Matrox @ Wiki

[Heiney]

Hey guys,

I have been working on a lot of wikipedia entries for things lately and I noticed that Matrox is rather neglected on there. It would be great to get some of the 'ol MURC people to work together to put up info on the various cards from over the years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox

I think this initial layout is good and we should fill in separate pages for each card and link them to this existing main page. Look at the Radeon page for ideas if you like. I've been putting a lot of time into that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon

It's not that I am unwilling to work on this alone, but honestly I can't remember a lot of the details for these cards anymore so it will be a serious research project for me to do alone. And I certainly don't know anything about the cards pre-Millenium and info about those is going to be rare. Millenium and onward shouldn't be too tough though.

-Swaaye

[Jessterw]

As a start I updated the link to here, given the old domain name is no longer "ours".

[Mikko]

Hi,

I'm offering my website to appear as an external link:

http://www.matroxrulez.net/

I created this website only one week ago and it's my first homepage ever...

[Mikko]

Since no one said anything, I just added my homepage into the list of external links.
If you think it's unappropriate, then feel free to modify Wikipedia and remove my link.

[Nicram]

Don't worry boys. Nicram sometimes update this in wikipedia From few years

[Nowhere]

OK...but why links to your sites (or rather - sites themselves) are always dead?

[Umfriend]

Wasn't there a Matrox Mystique 170 as well? I think in 2mb and 4mb versions?

[VJ]

Umf: Was it called 170? Or was it just the original Mystique (without number)?

Perhaps it should be more noted that Matrox Graphics is just one division of a company that also does Imaging and Video products.

The Rainbow Runner Studio (for Mystique) and the Rainbow Runner G-series are not on the list. Also, the DualHead2Go is missing from it.
This list will no doubt hold all the cards, apparently some other models are also missing from the list:

http://www.matrox.com/mga/support/drivers/latest/home.cfm

With the Mystique, the game Mechwarrior II was also bundled (together with Destruction Derby II and Scorched Planet); all games were Matrox optimized.
I don't think there were any games accompaning the Parhelia...



Jörg

[Heiney]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_G400

I've whipped up a big bunch of G400 history. Please look over and fix mistakes. I hope it's pretty good already.

This is pretty much how I think the entries for individual chips/cards should work.

BTW, The original Mystique was just Mystique. Later, Mystique 220 showed up. 220 represents the RAMDAC speed I believe, which was faster than the original Mystique's.

[Gurm]

Umm... IIRC wasn't the G200 also equipped with DualHead? I could have sworn I had multiple monitors running off of Julie's Mystique G200.

And I know the G200 DEFINITELY later came in MMC versions with a stupidly large number of heads.

Also, wasn't the G200 the DX6 part, and the G400 DX7?

------------

In a marginally related topic, I note that the link to BitBoys in the G400 article... leads nowhere. Apparently BitBoys don't exist on Wikipedia any more than they exist in real life! (chuckle)

[Heiney]

Umm... IIRC wasn't the G200 also equipped with DualHead? I could have sworn I had multiple monitors running off of Julie's Mystique G200.

And I know the G200 DEFINITELY later came in MMC versions with a stupidly large number of heads.

Also, wasn't the G200 the DX6 part, and the G400 DX7?

G200 didn't have dualhead. I have had both the Mystique and Millennium versions. Both have a single VGA out. Mystique had SVid and Composite for TV out I believe. Mystique was also clocked lower and used SDRAM instead of SGRAM.

G200 was DirectX5/6, and buggy at that. G200 had big probs at times with games that used multitexturing (you had to go into the UT.ini and disable it or textures would be all lit wrong), subpixel accuracy was wacky too (swimming floor textures). It was also slow, of course, heh heh. It was a 1x1 architecture with a 64-bit memory bus. 90 Megapixels/sec if I recall correctly, cuz it was clocked around 90 MHz. Everyone thought it was gonna kill Voodoo2, but there was no way for that to happen if it couldn't do single pass multitexture like Voodoo2, not to mention the Voodoo2 was simply a better chip in general (less buggy).

G400 was DX6. DX7 compliant parts have hardware T&L. G400 did have DX7 drivers of course, later on, but it doesn't have HW T&L so it's DX6. I remember when Matrox released their DX7 built drivers for G400. A friend and I were so excited, but it did almost nothing. We were playing UT at the time and it was DX7 native. ... heh. Back in da day. I'm pretty sure G400 has some sort of Z-buffer problem. In UT the textures in the distance always had z height issues where they would be placed on top of other textures and flash annoyingly. This could be somewhat fixed by enabling 32-bit z-buffer, but that slows things down. G400 was the only chip I saw do this. I know EPIC was aware of the issue for years, it showed up in a few changelogs on their site. Never really was fixed (couldn't be?)

When you get down to it, G400 looks an awful lot like 2xG200s on one chip. Double the internal bus widths (256-bit dualbus), 128-bit memory interface, 2x1 architecture, dualhead! ().

BTW, there are still bazillions of reviews and previews for these cards on the web. Just gotta google.

[Nowhere]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_G400

I've whipped up a big bunch of G400 history. Please look over and fix mistakes. I hope it's pretty good already.

...

I wonder how fast it will be edited by somebody... (speed claims)

[Umfriend]

And I know the G200 DEFINITELY later came in MMC versions with a stupidly large number of heads.

Well, that was a card with two or four G200's on it. Not one chip driving more than one screen.

[Mcollector]

Wasn't there a Matrox Mystique 170 as well? I think in 2mb and 4mb versions?

The original Mystique was just known as the Mystique (P/N code ID, MYST). It had a 170 MHz integrated RAMDAC. Because of the RAMDAC, some may have called it the Mystique 170 after the Mystique 220 came out to try to better differentiate the two, but it was not an official moniker. The GPU chip on the original Mystique was the 1064SG; it had an integrated RAMDAC

The Mystique 220 was known as, coincidentally, the Mystique 220 (P/N code ID, MY220). It had a 220 MHz integrated RAMDAC, hence the name. Officially, the GPU on the Mystique 220 was the 1164SG, but there are a number of the MY220 cards that have 1064SG printed on the GPU. I think those are early MY220's whose GPU passed the higher speed spec. As far as know, other than the RAMDAC speed and possibly the core clock, there is no difference between the Mystique and the Mystique 220. Calling the GPU the 1164SG (v. the 1064SG) was just a marketing ploy to make you think you were getting something different. When I called Matrox once on the 1164 v. 1064 issue, even their tech support had a Mystique 220 on the shelf with 1064SG marked GPU, even though the product propaganda says 1164SG. I've seen Mystique 220's with one or the other of both numbers, but the bios upgrades and drivers always ID it as a Mystique 220. It's probably just a Rev. level on the GPU chip.

Both came in versions with 2M and 4M soldered on the card, but you could upgrade to a maximum of 8M with either version using a memory upgrade daughter card. There were 2M, 4M, and 6M memory upgrades to make the total 4M, 6M, or 8M with on-card RAM + upgrade module RAM. The maximum was 8M (2+6 or 4+4) total. If you had the Rainbow Runner Studio daughter card, you couldn't use the memory upgrade cards, so the 4M on-board cards are best., IMHO.

[Heiney]

I ran a Matrox Mystique 220 4MB in combo with a Voodoo1 for a year or so. Fantastic pair. I even preferred Mystique's point sampling in some games to Voodoo's overly blurred bilinear mip mapping. Went from that to a Mill G200, then a Mill G400.

I wonder how fast it will be edited by somebody... (speed claims)

Heh, well hasn't happened yet... Some 3dfx/nV/ATi fanboy is sure to eventually swing by though.

All I know is my 'old G400MAX used to be ahead of everyone in D3D until GeForce 256 showed up. It's not really disputable, unless you bring Glide or OpenGL into the picture.

Last Matrox card I owned was G400..../overwhelming sadness! Anyone else remember the YEARS we sat around and heard rumors of how the G800 would blow away the competition? Matrox Fusion? PSRAM? !