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#Post#: 18--------------------------------------------------
Matrox
DIR By: Mr Horse
Date: December 17, 2017, 2:20 pm
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Chips
Impression
Millennium
Millennium
Successor to the Impression series, Millennium is a capable VGA
and GUI accelerator with good output quality. Its intended
audience was CAD users and others who desired high-performance,
high-resolution GUI acceleration and was highly-priced
accordingly.
Like the Impression, it is a rudimentary 3D accelerator with
support for gouraud shading. It does not support hardware
texture mapping. It is not Direct3D compatible. There were a few
games included with the card that interfaced with it.
Mystique
Mystique
Matrox Mystique is a 2D/3D/video accelerator for PC. Matrox
released their first Mystique on August 14, 1996. Newer
versions, including Mystique 220, kept appearing until summer
1997. The videocard usually had 2-4 Mb SGRAM expandable to 8MB
with a special memory add-on card. However, apart from higher
resolutions, upgrading memory did not make much difference.
Mystique was oriented on mid-end consummer and business market,
offering excellent 2D performance, traditional for Matrox. It
also has basic 3D capabilities, delivered mainly through Matrox
Simple Interface API. As for the 2D part, it's safe to say the
videocard has no known flaws. The image is crisp, has fine
colors. But the 3D part lacked a lot of functions, which were
removed to improve overall performance. Overall, Matrox Mystique
is a good choice for 2D graphics alongside 3dfx Voodoo.
Millennium II
Millenium II 8MB PCI
This chip is mysteriously similar to Mystique but it uses WRAM
instead of SGRAM and this gives it higher high-resolution GUI
performance. The 3D acceleration appears to be identical with
even the same bugs.
It comes in both AGP and PCI versions.
G100
This was primarily a budget VGA/GUI "productivity" accelerator
card. It has somewhat improved 3D hardware compared to the
Mystique and Millennium II, with bilinear filtering, but it
still lacks critical features like full alpha blending.
G200
Millennium G200
The G200 is Matrox's first in-house 3D accelerator with full
Direct3D 5 feature compliance. It typically comes with 8MB RAM
and is capable of rendering at any resolution that can fit
within that. It is capable of 32-bit rendering color depth
although the performance hit is considerable. It is AGP 2x
compliant and can use AGP texturing.
Unreal and Unreal Tournament may display an incorrect, overly
bright image. Editing the Unreal.ini and disabling
multi-texturing will fix this. Z-fighting may also be a problem
and enabling 32-bit z-buffer can help this.
G200's OpenGL support was very poor until years into its life.
Initially a slow OpenGL-to-Direct3D wrapper was used to support
a few games. Eventually a full OpenGL driver was released at
around the same time as G400's. Note that the final drivers for
G200 include a OpenGL driver with a bug that breaks transparent
water. This is remedied with later G400 driver package that
contains a G200 OpenGL ICD. Overwrite the older ICD in the
Windows directory.
Retail cards were Millennium G200, Mystique G200, Marvel G200
and G200 MMS. Millennium uses SGRAM while Mystique has slightly
slower SDRAM but also TV-output. Marvel features video in/out
capabilities. There is also a G250 chip which was OEM-only. It
is built on 250nm manufacturing instead of G200's 350nm and
typically does not need a heatsink.
G400
Millennium G400 Max
The G400 was essentially an improved and upgraded G200. Main
improvements include 2 rendering pipelines, 128-bit memory bus,
dual VGA monitor output, Direct3D 6 compliance, and
environmental bump mapping support (EMBM). It is over twice as
fast as Millennium G200. The G400 Max was similar in performance
to TNT2 Ultra and Voodoo3 3500.
It lacks most DVD acceleration features but has an interesting
DVD Max mode for output onto the second display.
Initially the card did not have an OpenGL driver. Matrox
compensated for over a year with a miniGL called TurboGL which
supported mainly Quake 1/2/3-based games. In early 2000 the
final OpenGL driver was ready.
Variants include the Millennium G400, Millennium G400 Max,
Marvel G400, and Marvel G400-TV. There are also a number of OEM
models with different specifications. Some cards come with
slightly slower SDRAM instead of SGRAM.
G450
A cost-reduced version of G400 with similar performance and
features. G400 Max is faster.
Retail products were Millennium G450 and Marvel G450 eTV.
G550
A Direct3D 6 GPU in practice. It does have a hardware transform
and lighting unit but it is not Direct3D 7 compliant. This was
only used for the Headcasting software. Performance of this card
is slightly above the G400 and G450.
The retail model was Millennium G550.
Parhelia
Parhelia revision 1
Matrox's first Direct3D 8 accelerator, although it was initially
advertised has having partial D3D9 capabilities. Performance is
similar to a GeForce4 Ti. Initial version of the GPU has some
bugs with secondary displays and also shipped with a low clock
speed because of manufacturing difficulties. A later version
increased clock speeds but also eliminated AGP 2x (3.3v)
support.
It features a unique anti-aliasing technique called fragment
anti-aliasing that provides very high quality (claimed
16X-equivalent MSAA). This technique has some caveats though,
such as incompatibility with stencil buffering, and so was not
further developed.
The first Matrox chip with full DVD acceleration.
It does not support Windows 9x.
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