I used to own a pair of PCI Matrox G450's I grabbed not knowing what they were from a parts box with the intention of harvesting the heatsinks.
Quick google I found out about EMBM so put them in my parts box to play around with another day.
Just recently I sold one that went very quickly which I was surprised and had another look at the specs. As you say roughly a TNT2 and been PCI makes it quite an attractive alternative for boards lacking AGP.
I have the other problem, too many AGP systems so now thinking about getting an AGP G550, although needing the dongle is less then ideal.

I'm not sure how I feel about my Mystique.
I see it more as a dos card, something like a Socket 7 build. However even though the MSI version of Destruction Derby 2 looks better the sound is so broken I prefer software mode. The Screamer games are good, moreso now a fix has been found of the "out of range" issue. I know dos compatibility isn't great but for me only 2 games are affected Jazz and Duke3D.

I'll still default to Nvida cards. I don't really notice the image quality differences, Stronger Direct X support, better dos compatibility But if your looking for something different or a 2nd machine I think Matrox is worth investigating.

Not sure what that last paragraph is about though? I can understand some people that only know DirectX and team red or team green not knowing or understanding Matrox as they backed the wrong tech so never really broke into the gaming sector which may of been a good thing really, so no one took their 3D offerings seriously but even posts from turn of the century gamers were pairing Voodoo 1 and 2 cards with Matrox because their 2D was so great

S3 on the other hand is famous for the Virge been the first to earn the name 3d decelerator despite arguably been a much more useful card for gaming, in dos anyway

Mystique was a great cheap Windows GUI card. GUI performance was in the realm of diminishing returns now. The 3D was functional but looked like software rendering. Matrox released M3D, a PowerVR PCX2 card, to offer a stopgap quality 3D rendering product.

G200 was a very fast GUI card and again cheap compared to say Millennium II. And its 3D capabilities are on the same page as a TNT, Voodoo3, Rage128 or Savage3D. But it was Direct3D-only until into the G400's lifetime when they both got OpenGL support in early 2000.

G100A was weird in general. The lod calculation for mipmaps is very messed up and is probably the worst part (i.e. seeing one half of a character blurry). I find the 4x4 dither alpha interesting (and there's no bilinear for the alpha channel), and the VGA out's still Matrox sharp, so it's a good Millennium/mystique substitute. Also it gets along with PowerVR PCX2. 😀

Techland's GL->D3D wrapper's what I used to try G100 with OpenGL games many years ago (no MSI on this card)

This ol Midtown Madness shot I did is probably the best summary of the G100A.

chinny22 wrote on 2023-05-02, 16:02:

I'm not sure how I feel about my Mystique.
I see it more as a dos card, something like a Socket 7 build.

In DOS though, Matrox has a somewhat limited implementation of VESA BIOS Extensions. They only expose modes of 640x480 and higher, where you usually want 320x200 or 320x240 truecolour modes for software rendered games.
You'd have to use SCITech Display Doctor to try and squeeze more modes out of it.

Personally I used a Matrox Mystique in the era of Windows NT4. There was no D3D support on NT4 anyway, so the limited 3D acceleration wasn't an issue. For DirectDraw it was very fast and compatible, and it also offered some interesting overlay features for efficient decoding and upscaling of video. Most notably it could do YUV->RGB with bilinear filtered upscaling in hardware.

The G200 and G400 were released in an interesting period... I believe the G200 was actually among the fastest cards at release time... So it looked like Matrox was finally getting a foothold in the rat race that is 3D acceleration.
Then the G400 initially looked good as well, against the nVidia TNT2, both in terms of performance and features.
But the G400 was released at about the same time as the nVidia GeForce, which completely changed the game again (hardware T&L, cubemaps, dot3 per-pixel lighting etc... all sorts of things that Matrox couldn't do, and then there was the raw performance of these beasts). Basically everyone except ATi dropped out of the race at that time.
The G450 was I believe a slightly cheaper and slower version of the original G400 (which also had a G400MAX version that was clocked higher)... then they also released a G550 as another update... And then finally the Parhelia, before they pulled out of the consumer PC market.

MGA Mystique is a real nice one. Drivers for lot's OS (WIN3X, VESA, OS/2, WINNT, WIN9X, NATIVE AMITHLON!) GUI-Accel. is nice and fast, drivers are really good, image quality is excellent.
MGA100 is a problematic one, I have some issues with it, but G200/400 are nice cards! drivers still for most OS (like above). G450 is weaker than G400, lost win3x but still has OS/2, G550 is nearly the same card but offers more performance than the g450.

Talking about 3D on G4xx/5xx it depends on the game-engine if you should better use opengl or d3d. For the most parts the D3D seems to be better/faster than opengl and you don't get a full control over the card. So switching on vsync is not possible. the matrox-tweaking tools offer very less options.

Doc

If you talk about bilinear filtering....my opinion is that early cards that do not support AF tend to look very blurry with only bilinear.
To my eye have software-rendering like image but fast and smooth is a hugh benefit the only downside is the missing alpha-belnding.
that ruins much more that the missing bilinear. There are some early 3D games and demoscene prods that make use of that
and therefore look ugly. But keep in mind, some very early 3D games support the mystique directly like "REVIL1+2"

I have a Mystique 2Mb (missing the memory expansion) mainly used for testing purposes, a G400 and a G550.

Funny thing is the G400 and G550 have roughly the same performance, one just has a wide memory bus to slow memory while the other has a narrow memory bus to fast memory. I also had lots of issues with the latest G550 drivers provided by Matrox, Direct3D and OpenGL would not work. Going back to the G400-era drivers it works just fine.

And as I said elsewhere, the G200 is everywhere even nowadays. It’s the default « VGA card » implementation in about every server produced.

And I’m still curious to try a Parhelia « first gen », I have an AGP Parhelia-LX somewhere which is basically half a Parhelia-512.

Which OS did you use?

I’m on XP SP3, version 6 drivers from 2008 behave strangely. Version 5.96 from 2006 (supporting G400-550) work fine.

Good ones: https://video.matrox.com/ct/apps/drivers/grap … /download?id=93
Bad ones, which you get by following the Matrox website: https://video.matrox.com/en/apps/drivers/grap … ist=12&osList=5

Ah ok, guessed that already....for me nothing more than Win2k but mostly only Win9X/ME.
I see the good one is Win2k too.. I 'll have a look.

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2023-05-03, 20:17:

And I’m still curious to try a Parhelia « first gen », I have an AGP Parhelia-LX somewhere which is basically half a Parhelia-512.

It's an interesting card. I have a Parhelia AGP 256MB with box, accessories and documents.

Even if the card was said to be more "gaming oriented", they barely admit it on the box.
The back of the box heavily depicts business use, with only a very very small picture of a triple head setup with Unreal Tournament 2003. Like if gaming was something to be ashamed of. (Picts here https://retro.user-unfriendly.net/Parts ... /pictures/)

I never tried the triple screen at home because I don't own 3 monitors. But I tried the reef tech demo and it looks amazing.

I like matrox a lot in general and I'm trying to collect most of their cards.

I currently collected :

• Impression Plus (IS-Athena, their first consumer oriented 3d capable card. 1994)
• Millennium with memory expansion (IS-Storm 1995)
• Mystique 220
• Millennium II
• G450
• G550
• Parhelia

G100/G200/G400 are generally easily available and I'm just waiting to find a good offer locally.
The original Mystique appears from time to time.
G400 Max is more difficult to find. I've seen some in cheap lots, but each time the seller didn't wanted to ship the items... Still waiting for this one.

I would love to see more tests and screenshot on this thread. Will try to post some too.

If there is some interest I can make a tutorial to setup amithlon with mga-myst, and show something like that e.g. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59136

Parhelia's only advantages were the display outputs. But even there the initial chip had some hardware bugs that caused problems on the secondary outputs.

For games it's usually noticeably slower than a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500. Radeon 9700 launched right after it did. So other than for that triple head thing, which it was barely fast enough for, it was definitely not a good card for games. It was also very expensive. Trying to get businesses to pay big bucks for it through brand strength and perception.

Also, G550 is the remnant of the aborted G800 project.

And on the topic of the newest drivers, Matrox dropped 3D acceleration support at some point so yeah you want old releases.

The server G200 is interesting but I suspect it's not related to the old G200. GUI acceleration is different these days.

Overall, Matrox didn't have the money to keep up with ATI and Nvidia.

acl wrote on 2023-05-03, 21:24:

Even if the card was said to be more "gaming oriented", they barely admit it on the box.

The Parhelia is very quirky.
It supports Vertex Shader 2.0, and I believe it was actually the first card on the market to do so.
But it 'only' supports Pixel Shader 1.3, which means it's not a 'full' Shader Model 2.0/DX9.0c spec card. It's like some transitional thing between DX8 and DX9-level shaders.
PS1.3 is GeForce4-level, not even as advanced as the PS1.4 you get on a Radeon 8500.

The other thing is the build-quality. Most matrox cards were very well made and had lot's of good components on the board.

swaaye wrote on 2023-05-03, 21:53:

Parhelia's only advantages were the display outputs. But even there the initial chip had some hardware bugs that caused problem […]
Show full quote

Parhelia's only advantages were the display outputs. But even there the initial chip had some hardware bugs that caused problems on the secondary outputs.

For games it's usually noticeably slower than a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500. Radeon 9700 launched right after it did. So other than for that triple head thing, which it was barely fast enough for, it was definitely not a good card for games. It was also very expensive. Trying to get businesses to pay big bucks for it through brand strength and perception.

Also, G550 is the remnant of the aborted G800 project.

And on the topic of the newest drivers, Matrox dropped 3D acceleration support at some point so yeah you want old releases.

The server G200 is interesting but I suspect it's not related to the old G200. GUI acceleration is different these days.

Overall, Matrox didn't have the money to keep up with ATI and Nvidia.

Uh I didn't know they dropped 3D support at one point...that's a pretty major thing and should be better noted on the driver download page...

Here is the output of an lspci on one of my servers. The G200 "core" is embedded in the HPE iLO, it's not a discrete chip.

1c1:00.1 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Electronics Systems Ltd. MGA G200eH3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
2	DeviceName: Embedded Device
3	Subsystem: Hewlett Packard Enterprise iLO5 VGA
4	Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr+ Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx-
5	Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
6	Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
7	Interrupt: pin B routed to IRQ 54
8	NUMA node: 0
9	IOMMU group: 16
10	Region 0: Memory at cc000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=16M]
11	Region 1: Memory at cdba0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
12	Region 2: Memory at cd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8M]
13	Expansion ROM at 000c0000 [virtual] [disabled] [size=128K]
14	Capabilities: [a8] Power Management version 3
15		Flags: PMEClk- DSI+ D1- D2- AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
16		Status: D0 NoSoftRst- PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-
17	Capabilities: [b0] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
18		Address: 0000000000000000  Data: 0000
19	Capabilities: [c0] Express (v2) Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
20		DevCap:	MaxPayload 128 bytes, PhantFunc 0, Latency L0s unlimited, L1 unlimited
21			ExtTag- AttnBtn- AttnInd- PwrInd- RBE+ FLReset-
22		DevCtl:	CorrErr- NonFatalErr+ FatalErr+ UnsupReq-
23			RlxdOrd- ExtTag- PhantFunc- AuxPwr- NoSnoop-
24			MaxPayload 128 bytes, MaxReadReq 128 bytes
25		DevSta:	CorrErr+ NonFatalErr- FatalErr- UnsupReq+ AuxPwr- TransPend-
26		LnkCap:	Port #0, Speed 5GT/s, Width x1, ASPM L0s, Exit Latency L0s <4us
27			ClockPM- Surprise- LLActRep- BwNot- ASPMOptComp-
28		LnkCtl:	ASPM Disabled; RCB 64 bytes, Disabled- CommClk+
29			ExtSynch- ClockPM- AutWidDis- BWInt- AutBWInt-
30		LnkSta:	Speed 5GT/s (ok), Width x1 (ok)
31			TrErr- Train- SlotClk+ DLActive- BWMgmt- ABWMgmt-
32		DevCap2: Completion Timeout: Range ABCD, TimeoutDis+ NROPrPrP- LTR-
33			 10BitTagComp- 10BitTagReq- OBFF Not Supported, ExtFmt- EETLPPrefix-
34			 EmergencyPowerReduction Not Supported, EmergencyPowerReductionInit-
35			 FRS-
36			 AtomicOpsCap: 32bit- 64bit- 128bitCAS-
37		DevCtl2: Completion Timeout: 50us to 50ms, TimeoutDis- LTR- OBFF Disabled,
38			 AtomicOpsCtl: ReqEn-
39		LnkSta2: Current De-emphasis Level: -3.5dB, EqualizationComplete- EqualizationPhase1-
40			 EqualizationPhase2- EqualizationPhase3- LinkEqualizationRequest-
41			 Retimer- 2Retimers- CrosslinkRes: unsupported
42	Capabilities: [100 v2] Advanced Error Reporting
43		UESta:	DLP- SDES- TLP- FCP- CmpltTO- CmpltAbrt- UnxCmplt- RxOF- MalfTLP- ECRC- UnsupReq- ACSViol-
44		UEMsk:	DLP- SDES- TLP- FCP- CmpltTO- CmpltAbrt- UnxCmplt- RxOF- MalfTLP- ECRC- UnsupReq- ACSViol-
45		UESvrt:	DLP- SDES- TLP+ FCP- CmpltTO- CmpltAbrt- UnxCmplt- RxOF- MalfTLP- ECRC- UnsupReq- ACSViol-
46		CESta:	RxErr- BadTLP- BadDLLP- Rollover- Timeout- AdvNonFatalErr+
47		CEMsk:	RxErr+ BadTLP+ BadDLLP+ Rollover+ Timeout+ AdvNonFatalErr+
48		AERCap:	First Error Pointer: 00, ECRCGenCap- ECRCGenEn- ECRCChkCap- ECRCChkEn-
49			MultHdrRecCap- MultHdrRecEn- TLPPfxPres- HdrLogCap-
50		HeaderLog: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
51	Kernel driver in use: mgag200
52	Kernel modules: mgag200

swaaye wrote on 2023-05-03, 21:53:

Parhelia's only advantages were the display outputs. But even there the initial chip had some hardware bugs that caused problems on the secondary outputs.

For games it's usually noticeably slower than a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500. Radeon 9700 launched right after it did. So other than for that triple head thing, which it was barely fast enough for, it was definitely not a good card for games. It was also very expensive. Trying to get businesses to pay big bucks for it through brand strength and perception.

Hey, it does have that rather interesting fragment AA though! When it works, it's actually fairly impressive and can exceed GF3 and Radeon 8500 with comparable IQ and whatever AA they use ( I believe 8500 is SSAA only?).
It's obviously no match in raw performance.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-05-03, 21:34:

If there is some interest I can make a tutorial to setup amithlon with mga-myst, and show something like that e.g. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59136

Hi!

Pls make a manual. I got mystique and other matrox’es.

In other news:
Matrox has just announced that they will be making 'regular' videocards again (albeit still with 4 outputs, so aimed at multihead). This time they are using Intel GPUs:
https://video.matrox.com/en/products/graphics … rds/luma-series

(They had used AMD GPUs in the past, and their D-series uses nVidia).