Voodoo 5 😜

Geforce256 😜

Matrox m3D. It really *SHOULD* have succeeded (OpenGL support, DirectX support, 32-bit 3D,) but Matrox driver support was slow and buggy.

I think it had enough success to muddle down the graphics quality of most games in 1998-99, so it did have an impact as much as Rage Pro did. A superfixed driver wouldn't do crap and its opengl was a limited minigl only functional for id tech2 stuff, and plus when Voodoo2 came out, it got frickin slaughtered back to the stone age.

It should be noted though, it is able to run OpenArena at high detail around 25fps at 1024x768x16, if you don't mind extremely bad polygon sorting 😀

Anonymous Freak wrote:

Matrox m3D. It really *SHOULD* have succeeded (OpenGL support, DirectX support, 32-bit 3D,) but Matrox driver support was slow and buggy.

It would have, if it was faster then 3Dfx Voodoo.

I loved my Aureal cards. They should have made it a little longer.

Mabye the Kyro II?

Matrox Parhelia

Anyone got one of those? I wonder how it holds up on legacy stuff

Says "Best" in the thread header, why is everyone keep bringing up Matrox products? 🤣

The Matrox G200 and the G400 had brief stardom in their perspective years.

yeah well, a powervr product never had a 'best' quality stuck to it. that parhelia is more fitting than anything else Matrox has ever done

Well, Voodoo 5 was pretty quick for it's time, had glide support and good image quality compared to what NV had at the time (which wasn't so hard to pull off, aamof), but it didn't save the company, now did it?

Nowdays, Voodoo 5's go for like €60+ while the contemporary GF2's are dirt cheap!

ATI rage fury MAXX - complete waste of resources, yet could have been awesome...

leileilol wrote:

Matrox Parhelia

Anyone got one of those? I wonder how it holds up on legacy stuff

I've always wondered about parhelias. Are there different versions or are they basically all the same? - prices on ebay are all over the place from £17 up to £350 or so. I guess it's still used professionally/commercially.

leileilol wrote:

Matrox Parhelia

It was terribly inefficient considering it was slower than a GeForce 4 Ti even though it had a crazy 4x4 pipeline design and a 256-bit bus. A few months after it came out, Radeon 9700 completely annihilated it.

Apparently it was rather buggy hardware. I remember there was an issue of some sort of flickering if you ran dual monitors and played video or something like that. And it obviously didn't clock as high as it should have. Matrox had lost a lot of their engineers to ATI and NVIDIA by the time Parhelia came out.

elfuego wrote:

ATI rage fury MAXX - complete waste of resources, yet could have been awesome...

Maybe if it hadn't been incompatible with Windows 2000/XP.

Tetrium wrote:

Voodoo 5 😜

There's no denying that Voodoo5 was perhaps the best overall choice for a lot of games. But it only had a small window until games started to use shader effects. A couple of years maybe.

EscapeVelocity wrote:

Mabye the Kyro II?

I think it was acceptable for maybe a year. Once the driver updates stopped and games started using shader effects you wouldn't have wanted to own one anymore.

bushwack wrote:

The Matrox G200 and the G400 had brief stardom in their perspective years.

They were buggy, particularly G200. Matrox also didn't have decent OpenGL support until like 1999. G200 was obsolete by the time they got it good and G400 had been around for almost a year! In the meantime they'd put out nasty things like a D3D-to-OpenGL wrapper and a miniGL called TurboGL. I was a Matrox guy back then and lived through both G200 and G400.

Better to have a Voodoo3 because of the buggy aspect. I seriously have converted into a 3dfx zealot because of how only a 3dfx card seems to be able to run everything properly.

leileilol wrote:

It should be noted though, it is able to run OpenArena at high detail around 25fps at 1024x768x16, if you don't mind extremely bad polygon sorting 😀

Is that art?! 😁

leileilol wrote:

Geforce256 😜

It did live on. GeForce 2 is essentially the same thing. 😉