product to not only Radeon 9700 but also the GeForce4 Ti. They never stood a chance.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I wonder why Edge AA isn't adopted anymore. You can still combine it with other methods of AA; MSAA or SSAA for everything else, and Edge AA for polygon edges that do not intersect.

I think that's because it is not really needed anymore. You can get better results with SMAA and other types of AA (post-AA also works great, look at SMAA) without that much of an impact in performance.

S3 still makes videocards
http://www.s3graphics.com

Stretch wrote:

S3 still makes videocards
http://www.s3graphics.com

Yeah, but try finding one for sale. This is the first and only one I have ever found.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Qimonda-S3-Chrome-512 … =item5662a26482