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Firingsquad remembering the G400
Matrox G400
The other Canadian graphics company, Matrox, made their mark in 1999 with the gaming community with their Matrox Millenium G400 and G400 Max. With this card, Matrox briefly held the 3D performance and quality crown. It had environment mapped bump mapping, fast memory, great image quality, and dual head capability. In the end, it would be the G400's TV-out support that keeps the board in our labs today.
Even today, most TV-out implementations are compared to the G400. Matrox was able to output a clean 10-bit 1024x768 signal through the S-Video output, when others at the time could only do 800x600. The software engineers, recognizing that people usually ran their monitors at higher resolutions, added a downsampling feature to the TV-out.
This meant that if you ran your desktop at 1600x1200, the drivers would automatically downsample the image to 1024x768 before sending it out to the TV chip. You'd be able to maintain full quality on the desktop and see the "best possible" output on the TV. One thing to know is that the G400 TV-out worked perfectly in DOS and BIOS – as a cost cutting measure, the G450 TV-out wasn't as adept outside of Windows. Don't forget, with the G400, the TV-out chip was so complex that it needed its own heatsink…
Usability
The G400 also had DVDMax, which automatically ran DVDs and any video played through the overlay at full screen on televisions. As a result, it was possible to have a DVD playing in a tiny window at the corner of your screen so that you could use your PC normally while also having a full-quality picture available on the TV. You never had to worry about primary versus secondary displays, and the direct connection between the overlay and TV output chip produced superb quality. This feature took years to become incorporated into video cards from other manufacturers.
Image quality enthusiasts also raved about the G400’s RAMDACs. This improved image quality on all applications, especially if you were running big monitors at high resolutions. On paper, they didn’t look that much more impressive than the competition, but you had no trouble finding enthusiasts who would swear by their quality.
So what happened after the G400?
Matrox basically stagnated after the G400. The G450 was no faster than the G400, and by the time the Parhelia was released, it was overpriced and underperforming. Today Matrox has fallen back to the corporate and video environment and throughout the years since the G400, both engineers and support staff (marketing, software, etc.) found greener pastures. Cards such as the NVIDIA Quadro NVS are rapidly encroaching on their multi-display, and in the end, Matrox is falling into the shadow of the graphics industry. Although the G400 was a FiringSquad Editor's Choice product, I doubt we'll ever see another such product from Matrox.
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