Inb4 a mod locks this thread.

ODwilly wrote:

Inb4 a mod locks this thread.

What a weird derail of a thread.

I don't know - I like to filter through the emotional fluff and try to extract the core information. If you don't, you'll get caught up in people's sense of self-righteousness. You can also investigate just the fluff to gain some understanding for unfiltered human nature - more like viewpoint of online sociology. However, mixing both aspects together, it can get be a bit trying to read. I wasn't sure if I'd make it to page 5. I'm not criticising anyone's viewpoints or comments; I find it all relatively interesting in small doses. As I see it, both viewpoints have some merit. Might be better to let it keep rolling until the topic wears itself out. It can always be edited or deleted later if it gets too offensive.

I use the millennium in my socket 7 machine by the way, good card. Don't use it much in dos though.

vvbee wrote:

I use the millennium in my socket 7 machine by the way, good card. Don't use it much in dos though.

I also happen to have one but never used it. I have a Mystique 220 in my K6-2 SLI Win98SE build and an S3 Trio in my P133 DOS build. How is its DOS compatibility? It probably has great Win3.x drivers? Does it have any 3D acceleration under DOS for things like Screamer, Tomb Raider, Quake etc?

I only use it in win 98 and select dos titles with software rendering, so can't say. It accelerates solid polygons and that's it as far as I know but evidently can combine with software rendering for parts of the image. You wouldn't get it for 3d gaming unless for a specific title you knew was supported, and how many are those. The matrox version of tomb raider doesn't even run on my first-gen mystique even though it was made for the mystique line.

I don't think there was any game with acceleration for the Matrox Millennium.
There were a few titles for the Mystique. I had a first-gen one with 2 MB, and Tomb Raider worked fine, but only in 512x384 res iirc. 640x480 required 4 mb... Pretty much the story of my Mystique anyway: Direct3D support was there, in theory, but virtually anything failed to run with 2 MB.
DOS compatibility is reasonable. As in, the standard VGA functionality is supported quite well. SVGA not so much. You need UNIVBE to get decent VESA support, and even then I don't think you get anything below 640x480, which is annoying. At the time I was mainly interested in 320x200 or 320x240 in 16-bit or 32-bit truecolour. Matrox didn't offer support for those, unlike S3 Trio64 for example.
Some games supported 640x480 in 256 colours though, such as Need for Speed, and that worked great on the Matrox cards. They could showcase their excellent raw bandwidth.

There were Matrox Millennium accelerated games. The most well known is probably Papyrus' NASCAR Racing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bJGnzb0Asw

Edit: Well, okay, it turns out it was probably just NASCAR!

Probably more interesting to port a renderer to the millennium than to use it to run existing ones.

Well, I suppose there is no point left in actually using it in a build, it has worse DOS compatibility than an S3 Trio, and no 2D advantage over later Matrox PCI cards such as the Mystique/Millennium II/G100/G200?

I don't know, out of it and the mystique, g100 and g400 I've used, the millennium has the best 2d image. I haven't compared them side by side, it's just the impression I get.

In my newer via kt333 testbed the mystique has bad issues with certain settings. I think the related g100 is better for 3d in many ways.

appiah4 wrote:

Well, I suppose there is no point left in actually using it in a build

That depends... I do think it is faster than an S3 Trio, especially in 640x480 modes. It also obviously has better quality than an S3 Trio. And in the Pentum 60 era, SVGA software was quite rare anyway. The Millennium had enough of a reputation that a lot of SVGA software had specific support for it.
Besides, the Millennium was THE choice for Windows 3.x or Windows 95 back in the day.
It's much faster at accelerating Windows, and it has some important features for video playback for example.
When I upgraded my S3 Trio64 card to a Mystique in my P133, one of the big changes in Windows was that I could now play VideoCD and CDI movies in any resolution and any colour depth. Earlier I was limited to 640x480. Why? Because the Millennium and Mystique have hardware-accelerated YUY2-to-RGB conversion, complete with bilinear filtered upscaling. This meant that the CPU had less work to do, and upscaling was 'free', so the resolution no longer mattered. The CPU did not have to do more work for 1024x768 than it did for 640x480, because scaling was the only difference. The S3 Trio64 required the CPU to handle it, and a Pentium 133 simply wasn't fast enough.
My Mystique even came with a free SoftPEG video player, and Matrox included a high-quality MPEG video on the included CD to demonstrate its capabilities.
Here it is on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-ir8NS3sIrk

For me, this marked the move of changing from renting VHS movies to renting VideoCD (yea, digital video before DVD was a thing 😀).

appiah4 wrote:

and no 2D advantage over later Matrox PCI cards such as the Mystique/Millennium II/G100/G200?

Well clearly the later Millennium models supercede the original Millennium in every way. The Mystique is a budget verssion of the Millennium though, not quite as fast, and not quite as high quality (especially the original Mystique, which is why they later updated it with a 220 MHz RAMDAC instead of the original 170 MHz one).
But by that logic, there would be no reason to build a Pentium 60 machine either, since later Pentiums supercede the Pentium 60 in every way.

Anyway, every piece of hardware has its strengths and its weaknesses. It all depends on what you want to go for.

That video is impressive, I've never seen it in that quality before. Are you saying that a Millennium or Mystique can play this video at this quality on a Pentium 133 or so with the accompanying software? What's the resolution and other specs on that video? To my eyes this looks almost on par with DVD, so color me impressed!

In my personal experience, my father had a Matrox Millennium 2 4MB in his HP Vectra VL6 with a Pentium II 233, 64MB and NT4.0 back in 1997, while the rest of the family (mostly me and my brother) had to share a Pentium 133 with 16MB RAM and an S3 Virge alongside Windows 95. Because his system was so high end at the time and because of the "serious" OS, I always saw Matrox as "serious business" 🤣. I don't think the Millennium 2 (which the Mystique is based off of) had quite the impact in the mind share that the original Millennium had, but arguably it had greater impact in software support and it also offered Direct 3D up to D3D 5.0 (and 6.0 if you really stretched it out).
The original Millennium was indeed an amazing card back in 1995, which contributed to the mind share thing, a lot people just viewed them as the superior graphics card vendor for many many years, even though by the late 90's they got surpassed in many ways. Starting with 3D Acceleration, while the Millennium II and Mystique were somewhat fast, they lacked many features and while the G200 and especially the G400 were quite competitive in D3D, they suffered when it came to OpenGL games. I don't have to bring up any bad TurboGL memories I suppose 🤣 .
The one big thing they really did well was 2D IQ and performance, in which for many years they were untouchable. But 3Dfx and Nvidia (and ATi?) caught up with them for the most part around 1998. I can't tell a difference between a G400, a Voodoo3 and a (good) TNT/TNT2, although I'm sure there are differences to those who know where to look.
I guess they were kinda like 3Dfx in that way, they really made an amazing early impression, but within just a few years they were no longer top.

Oh I do own and use a Mystique 220 4MB in my K6-2 SLI PC, I think it is the best period correct 2D card for <=1998 systems. I just LOVE that card to bits. It is super bad for games though, has no texturing. It works great alongside a Voodoo 2 or SLI config though.

But it is not a great card for DOS, it does a good job for sure but it is not great. Anyway, I just asked because I have a Millennium in my collection (which I believe is a Millennium I 4MB, never tried using it before) and was wondering if there was any use for it that I didn't think of.. I would rather use an S3 or a Mystique 220 in its place under any use case scenario is all.

F2bnp wrote:

That video is impressive, I've never seen it in that quality before. Are you saying that a Millennium or Mystique can play this video at this quality on a Pentium 133 or so with the accompanying software? What's the resolution and other specs on that video? To my eyes this looks almost on par with DVD, so color me impressed!

Yes, that video will play at full framerate (I think it's either 50 or 60 fields per second) on a Pentium 133, perhaps even a slower machine.
I don't think it's quite DVD resolution though. Sadly I haven't been able to find my original driver CD in ages. I think someone borrowed it and never returned it.
There are images of a Matrox Mystique driver CD on archive.org, but sadly they do not appear to include the video.

appiah4 wrote:

But it is not a great card for DOS, it does a good job for sure but it is not great. Anyway, I just asked because I have a Millennium in my collection (which I believe is a Millennium I 4MB, never tried using it before) and was wondering if there was any use for it that I didn't think of.. I would rather use an S3 or a Mystique 220 in its place under any use case scenario is all.

Since the Mystique is basically just a more affordable, more consumer-oriented version of the Millennium, there's not much reason to use a Millennium if you also have the Mystique... at least, for consumer-oriented stuff. The Millennium will still be faster in terms of Windows acceleration, because of its faster (and more expensive) WRAM.

Scali wrote:

Yes, that video will play at full framerate (I think it's either 50 or 60 fields per second) on a Pentium 133, perhaps even a slower machine.
I don't think it's quite DVD resolution though. Sadly I haven't been able to find my original driver CD in ages. I think someone borrowed it and never returned it.
There are images of a Matrox Mystique driver CD on archive.org, but sadly they do not appear to include the video.

I own an original copy of the Mystique 220 driver CD, I can image it for you tonight if you want.

appiah4 wrote:

I own an original copy of the Mystique 220 driver CD, I can image it for you tonight if you want.

Sure, if it includes the MPEG video!

Scali wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

I own an original copy of the Mystique 220 driver CD, I can image it for you tonight if you want.

Sure, if it includes the MPEG video!

It should. I'll check tonight.

There's indeed a reason why I was dubious about the pentium 60 and millennium being a common combination, not least when the millennium was fresh. A cost-cut video option should be well more likely in that context.

That said, for gaming and related tasks, the niche for my millennium is software rendering and win 9x 2d. Not too common a build either and you need a decently fast cpu, more likely something from the late 90s than the mid ones.