dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-09-13, 08:13:

Does anybody use a P650/750 for Retro-Gaming on Win2K/Xp? How good is such a card?
Does the matrox reef-demo still work on P650/750 even if the specs are much lower as on the original Parhelia512.

Had a P750 decades ago. Found it hardly faster than G400Max (and definitely slower than an FX5200) - except at very low resolutions - but with worse drivers. Still, that would have been around 2005-2006, so possibly drivers have improved.

As for Reef demo: https://youtu.be/nY0eBZLLJgw

Thank you. Interesting!

You would be better off with a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500. They are faster and more compatible.

swaaye wrote on 2021-09-13, 23:50:

You would be better off with a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500. They are faster and more compatible.

...but not as novel, if that's what you're after. I like Matrox; I like novel, but everytime I've put in a Matrox card for 3D use and benchmarked it against the competition, I eventually pulled out the Matrox. I may have some Quake2 benchmarks results somewhere with all the Matroxes (Mystique 220 thru to P750). If if sufficient interest, I can create a new one, like all the Matroxes on a Tualatin.

I had a Matrox maybe a G400, though could have been a 200, I vaguely remember testing it, admiring the nice crisp high desktop res I could get out of it, and finding games ran about like one of the less desirable GF2 MX models (IDK a SDRAM 200 with factory underclock for zero cooling say) then going right back to my GF3... (Which was the plan anyway, was just verifying the card worked I guess). It hasn't emerged out of "the pile" yet in recent times, so unsure of it's fate at the moment. Will have to think of a niche for it when it does... I've got a Compaq Qvision Q210 it could be all high res and sexy on, but I might want that for games.

feipoa wrote on 2021-09-14, 01:11:

swaaye wrote on 2021-09-13, 23:50:

You would be better off with a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500. They are faster and more compatible.

...but not as novel, if that's what you're after. I like Matrox; I like novel, but everytime I've put in a Matrox card for 3D use and benchmarked it against the competition, I eventually pulled out the Matrox. I may have some Quake2 benchmarks results somewhere with all the Matroxes (Mystique 220 thru to P750). If if sufficient interest, I can create a new one, like all the Matroxes on a Tualatin.

I’d be interested!

feipoa wrote on 2021-09-14, 01:11:

swaaye wrote on 2021-09-13, 23:50:

You would be better off with a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500. They are faster and more compatible.

...but not as novel, if that's what you're after.

Rather not as common? It is hard to beat those two in terms of novelty.

I really like the "Underdogs". Therefore I bought the P650. I'll check it in a Shuttle XPC.

P650 Great 2D dualhead card. 3D? About G550 level...

P750 and Parhelia added triple-head support, which is nothing special now, but was as ground-breaking when they appeared as dualhead was when G400 did it (Miro Twin cards and CGA+Hercules combo notwithstanding 😉 )

That might have been why I picked mine up in the first place, the dualhead feature. But I think I found that a TGUI9680 was happy playing 2nd fiddle so could have that and a gruntier 3D card installed.

The Matrox Productiva G100 MMS supports four monitors and I believe it came out in 1998, a year before the G400.

There's also a G200 MMS that supports 4 monitors.

There's one caveat with these old MMS cards - they are not designed to render 3D on multiple monitors, unless it's separate instance for each chip.

Matrox video cards, at least from the old Millennium onwards, have always had a very good 2D video signal 👍

I would say that in 2D, at least for the image quality, in the pc-home environment, they were sovereign (apart from the VESA compatibility for DOS games where S3 and CirrusLogic were further ahead 😅)

The pain points have always been in 3D, where Matrox has never shone, remaining in the great sea of mediocrity, first behind PowerVR and 3dfx, then nVdia and ATI (absorbed by AMD).

Moral of the story: Parhelia P650 / 750 will surely guarantee you excellent 2D quality and will be something to try in 3D without expecting great results in terms of frames or 3D effects (let's say something to try out of pure passion and to gain experience) 😉

Personally apart from having a max build for the period of my interest, I like to put together builds to experiment 😁

to try in 3D without expecting great results

In terms of peformance, P650/P750 should be hovering around GeForce 2 GTS-Ti performance, but with DX 8.1 capabilities.

What are the clock speeds of the P650/750? It might be interesting to compare to the bigger Parhelia and see if efficiency changed. Though it seemed like Matrox stopped caring about 3D game performance, compatibility, control panel options, etc after about a year of Parhelia.

190 and 250 Mhz on paper (who knows how they fluctuate on real cards), half of Parhelia-512 pixel pipes, 128-bit bus.

Parhelia was “value 3D” priced back in the day, I almost bought one not long after it’s launch for my Duron but a lack of 9x support made me buy a $45 G400 off pricewatch .

I wasn’t a heavy gamer and it worked fine.