Matrox cards before original Millenium were ill suited for DOS gaming. To such degree, that they had to specifically promote that Millenium cards were finally good for games.

But did they have any good points at all? I mean, Millennium (and I suppose the previous card too) had great VGA analog output quality and great GUI acceleration, what about that ISA version?

what about that ISA version

ISA = bad performance x2. Sure, you can use such card for productivity like CAD and smooth GUI, but what would be the point?

This card is unknown to me. I should have a VLB version somewhere but didn't play around with it much...

Anyway... there surely was a point for ISA at one time... But like this hobby of ours... what's the point with it? 🤣

But like this hobby of ours... what's the point with it?

Mostly games. I doubt that most vogoners (including me) are able or willing to "play" with stone age CAD on regular basis.

I do play with AutoCAD v10 to 13 from time to time 😉 But mostly I play with old hardware... games very rarerly...

I suppose that having some Autocad real hw acceleration for the 3D stuff might have done some differences back in those days probably when it was "rendering time" at the end of the project. I remember first time I've used Autocad the machines were AMD 486@120Mhz and W95 (first time I have seen this o.s. too) in the lab and the software came with many many floppies I remember the professor had to install. The version was the v12. What a great application, I suppose anything could have been done with that sw compared to nowdays requirements for similar app.

But the idea more than having a CAD oriented machine I'd not be able to use anymore (who remembers it), would be more having a feature advanced vga with even useless features but still.. advanced. Like the Mach64 we can't really say that in the ISA version is worth its price... but still is impressive that chip has been built into a ISA card for who didn't have VLB/PCI bus. It sort of remember those Overdrive cpu solution, back in those times it might have been awesome to be able to push those systems so much starting from a 486SX@25 and maybe ending up with a (sort of) Pentium. 😁
And after all.. the Matrox vga output quality has always been great... the Millennium PCI is still great on a 4:3 LCD nowdays for its image quality, stability, colors.. not to mention all the other cards that came after that with the analog vga output.

Just checked and I have Matrox MGA Ultima 2MB VLB card. Unless Impression is hiding somewhere 🤣

would be more having a feature advanced vga with even useless features but still.. advanced.

Once again. Matrox cards before Millenium series were pretty much useless as "VGA cards" and ISA bus doesn't help that either.

I would imagine that the VGA core in these impressions can be disabled, and you can tie them to a good VGA card with the feature connector. I would think the performance should be similar to a Mach64 in Windows.