Best I can tell, top = A-Trend Helios 3D 4MB Voodoo Graphics. Bottom = Matrox Mystique 4MB.

The Matrox card appears to be an original Matrox Mystique. It has a MY220 sticker but is using the MGA1064SG chip rather than the MGA1164SG

Are they good cards? Or did I rip myself off? 🤣

King_Corduroy wrote:

Are they good cards? Or did I rip myself off? 🤣

They're a good contemporaneous pair. The Mystique (like most Matrox cards) has a bad reputation for low performance/3D quality relative to competitor boards (but I have never owned one so I can't comment first-hand). The Voodoo is a 3dfx card, and pricing there has gone insane in the last few years - looking up Voodoo 1 on ebay shows a lot of $40-$50 results. So I think for $30 you did well enough vs ebay, especially considering the pair of soundcards you also got.

Now of course: is the performance "worth" $30? Or $50? I think that's a more relativistic question. On one hand, I've purchased GeForce FX and Radeon 9 cards for less than $30 (and those boards would shatter a Mystique or Voodoo in terms of overall performance), but they aren't straight-up comparable in that I can't drop one of those in a non-AGP DOS machine and use them for native Glide. I think if you actually have a USE for a Voodoo, it's worth owning one, but if you have nothing that uses or needs it, there's no point in paying current prices for 3dfx hardware.

Yes recently I purchased an AMD Sapphire 7790 HD for 50$ and it is as you point out MUCH faster and better. But can I use that card in Windows 98SE? Nope. So in order to make my little Packard Bell just a little bit better I wanted to slap one of these in. 😀
Besides whats not cool about owning a Voodoo card? 🤣

And those two will go super well together.

A very good combo right there. 😀 Voodoo 1 + Matrox Mystique.

Do you (or should I) use both these cards in one machine? I know the Voodoo is a passthrough but I really don't know anything about these at all.

Does the machine have a working 2D card that satisfies your needs and/or is superior to the abilities of the Mystique? If yes, then you should just add the Voodoo. If no, then replace the existing 2D card with the Mystique.

No the mystique is superior. The Packard has an on board Virge S3 with 2mb vram. Thanks! I'm pretty new to this early 3d accelerated stuff so this has been very helpful! Thanks!

I'm definitely going to have fun with these! 😁

King_Corduroy wrote:

No the mystique is superior. The Packard has an on board Virge S3 with 2mb vram. Thanks! I'm pretty new to this early 3d accelerated stuff so this has been very helpful! Thanks!

I'm definitely going to have fun with these! 😁

Note that I've never played around with an S3 card, but I do know that the Virge series has S3D - if you have anything that relies on that, the Virge may be a better choice than the Mystique. Otherwise I'd say pull the S3 out and install this duo. 😀

I think these two will be a better choice since the S3 doesn't do a very good job on render quality (textures and shadows look like crap plus 3d games run a bit choppy) but I cannot pull it since it is integrated instead I will simply disable it. 😜

I have no idea about the Voodoo, but the Matrox Mystique is a quality card; Clear, Bright, Vibrant, Fast. A great DOS and early Windows card. The S3 will only beat it on compatibility and we are only talking a small amount of games. I would value the Matrox Mystique alone at about $20. So being that you got a number of cards for $30 including a voodoo .... clearly a good deal.

rgart wrote:

The Matrox card appears to be an original Matrox Mystique. It has a MY220 sticker but is using the MGA1064SG chip rather than the MGA1164SG

Mystique 220 did use only 1164SG, this H revision also have the 220 MHz dac.