How many of you think it ´d be a good idea Matrox releasing a m3DII

[labrador]

The M3D was Matrox's desperate attempt to get on the 3D bandwagon. Only a year before the M3D came out you could have found a white paper on Matrox's website explaining why 3D gaming is a small insignificant niche market that doesn't generate the revenue to justify 3D development costs. Kinda like what they are saying now as they put out the G550.

The M3D sucked generally. It worked OK only in games that were ported to work with the PowerVR chipset native code. Something like Quake II was passable. The M3D could not support generic Direct X 3D acceleration. I had the M3D combined with a Mystique card and I found I had to disable the M3D to fly Flight Simulator 95 or 98. I could get 25 frames/sec in the Mystique, or 3 frames a second in the M3D, in the exact same game situation taking off from the default FS98 airport.

I was naive about 3D in those days. I was mostly excited about the low price, and I had some false faith in Matrox providing quality products under its fine name. I will never buy another card (or other device) based on the PowerVR crap.

[Alec]

The PowerVR crap you´re talking about must be the first generation... cause the PowerVR guys are doing a much better job in 3D gaming than Matrox...I´d buy a Kyro II anytime... it certainly seems less crap than a G550 for gaming... ehehehe.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by labrador:
I was naive about 3D in those days. I was mostly excited about the low price, and I had some false faith in Matrox providing quality products under its fine name. I will never buy another card (or other device) based on the PowerVR crap.</font>

Almost everyone was naive about 3D. Also, I don´t think that the M3D was cheap when it came out. Actually, the M3D (PCX2 chip) was one of the 3 best 3D gaming chips at the time - is that being crap?
In those days there was great indefinition about the future of 3D, and so everyone chose a path to take. I don´t think that the M3D was crap, because EVERYTHING was crap, comparing with today´s 3D accelerators. Voodoo I was fast for the time, but 640x480 limited with a Z-buffer on (2 Mb for textures only), 4Mb total. Its image quality was crap, although one of the best at the time. And then came the RIVA 128, which was the best first-generation 3D gaming card (it was 2D, also). Actually, I think that the M3D had good picture quality for the time and DirectX support was reasonable. PowerSGL games were great, though. And it sported 4Mb texture memory.

Permedia I and II, Number 9 and Rendition Verité were worse in 3D - and there are a couple of other brands which aren´t even worth mentioning...

[This message has been edited by Alec (edited 26 June 2001).]

[Nuno]

Yes, on those days the only real 3d offer was 3dfx vs PowerVR. Glide games exceled with 3dfx PowerSGL games ran unbelievebly on PCX2.

3dfx won the war, there were much more glide titles released than native PSGL ones.

But native PSGL games just looked awesome. Anyone ever played Tomb Raider 1 (when it was really fun) with the SGL patch at 1024x768x24? It just looked awesome. And we all had to wait a little while for 1024x768 true color gaming to become reality again. Ultimate Race pro SGL still looks very good for today standards.

What´s ironical about all that was that 3dfx is dead (sadly) and PowerVR is still alive and kicking.

[ckj]

December 1999, I bought my marvel G400.
I was very happy with it : excellent 2D, very good 3D, excellent video capture.

June 2001, games performance sucks and I'm still waiting for a real successor to my marvel (don't speak of the marvel G450...).
The release of the G550 is a bad joke for me and I'm asking Hercule support if a Kyro II with video capture will be soon available.
According to them nothing is planned.
So I'm dreaming of a matrox Kyro II based card with video capture. But it's just a dream.

January 2002, Matrox announces the end of their activity, due to a bad commercial politic and I buy a ATI all in wonder radeon 2, with very bad drivers but there's no other choise....

What a very sad story..........