Matrox G100 Nostalgia Thread (Split from RV670 AA)

The millennium was a great card to partner with the PowerVR PCX1 and PCX2 because it had a good high speed interface for PCI.

 

I had a MGA1064SG (aka mystique) bought because i needed something to partner a voodoo1 and my cirrus logic 256k card wasnt upto the job (3dfx recommended a 2mb card)
the mystique had the 2nd best dos performance at the time (-2.5% millenium) had great 2d windows performance + crap but fast 3d

ps: actually the mystique version of tomb raider looked dammed good

 

I had a G100 in my first computer. I recall the performance was decent, but quality was poor. I soon added a VoodooII which was a better experience and could play Unreal in hardware. Woot! Plus I could code Glide on it.

I later bought the G400 card, which was really good. Unfortunately, their OpenGL support wasn't that impressive. The USP of the card was EMBM, but they never exposed that in OpenGL.

 

Let's not leave out my little Mystique 220 4MB. I paired this up with a Righteous 3D. Fabulous combo. It was a pretty cheap card at the time and has excellent 2D. Sometimes I actually preferred Mystique's pixelized 3D look compared to Voodoo's super-ultra-bilinear-blur.



My Matrox history went: Mystique 220 -> Mystique G200 -> Millennium G400. Wonderful cards in their time. I have a Millennium II 8MB in the drawer at home but I got it fairly recently so it doesn't really count.

 

So does the Virge version, if you can believe it. It runs decent and has texture filtering.

 

Ah the fond memories of playing many a game of Magic Carpet (back when Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog were making awesome and innovative games) on the Millenium.

I always semi-regretted replacing that with a ATI wonder card (can't even remember which one now) for basic multi-media capabilities (video in/out) for pairing with V1/V2.

The infancy of 3D accelerated graphics on the PC was an exciting time.

Regards,
SB

 

Indeed. Pretty sure the chip itself didn't do the calculation itself, any chip can support per-primitive mipmaps - driver determines the mipmap required and adjusts the texture address/width/height accordingly. I think some of the mach64-derivative rage pro chips worked like that too.

 

I spent so much time playing Mechwarrior 2 on my Mystique. Still have a copy around here somewhere. I had the 2 meg version, so it ran at 512x384 but it was so much better than the software rendered engine. I might have to fire up a Win98 box to put the Mystique in to play again.

 

The G100 was a crappy product. It didn't even support hardware-accellerated overlay mode, which made it useless to me back then (I had a TV card). Quite a poor showing for a card that was quite expensive compared to its competition.

I returned it and got some S3 Virge based card (or was it ATI Rage II or something, dunno) for less than half the price, which, apparently, at least had support for important 2D functionality that the G100 lacked.

Back in DOS days, a lot of people bought Matrox cards for gaming. It was almost always a waste of money. Their main strength was more memory bandwidth than the cheaper competitors but that advantage was only relevant when running windows at high resolution which few gamers did back in DOS days.

The performance advantage of awfully expensive Matrox cards in non-hardware accelerated DOS games was exactly zero compared to bottom-of-the-barrel S3 cards.

I remember that a lot of hardware and game magazines were pimping Matrox cards as the "fastest 2D cards" pretty hardcore back then. They mostly based this on synthetic benchmarks that stressed memory bandwidth, which was of zero relevance to gamers playing in basic VGA resolution (all cards had sufficient memory bandwidth for that). Actual game benchmarks (which were very rarely done in those days) showed no difference in performance between a Milennium and ultra-cheap budget cards.

I always considered Matrox cards a waste of money but apparently, they were selling like hotcakes. To gamers, I might add. The Milennium certainly had it's place for professional applications but Matrox must have laughed all the way to the bank when they read how much endorsement their cards received in gaming magazines.

The Mystique was a bit of a joke compared to what 3Dfx and Rendition had to offer around the same time, which quickly became apparent when game developers didn't give a rat's ass about the gimpy G200. The G100 was, as I mentioned, even more of a joke. Matrox only excelled in their lack of functionality. The G100 was a crappy 2D card, the Mystique a crappy 3D card.

They had their heyday with the G400 which was arguably a bit better than the TNT but it was so ridiculously overpriced that it wasn't really attractive. The Parhelia... eh, no need to talk about that one.

 

Please don't forget that Millenium 1 and 2 had en absolutely superb, separate D/A converter from TI, that gave stunning 2D quality in all resolutions. I still use a Mill2 today due to that. Also, as I remember it, they were quite a bit faster than most in 2D (and not only in synthetic benchmarks), and I tested them against a lot of cards at the time.

Matrox has always had top notch image quality, when other cards were blurry in comparison. At least you always knew that if you payed extra for a Matrox, you didn't have to wonder if it was time to clean your glasses or just a bad card.

Only one I thought was in the same league was some Number Nine card (had an IBM A/D converter with naked die). Still have all the cards I bought over the years, some get used from time to time in older boxes.

I agree though, 3D wasn't so hot on most Matrox. G400 Max was ok, but late to the party and I bought a TNT2 Ultra instead because of it. Later on I got a used G400 Max just to add to my collection though.

 

I still have a G400Max at my parents house as a back up card for their computer. God bump mapping and the water in Expendable was amazing!

 

Ok, I was clearly talking DOS games with regard to 2D performance. Image quality at these resolutions was a non-issue. So was the notion of a "fast 2D card". The games were CPU-rendered. There was no "faster 2D card" for games.

The Millennium had it's place for professional applications (i.e. anything requiring a high 2D resolution), which was of no interest to most gamers and home users at that time. It was simply a waste of money for the average gamer.

I think Matrox 2D quality has always been overstated. I certainly wasn't impressed with the G100. Maybe the Millennium as their professional flagship was great but their consumer cards? I'm not so sure of that. I vaguely remember some tests in c't magazine where they were rated markedly average.

 

I don't recall G400 being overpriced, in fact, I remember it being quite cheap. I paid 1700 SEK for my VoodooII card. I upgraded to my G400Max for 1100 SEK.

 

The prices of the smaller versions of the G400 were ok but in order to be competitive with cards like the Hercules Dynamite TNT2 Ultra (which was overclocked quite a bit out of the box) you needed a G400 MAX... which still ended up slower and more expensive than the Hercules card.

And, if I remember correctly, the GeForce was released less than two months after the G400 hit the market. At best, the G400 was a good competitor to the TNT2 Ultra but it was late to the market and had a horrible OpenGL ICD.

 

Well Matrox may have been overpriced for DOS games, but there certainly were speed and compatibility differences between cards back then. Millennium was astoundingly faster than some other DOS cards (i.e. Trident, Cirrus, and their own older stuff), had excellent DOS VESA compatibility, fantastic speed in Windows, and had that excellent 2D quality. It was a great card all around. It was one of the first cards to get it all right.

Lots of cards were very expensive back then, anyway, if you wanted decent GUI acceleration. For example, Diamond's Viper with the Weitek co-processor was horrible for DOS games but decent for Windows. #9's Imagine series used a separate and very shitty CL chip for DOS. ATI's Mach 32 series was pretty terrible too. Until Millennium, I don't recall being able to just get it all in one card. I never owned Millennium though; I was using VLB stuff still at the time and had a used #9 Motion 771 (S3 968).

Mystique offered almost all of the advantages of Millennium for WAY less price. And while Mystique's 3D was missing features, it did work and even beat out what the way more expensive Millennium had. I think I paid about $130 for a Mystique 220, only a few $$ more than a STB Virge card. I bought the Mystique primarily for its Windows performance and price. Actually, the only reason I got it at all was because the STB Nitro 3D (Virge/GX) repeatedly locked up my Supermicro P6 mobo.

G200 was an interesting contraption. It was no TNT, but it was ok. It was good enough to replace a Voodoo1 most of the time. Mystique G200 was pretty cheap too. I'm not sure why, but my G200 is actually a pretty blurry card. This is how it has probably always been, but back when I was using it I would've been limited to about 1152x864. Going higher than that though gets you a soft image.

And yeah I got a plain Millennium G400. It was about $160. My only problem with that card was that, in UT, it always had Z fighting issues with decals. Even with the "32-bit" z-buffer. Oh, and OpenGL wasn't optimized until near the end of its life lol. But they put the effort in, releasing a special TurboGL to get games going fast while they separately tweaked the full ICD.

I never paid over $160 for a new Matrox card. They covered the market pretty well, IMO.

 

I'm not sure what DOS games you were playing but even trying to say 2D speed was the same in DOS games (Doom for example or Wolf 3D) is very far from reality.

For the longest time Trident, Cirrus Logic, and ATI based graphics chips couldn't come anywhere near the Tseng based chips. And while quality might have been great the speed of ATI's 32 bit 2D chips are that time were horrendously slow. Then again 16-bit color was more than most could handle at a respectable speed.

Granted most games were at most 256 color at the time which helped level the playing field. But even at that speed you could certainly tell the difference in games like Magic Carpet, Syndicate, Ultima VIII, Ultima Underworld I/II, System Shock, Wolf 3D, Doom I/II, Mechwarrior in software only mode, and the list goes on and on an on...

And if you were into the demo scene at all back in the early 90's, then anything but a Tseng based card was just too damned slow.

Hell, even just looking at GIFs showed a great disparity in 2D speed...in DOS...

Regards,
SB

 

We're talking about the Millennium here, though, and at that time (mid 90s), all 2D cards, except some rare exception like the S3 Trio32 with its castrated 32bit bus, had no problems displaying whatever FPS the CPU could provide.

At that time, the 2D cores of basically all market players had already matured to a point where the differences where negligable. For example, S3 used the 2D core of their Trio chips in subsequent generations (Virge) more or less unchanged.

ATI had the Mach 64 in 1994 and IIRC the 2D core was carried over into the Rage series because it was good enough. The first Rage cards, if my memory serves me right, were released roughly around the time the first Millennium (2064 chip) became available.

In the very early 1990s, yes, there were video cards that were simply slow. Video memory bandwidth, ISA bus throughput and whatnot. My first video card was a Targa card with a Tseng chip and some additional "windows accelerator" chip in a socket - these were the late i386 / early i486 days. Matrox wasn't really a household name back then because their cards were just too damn expensive and targeted at professional users exclusively and suffered from truly abysmal VGA performance. It was Tseng or nothing.

So yeah, you could end up with crap performance in Ultima VIII if your PC was 2 years old and had a cheapo 2D card designed in 1991.

But none of this remained an issue when Matrox became so popular among gamers with the original Millennium. And that's why I still feel that for most gamers, buying an expensive graphics card that was designed for operating at very high resolutions (for that time), was a waste of money. Just like pairing up your Mystique or Millennium II with your Voodoos was a waste of money for the average gamer because every cheap S3 or ATI card could operate your low-res desktop on your 15" monitor just as well and the 3D-capabilities of these Matrox cards were, well, rather short-lived.

 

G400 MAX wasn't overpriced. It offered interesting features:

1. Multi-monitor support, TV out + CRT, independent resolution and refresh. Other cards forced CRT to 50/60Hz and low resolution.

2. Excellent analogue signal quality. Sharp image, nice colours. TNTs and other cards, which weren't manufactured under GPU brand name, were not even close. Only original 3Dfx V3 and original Rage 128/128PRO had similar IQ at lower resolutions.

3. Excellent image quality in 3D - one of the few cards which was able to run Q3 with trilinear filtering (TNTs did mip-map dithering, V3 used bilinear filtering or dithered)

4. Good feature set - EMBM: more than GeForce 4 MX and 2 years earlier

the only weak point was lack of texture compression support, but this wasn't significant disadvantage - only S3 and ATi supported S3TC/DXTC at that time...

 

Well, it's just that I recall the Millennium as being the first card to get it all right. And that came with a premium. It certainly blew its peers of the time out of the water. S3 Vision 968, ET4000, Weitek P9000 (Diamond Viper), ATI Mach 32/64, etc. There was no Virge or Trio until almost a year after Millennium launched, I believe.


Note what they compare it to. Diamond Stealth 64 Video was S3 968 and Graphics Pro Turbo was Mach 64.

Yeah, as a DOS card, it wasn't the way to go though I suppose. Just grab something with ET4000 W32 and you're good to go.

 

Synthetic benchmark. Completely irrelevant, software-rendered games were CPU limited.