Matrox makes the Microsoft DX wall of history

[Jammrock]

This is pretty awesome. People at the mothership are flocking to the GPU wall to pay homage to gaming card history.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2019/01/07/wall-of-gpu-history/

Matrox has two entries in the blog post: the venerable Millenium G400 and the Parahelia QID.

[cjolley]

That's pretty cool, thanks.

[UtwigMU]

This is awesome.

Which Parhelia was actually the best?
The 256 AGPx8?
The QID?
The APVe?

[Umfriend]

The G550, if just because of Head Casting. AFAIK, the very first (and last) card to offer that.

[VJ]

Completely forgot about headcasting...

[UtwigMU]

Has anyone here ever actually used headcasting? I got G550 mouse mat with cyber woman (advertising headcasting) from Matrox Germany so I remember it.

[Umfriend]

Has anyone here ever actually used headcasting? I got G550 mouse mat with cyber woman (advertising headcasting) from Matrox Germany so I remember it.

Yes, we made fun of it. The only use it ever had.

[UtwigMU]

I think it was the G550 and not the Parhelia that did the Matrox in:
1999 G400 top of the line - overall best graphic card. G200 (best 2D card) shrunk and sold to OEMs (there were servers as recently as 2016 with G200).
2000 G450 - die shrunk cheaper G400 - still lots of sales to OEMs. The problem was there was no G800 which should have been GeForce 2 / Radeon 32-64MB card
2001 G550 - canned G800 - still lots of sales to OEMs from G550 and G450
2002 Parhelia ahead of GeForce 3 / Radeon 8500 but behind GeForce 4 Ti. Problem was that bulk of nVidia sales was GeForce 4MX which was just rebadged GF2. Matrox only had Parhelia which was competitive becuase of Quadro/FireGL features at lower price and because of triplehead but nothing to sell in mainstream market

[Umfriend]

Price and marketing come to mind too. I think the Parhelia also got a bad wrap with gamers due to the implementation of FAA.