My Matrox Retrospective

[SteveC]

Hi all,

Just made a video going through my old Matrox graphics cards. Also have captured and uploaded the G200, G400 and Parhelia Tech Demos. Hope it interests somebody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa08lCtqtzc

Tech Demos are linked in the video (G200 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzKblqZL-VY, G400 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkvlwR4tQ9I, Parhelia - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oykak0-WZfc)

I've been doing a load of benchmarks too - I'll upload them at some point!

Cheers,
Steve

[VJ]

Oh, those bring back memories... the Reef demo...

[UtwigMU]

Nice video Steve! This brings back the memories and some bits I already forgot like the bitboys part which I remember being hugely hyped here. I still have Millennium PCI, 2 G400s DH and Parehelia. I also used G200 and G550 at some point.

I think what killed Matrox wasn't the failure of Parhelia to get number one spot but the failure of G800/G550. Until DirectX 9 all makers used die shrunk older generation cards for the bulk of sales, especially to OEMs. there were many G200s and G450s in OEM boxes. But once Parhelia came nVidia had GeForce 2 (they rebranded it as 3-digit lowend Geforce 4) and Ati had the Radeon 7000. Geforce 2 was badass - I remember having put Hercules GF2 MX in brother's Athlon XP 1900+ PC at the time and he had framerates similar to me with Parhelia on dual Athlons 2500+ in Enemy Territory. Matrox had no G800/G850 and they also didn't have any laptop card - at that time laptop sales started to pick up.

Parhelia was expensive and hasn't sold much and G550 was basically 1999 tech in 2002/2003. Had the G550 been competitive with GF2 and Radeon 7500 they could have filled the bulk of sales to OEMs and could have funded the RND for Parhelia 2. The GeForce 5000 fiasco also hadn't killed nVidia but if the following series were a fail, it could have killed them.

Does anyone know how far actually Parhelia 2 RND came?

The fanboy in me regrets them not having had released Parhelia 2 but the business experience I had latter tells me it was probably correct to put resources in their most profitable multiple monitor market if they predicted they cannot compete with Ati and nVidia in 3d. I remember how Parhelia was done by hand and they haven't invested in circuit software which could have yielded clocks on par with GeForce 4 or Radeon 9000 series. They probably decided that investing in RnD which could have not paid off could have killed the company while doing multi monitor market would have kept them alive but in smaller size.

[cjolley]

Still rockin' a couple of HP servers with Matrox chips.