My first pci card it was. I battled hard with my mate owning a millennium. Still have theae old benches on my disk 😀

The 968 was in line with the matrox mostly in 16-24bit dos bench’s. Maybe bottlenecked. Windows matrox mostly ahead
In 8bit without vesa 2.0 driver - no chance. With vesa 2.0 also quite close!

As for VGA- no chance against the matrox. Yes there is a 320x200 vesa Mode but only very few games make use of it. I only am aware of one game out of the dn3d engined games we you could choose between vga std Mode and vesa

Sure it was also good for Video for windows which I didn’t use. So money thrown out of the window in 1995 for 550DM if I remember

Marco wrote on 2021-10-15, 13:39:

As for VGA- no chance against the matrox.

No chance against Matrox in VGA?

That card has compatibility issues even in non-VESA stuff. Check Gona's list:
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

Besides Commander Keen (which many like to cherry pick) it has issues with Jazz Jackrabbit and obscure games, Matrox cards are great on Windows though.

Yes there is a 320x200 vesa Mode but only very few games make use of it. I only am aware of one game out of the dn3d engined games we you could choose between vga std Mode and vesa

Stargunner and DOS Quake are also good examples that can use VESA 2.0 320x200/240 with 8bpp and there is a handful of games that uses 15/16bpp in 320x200/240.