386SX wrote:Weren't they released at the same time/year? I don't understand why there's this huge quality difference, I know the Mystique was probably a more expensive and advanced card but it's like night and day.
Matrox built its own cards, which allowed for much better quality control. Their cards have legendary quality in analog VGA output.
They used a 5-stage output filter on their RAMDACs, where most other cards just used 2 or 3 stages. This allowed Matrox much better control over the filter cutoff, preventing blur/smearing at high resolutions/refresh-rates.
A common trick back in the day was to simply remove the last stage of the output filter on a bad card. I've done this on an Asus GeForce2 GTS of mine, and it improved the quality a lot. The same trick would probably work on S3 cards.
Aside from that, the Mystique was one of the first 'budget' consumer cards from Matrox. They were mostly aiming at high-end solutions in the earlier days, making the best and most advanced 'windows accelerator' cards back then, and the Mystique was basically a respin of the technology they already had in-house, aimed at a larger market (using cheaper memory to keep prices down and such).
In a way it is similar to what eg nVidia does these days, with Quadro professional cards, and GeForce which is pretty much the same technology at a lower pricetag.