Matrox Parhelia....The Final Graphics Card.
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.ย. 2024
- Hello and welcome to another Budget Builds Episode where today we're going to be taking a look at the Matrox Parhelia, thats right something not by AMD, ATI, Nvidia, 3DFX and the likes, no this time we're back at it looking at Matrox... But not just any Matrox card, no this time we're taking a look at the final card they managed to make, so sit back, relax, and enjoy as we take a deep dive into the history of the card and push it to its uptmost limits. With Matrox's Final Stand.
The Matrox G550 (The Prequel to this video): • The card that KILLED.....
Phil's Computer Labs Awesome video on the card: • Matrox Parhelia Triple...
Anyways we really do push this card to its limits with the likes of Half Life 2, CS Source, Fable TLC and plenty more, with plenty of researching going into documenting the history of this card and just what happened. Enjoy :D
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Specs:
CPU: Pentium 4 Northwood @ 2.6GHz
GPU: Matrox Parhelia - 128MB AGP 4X Release Model
RAM: 2GB DDR RAM
Windows 7 Debloted and Windows XP 32Bit SP3
THIS VIDEO IS MADE AS A HOBBY AND NOT TO BE REDISTRIBUTED OR REUPLOADED
0:35 - I say decade....Turns out we're all old now and I actually mean Century, so the Year 2000. Anyways enjoy!
You could also say Millenium
Noticed that one, lol.
@Budget Build Officail
No joke, you can buy a "new" Martox cards even today! :D Look here: www.mindfactory.de/Hardware/Grafikkarten+(VGA)/Matrox.html
Could of put "last two decades" Instead now.
You aren't old. I started gaming with Pong as a kid. That was the only video game. Well that and the light gun thing. I am old.
It makes sense that a professional PC hardware company would have issues entering the consumer market. Pro grade hardware is usually build quality/reliability/build quality focused, while *consumer* grade is usually (disposable) bang for the buck focused.(*spell corrected)
plus as he said, Radeon 9000s series. Even Nvidia would be on the backfoot for the next two years.
consider grade?
That sums it up well: It's worth noting that companies who *are* known for focusing on build quality (Sapphire and PowerColor come to mind because I'm an ATI/AMD guy) are very often lauded on this fact in particular. Can confirm the quality of my new Nitro+'s display ports... I'm a klutz...
@@catnium Sorry, proof reading is not my forte. Fixed.
They weren't entering the consumer market, they were getting kicked out of it.
The GPU market could be intresting today if they were still around. sad
@Michael Hansen
All displays will speak in French though. Lol.
@Michael Hansen interesting point there. if I recall, their drivers don't interefere with an AMD/Nvidia card, that was a combination done by some EVE multi-boxers back in the day (since EVE isn't demanding per se, especially in DX9 mode with low settings....)
@TheThunderGuy S I was about say this as well. I was a huge 3Dfx fan, I think I had all the different version cards made. Back in 99-00 I remember using a Matrox G200 together with two Voodoo2's was like the ultimate setup.
they are around but their stuff is made by nvidia lol
Meanwhile.....
*Intel has joined the server.*
I had this video card when it released. I made heatsinks for it, overclocked it, and ran quake 3 on triple CRT monitors back then... thanks to parhelia, I have always been a surround screen gamer. I can never go back to 1 screen. Matrox Parhelia was a legend.
*respect*
Ooh. Almost forgot quake and unreal tournament. Felt like I was living in the future.
this is a rad comment
The late 90s early 00s were a wild time for pc hardware, I kinda miss those turbine looking cpu coolers thermaltake used to make
it still is in a way
or the circular zantechs with the composite heatpipes
I remember when Voodoo 3D hit and you still needed a dedicated 2D card to go beside it. Now those were the days, when men were men, women were women and computers where just really large pocket calculators.
LadBooboo cooler master jet 7 I have for my Pentium cooler cooler ever !
I could’ve gotten a cup holder...
I really could’ve
Some years ago i chatted with a matrix representative at the Expo in Hannover Germany where they had a small booth. We had a Matrox Mystique back in the nineties in my brothers first pc which powered all the fun we had back then so i was delighted to see them there. Turns out they are still going strong albeit not in the gaming market of course but in a professional niche which is ultra reliable multi-monitor 2D graphics. They have 700 employees according to wikipedia as of last year so they seem to do pretty good.
Nice recap of an highly anticipated card of the early 2000's! Two things, one of the main reasons for the hype that Parhelia-512 would be great for gaming was the massive bandwith it had, 17.6GB/s (Retail) which was 7.2GB/s faster than Ti4600! That was really unheard at the time! Secondly Parhelia suffered greatly with the decision Matrox made of not including any occlusion culling tech. So the card just rendered everything in scene, not able to check if an abject would be visible to the gamer. That really saturated the bandwith a lot with unnecessary data.
Not changing anything else, JUST adding that would have given the card a huge boost.
Yup, they just included a quad memory channel and Fast Z clear.
Matrox was an interesting company to say the least
Still remember playing with a Matrox Tesselator system - SVGA in 1983.
In fact Matrox might be a more interesting company right now.
Matrox was co-founded. A few months ago one of them packed up and sold his side of the company to the other guy. Things could get interesting if the one left with the company has interesting ambitions.
They make the best in female hygiene products
@Michael Hansen Now they are using Amd video chips with some exotic display outs and adapters
@@allangibson8494 you mean 1993, there was no svga nor vga during that time
Surprising to see the features this card was packing back in its day. Really loved watching this blast from the past. RIP Matrox
Yup, they're still around, they just have a very specific niche in the enterprise market, where they actually do pretty well for themselves. They focus entirely on gpus for multi-monitor setups and high resolution multi-panel displays. Their current cards are very interesting in context since they have very high quality 2D acceleration, which is a tertiary focus on mainstream gpus. Provided the drivers were there to make it happen (and they aren't,) I would love to see how a C680 performs versus, say, a 1050 ti in Age of Empires 2: DE, which is fundamentally still a 2D game.
@iewind I try
Matrox made gaming cards before the 2000s.
Matrox Mystique series in the mid 90s. I had one then.
I still have one. For 2D with a Voodoo...
The "Mystake" was my first 3D card when I had no idea what I was doing. Trash. Couldn't even run GLQUake.
I remember them being pretty popular also. Never had one of the cards, but I remember all the ads and high star retings for them in magazines.
@@LastOneLeft99 The "Mystake" actually wasn't so bad at all when you realize it was competing against the S3 Virge and ATI Rage, not Voodoo. IIRC, Voodoo came later. The Mystique was only of the infamous "Virge, Rage, Mystique" trinity to actually run Direct 3D games at playable framerates. It sacrificed any texture filtering or true transparency for it, but at least you could actually PLAY games like Turok or Shadow of the Empire on it. Those games btw were among the first to REQUIRE a 3D card so the Mystique at least made them playable if ugly as hell.
"Trash. Couldn't even run GLQUake." - You realize no card but the Voodoo and some professional graphics cards of the era could run it right? OK, the Rendition Verite ran Quake accelerated, playably, but using its own API - NOT Glquake.
@@michalzustak8846 Yes I stand by my statement of it being trash. I saved money and got a Voodoo 1 so I could finally play GLQuake
You say its the only card they marketed as a gaming card, but what about the Mystique? I had one of them back in the day and that was marketed as a gaming card.
I do cover this slightly in my other Matrox video. I should really do a spin off video on the card.
Not only that, but it came with pack in games. I had one.
@Dr ROLFCOPTER! yeah the g400 and g450, they are actually better than a voodoo 3 3000. I have several cards I got in pallets from a salvage company and have tested both.The only thing I dont like about the g450 is even though it has 32mb of ram its split up into 2 monitor outputs so if you use 1 vga port its only 16 megs
Lol it could have been marketet as a gaming card, but very few games had support for it, same for the matrox M3D (the one I had).
@@PJBonoVox Ditto. Destruction Derby was actually the shit.
Still usable. Not sure why anyone would want to use it, but it works.
Well, for text editing, It can deal with it
Technically, even the FX5200 works.
still have this card in a editing rig, 3 monitors , works great,
@@VGamingJunkieVT technically the OG ati wonder still works
I really enjoy learning about more older or dare I say legacy GPU's. It's so interesting how far we came from cards like these.
lol bro your frog avatar is so damn cool
And nowadays we have apu that can work as good as a vga technology is continuely developing maybe in near futire we wont need vga anymore
@@CommanderTato it's supposed to look like me. It was pepe working on a raspberry pi and inhaling the soldering fumes
@@BigNerdLandon Hum, did it worth the sacrifice?
@@CommanderTato absolutely
It's funny that today Matrox's bread and butter is the embedded G200 chip that's in almost every server. I have an old Cisco server from 2012 that has a G200 chip on it. We just bought some brand new Dell R740 servers at work a few months back, and they also have a G200 chip.
Matrox actually got bought out by ATi shortly after the Parhelia came out. They're around in name, mostly, though their offices outside of Montreal are still there (or were last time I drove past the area). They focus mostly on large digital signage right now -- I'd be lying if I didn't say some part of me wants to buy the card with 16 DisplayPort outputs, and a whole bunch of DP 4x splitters, to see how a modern Windows or Linux OS would choke on a 48-screen display
9800 Pro owner here, when that card hit... it was amazing!!! Lasted far too long :) I replaced eventually with a 4870 IceQ or something.
Yes the features were amaizing ..
The bump mapping and details And colors
made it spectacular over Nvidia soft blurry graphics.
I remember going from my 1998 Matrox Mystique G200 to my new nVidia GeForce 4 Ti 4600 and noticing the analog image quality was actually WORSE than my 5 year old Matrox! That's when I gained a lot more respect for Matrox. I later bought a used Parhelia for cheap but eventually settled on an ATI Radeon X800 Pro which had good image quality and more powerful 3D. But without a doubt, Matrox had the best image quality for analog cards which is what I valued much more over higher frame rates in 3D games.
my uncle was one of the people who worked on this card back in the day :)
@mdx maybe, i know he works at nvidia now helping make RTX cards so maybe it was more the other people lol
Cool! Matrox had the best overall image quality, especially compared to other cards with analog connections. Outside of 3D performance, it was the best graphics card for the time.
11:53 Did I hear right that he says: "...Crysis of it's day DAY it was Farc Cry"...
TH-cam audio bug. Should be resolved when the video is done processing.
@The New Baris Berat Balci whats a wnr?
@The New Baris Berat Balci Yeah... sadly.
@The New Baris Berat Balci the fuck. I found nothing about windows
Well, I hear "of its da-day" silly TH-cam.
You and LGR have to be my favorite channels for learning about old interesting tech, cheers.
I was just reminiscing about Matrox, how they were the king at 2D cards back in the day, and remembering the last Matrox card I had, a G200 AGP with 8MB. Those were some interesting times. From what I could tell when I went to see if they were still around a few weeks ago, it looked like they were, sort of, but more a ghost town. I think they dabbled in making cards and external devices to split displays, but even the most recent one was maybe 10 years or so if I recall. Great timing on this video for myself.
The feature-list of this card is almost like hearing of a hardware raytracing capable graphics card releasing back in 2010. So ahead of its time in some ways, but woefully behind in the fields that mattered most. Still pretty cool.
The one killer title that sold a lot of Matrox cards was Flight Simulator 2004, because it offered very easy triple head support which was still very challenging for ATI and nVidia in that era.
Never owned or knew anyone with a Matrox card. I went through the years of 3dfx and then straight to ATI.
Still have a Matrox G450... Image quality is still da bomb...
There is a second revision of the card, there's a node shrink, and it gets about 20% clock boost, 256MB VRAM, and keyed for AGP 8X slot.
There was no market for it and I believe they were made mostly to do RMA on the 128MB 4X card that came out. It's almost impossible to find. I only got it after staring at eBay for a year.
The Matrox DigiSuite would be a great topic for discussion.
We were the #1 Repair Group for systems and certified 3 motherboards specifically to handle the cards. Which were insanely expensive and required mindfulness of PCI Slot IRQ Assignments to ensure stability. ESPN was one of the first customers of these setups.
I wouldn't be shocked if even win10 has at least basic support for it built in. Windows always tended to have built in drivers for matrox cards offering decent support, then you'd install the driver's from matrox for the extras. Unlike other graphics cards where u were stuck at something like 640x480 or 800x600 non accelerated 256 color standard vga till you loaded the drivers
Man that Supersampling is really awesome. Never seen such negligible performance hit with Supersampling on nvidia/amd/ati cards
Now that's a brand I hadn't thought about in decades! I remember Matrox as a solid graphics card for work environments, not so much for gaming unless you pair it with something like a Voodoo card. Nice to hear they are still around.
Pro 2d outpout, high refresh rate, early d3d and opengl, two vga/dvi out ... Was a pro league and my big love
Be nice to see a similar view of the S3 cards of the same era.
Still keeping my old s3 virge gx/2 in the basement along with my voodoo 2 card for nostalgia.
Some of the S3 cards had MPEG video decoder card accessory boards (like for the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000, a Virge 325 chip model) so that they could play MPEG videos full screen on low end hardware like early Pentium's and 486 class PC's.
These were great if you had video CD movies (they were available).
Just play the .DAT files on them in a MPEG media player to run the movie.
I even found a Packard Bell PC (Platinum 65 model) that had a Brooktree video decoder chip along side the S3 Virge 325 graphics chip on the motherboard.
It also had a Analog TV Tuner card in it as well.
Really sad, the last one I used was 8x agp G400 max which featuring bump-mapping at the time. Matrox Millenlium was the 2D king, the most impressing was the picture quality that beat all others competitors.
I wanted Matrox to release the G800, the first time I heard of that card was when the CEO of SNK said he was planning on releasing a new console in the early 2000s with a pentium 4 and dual Matrox G800s.
3:01 this video went from pretty good to GOD MODE when the Sega GT 2002 music started to play
Holy crap, that console sounds amazing. Too bad SNK exited the hardware market with their failed Hyper Neo Geo 64.
@@matchmakerchris7617 Been doing a lot of research and looking back it seems the CEO of SNK was bs when he talked about the new Neo Geo hardware with a Pentium 4 and two G800. This was done in early 2000 before the company went under so I think he was trying to get more investors to give him money. As for the Hyper Neo Geo 64 a few months ago finally somebody took the hardware apart and mapped all the chips so we know how the thing actually works. It is literally SNK trying to do a sega model 2 but with no money. pretty sad
I was sad when the Canadian ATi was acquired by AMD in 2006, then I searched for any PC hardware makers were still owned by Canadians and saw Matrox and started to cry...
Eurocom is another little known PC manufacturer... I bought their Sky X4C... It's been a damn good one now for almost 2 years... Rock solid and reliable...
Love when old hardware's getting its tribute in your videos. I wonder if there're Linux drivers for this card, too.
There are indeed.
I had a Matrox Millennium and I loved that thing in its day. Loved the video!
That was the golden era of Matrox. 2D graphics king. S3 is scrap.
The blue-ground bug from Far Cry can be fixed by updating the game from 1.0 to 1.1 and so. It happened to me when i was playing with my old Geforce4 MX440.
I have tried all versions from V1.0 to V1.4, still issues with the Matrox card
I bought a Matrox for multi-monitor support. At the time, no other maker had a card that did it as well. And the Matrox was the most stable video card I've used.... even more so than the Quadro I now use in my workstation.
I'm a simple man, I see AGP, I click.
The radeon 9700 might have done a significant amount of damage to matrox but really it was the DVI connector that killed Matrox.
If you are old enough to connect your monitors up with VGA or BNC cables then you would remember how blurry ATi's picture was and how washed out Nvidias picture was compared to Matrox's amazing picture quality. But then came the digital DVI connector it levelled the playing field. Leaving Matrox's performance (FPS) as a supreme chink in its armour.
Matrox I seem to recall made a pretty well regarded gaming card called the "Millenium". The strength of this gaming card was that unlike the Voodoo 2 or similar, Matrox were one of the first (with the card called the "All-In-One-Wonder) to combine a 2D and a 3D card on the same PCB. This may sound like an obvious thing to do now, but back in those days (I'm talking 90's) 2D and 3D cards were sold separately and used an external passthrough cable to conjoin the two cards before a final cable sent the image generated by BOTH cards to the CRT monitor. All good, or so it sounds. The down side was the cost. Most people were used to replacing just the 3D card, and had the same 2D card for years (I used an S3 Savage for quite a while, firstly with a single Voodoo 2, and latterly with a PAIR of Voodoo 2 in SLI) and the eyewatering cost of the Millenium and then the "All-In-One-Wonder" which came before it meant most people couldn't afford it.
i used to work for matrox, it was impossible for them to compete against the big, they just had a good start in the gaming community.
I was really hyped for the Parhelina back then. At that point, I had the g 400max. Btw it's a shame that we don't see Maxtrox anymore
I had the G400max as well and it was the best for Duke Nukem 3D
Matrox is still making graphics adapters, if you want to call them that. They are more in the market of making multi-monitor PCI-e/PCI extenders for the onboard graphics chips. They make the "Graphics eXphansion" series and the "Mura IPX/MPX" and they still make the M9120/9128, M9140/9148 multi-monitor adapters for PCI/PCIe. That said, the Matrox PCIe display adapters max out at 1080p with 512mb RAM so only niche (I think OEM specifically) applications would use them as I can't fathom anyone both business or consumer who would get one on purpose.
I remember I was so hyped about this card. All the hardware magazines were feeding the hype train as Matrox was promising ground breaking new technologies. A huge 512 bits memory bus, super high quality and fast AA, displacement mapping, multi-texturing etc... And it all died when the first reviews came out.
By the way, Super Sampling (not the fast FAA 16x) was not exclusive to the Parhelia. It was available on all Geforces and Radeons of the time, it was in fact the first type of AA to be used by graphics cards. But it was so taxing on resources that non one really bothered turning it on.
Oh, the nostalgia of it all... not a gamer myself, but used a Parhelia with a Millenium G400 as a three monitor set up for Design work (CAD & Web mainly). Loved this card. Really crisp displays and (as you said) almost no OS support issues. Switched to nVidia when I could no longer get Matrox and still running 3x monitors but currently with a GT730 (4Gb running 2 mon) and GT610 (1Gb running 1) - contemplating an upgrade to a GTX 1660 6Gb and three new DP Iiyama monitors, even though I no longer work on design - kinda got used to the screen real estate of 5760 x 1080 :-) Great video - thanks for doing it.
Ran quite a few Matrox cards back in the day from the G200 all the way through to a PCIe Parhelia. We mostly sold them to clients in the graphics space, multiple monitor support, great resolution support and very high quality image production. Not great for gaming but I had access to the cards through work where I could usually pick up a previous generation we still had in stock for next to nothing. The "Gaming" cards we stocked never stayed in stock long enough to get a good deal on. The Parhelia was impressive next to the productivity focused G series we sold a lot of but sadly was eclipsed (badly) by much faster Radeon cards and even the Geforce 4 was faster. Most people gaming back then were focused on resolution and quality settings, this was the era where 30fps was considered the bar and you pushed for that at the highest resolution and quality settings you could get out of your card. The Parhelia just didn't have the prestige of Geforce or Radeon and as such, many gamers overlooked it, even if they picked up a lower end Nvidia or ATI GPU that was actually slower. By the time Parhelia was phased out you could pick them up pretty cheap, cheaper than slower, lower tier cards from the competition but only a few people really knew that and by this time there were already games that wouldn't run properly on the card thanks to poor DX9 support.
If a game ran on openGL the parhelia did well but a lot of titles shifted the DX route thanks to the huge jump in features from DX8 to DX9. Microsoft really wanted to push XP as THE gaming OS and did all they could to make DX the API of choice for AAA developers.
Great video, lots of nostalgia here.
Nobody did that we ran fast as possible 60fps was bar u basically keep most settings high turned aa off
30fps was doom era
"So we all heard about "
Well actually never but it looks interesting xD
I actually played WoW with this card, cleared Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau, and went up to Ulduar in the Lich King expanssion :))). This was actually one of best video cards for 2D graphic arts, photography, the reason I used it.
I always wanted a Parhelia. Say what you want about the Mystique, it was my first 3D card and it was GOOD, it ran TombRaider in 640x480 at a solid 30fps, same with MotoRacer in 512x384, the bundled Mechwarrior 2 was the best version of the game ever made AND the 2D image quality and speed was typical Matrox legend.
Back when Parhelia came out, I was working at PC World and had already taken pretty much one of every video card available out of the "returns" cage in the warehouse. I also knew some dodgy guys back then who were breaking entire office sized PC lots every week, and I got some amazing hardware from those guys for nothing except the time it took for me to help them out. I wasn't short on hardware. But I never came across a Rage Fury Maxx, or a Matrox Parhelia. Those are the two cards missing from my collection, and the two I most wanted back in the day.
Prices now on eBay for both are insane, unfortunately.
Do you know the history of Trident video cards ? I'm probably able to just type that in the search, but you covered this very well. Nice Job! :D
Love your channel brother.
I have been watching your videos recently. Enjoying myself.
I saw an ad for them a couple of weeks back. Apparently they moved into machine vision space (manufacturing, automated assembly lines, etc). I was surprised to see they are still around. Back in the day I had the millenium card and it wasn't bad for the time.
2:15 back when tech demos used comic sans
I had one of these for flight sim over 3 monitors. This was back in the day before ultrawide monitors were a thing and it was amazing. Was fantastic for productivity too. Was way ahead of its time for what I needed. Civ and age of empires were damn good too. I still don't have as good a productivity setup even now but that will change sometime next Yr when I get an ultrawide. Great video!
Wow its being years since the last time I saw a Matrox card
Thanks very much for this. I had a Matrox Millenium in my pre 2000 build; used it to run Falcon 4.0 :-D It was a pretty decent card, but was quickly overwhelmed by all the new 3D games coming out. When Parhelia was announced, it was too expensive for me, and so went for a Sapphire ATi 9500 upgrade.
I remember having fond memories of the first PC I built that I had specced out with the Matrox Marvel G200-TV, as I wanted to do actual video editing at home and had some experience at work with the Matrox Digisuite MJPEG capture cards. I was impressed at the time, although as I recall there wasn't great support for video editing software beyond the bundled package. I did game a bit and wasn't unimpressed with what it could do, even though it likely wasn't the best available.
In the end I think I ended up replacing the card with an ATI card and a Pinnacle capture card that I had gotten relatively cheaply through work, so it didn't end up being as good as I had hoped. Still it seemed pretty cutting edge at the time, as I recall it. always wondered what had happened to Matrox after I jumped ship, so thank you for the interesting history lesson.
My G400 was the first dualhead card, and it worked fine for gaming at the time.
2x 19" Viewsonic Pro CRTs running at 1280X960 was amazing! :)
Love my Matrox Mystique G200. Was my first GPU. Original card went bad few years ago, but I couldn't let go of it, so I bought another one. Even have the 8mb VRAM upgrade. In 2D it can process HD windows desktop applications effortlessly. Gaming-wise, best kept at 800x600. I loved running demoscene files on a G200. Matrox chips were popular with shader junkies.
Anyone here remember the mythical Matrox G800 that was cancelled. All we heard was rumors and I even held on buying a new GPU to wait for the G800.......damn
also 2:58 that is Sega GT 2002 menu music in the background. I have not thought about that game in more than 10 years!!!
These were particularly attractive in a world where ATI and NVidia could only support two displays per card. That era did not take long to end. Though 3D surround spanning did take quite a few more years.
If you were gonna need an extra graphics card anyway because the Matrox ain't a performer... You could run 4 displays off two NV/ATI cards instead.
Sega GT 2002 music. Classy, you have my respect.
Make a video on the final PowerVR card, the Kyro II. I wanted to Kyro III to come out only for ST to pull out last minute and force Imagination Technologies to go mobile
PowerVR had some potential. Some really interesting tech on their cards.
I had a Kyro II. I couldn't believe how cheap it was for the performance it had. I was sad to see them not develop that concept further.
Power be still makes phone gpus though, right?
@@faolor6468 yeah but after arm started selling Mali, Apple started making their own GPU and QUALCOMM has the Adreno only a few Chinese companies are using the PowerVR. Think they might get killed off in a few years.
I bought a cheap mystery graphics card at a recycler because it was 64-bit PCI-X. Turns out it was a Parhelia, which I think is the only graphics card to ever be built for the interface, making it arguably the best option for a second high-speed video card back in the AGP era when otherwise you'd be stuck on basic 32-bit PCI for a second card.
So nostalgic! - I have some Matrox cards in my collection - PCI Matrox Mistique (1996), PCI Matrox G200 and AGP Matrox G450 - I even use for a while PCI G200 when my video card fails!
The ATI 9000 series was so devastating, I was pretty much convinced, that even Nvidia where disappearing from the market..
Great cards though. I used a Radeon 9800 in a powermac g5 for a long time.
Indeed, even the cheap ATI 9250 was decent at its time for a card that I can found in my country for $45 brand new
I was fascinated by this card when it first came out. Reviewers weren't impressed with performance, but I remember an interview with one of the company reps as he talked about low-level tech like the unique anti-aliasing, and that Matrox had full compliance with the OpenGL spec. Most cards of the time did NOT do OpenGL well. I ended up with an ATI 9800 Pro around this time, and I remember it as having the worst drivers ever in the history of graphics (plus, it died due to overheating). I wish I'd had the budget to get the Parhelia.
It was a good card, from a good company, and even had a good product name. It wasn't competitive in the gaming market, but it was special.
I love the kotor background music it fits great.
Matrox Mystique 4MB PCI still sits on my shelf
Half way through the video... the badassery of the Parhelia was triple-head gaming. Play UT2004 on three screens... I warped my table from having 3x21" CRTs on it... so worth it!
I remember in the work, around 2001, we use Compaq's with Matrox to work with CAD and some of 3D in gorgeous 20" monitors, good to remember this time!
I had a G400 Max, Loved it and much prefer it to the Voodoo 3500 and image quality (colours etc) was way better, ATI was close but still, and nvidia always seemed washy.
WHen I got it, I was building a new system and it wasn't out, so got the Voodoo and had that for one month until sold it and got the G400max. I do recall the excitement and community hype of this Parhelia, but delays, etc etc as you explain, killed it before it came out.
This saw Matrox go back in focus to what they did best, business cards and with that, multiple displays and the Bloomberg terminal and sharedealing world, lapped those up and for your production line business computers just loving Matrox and in hindsight, Matrox did wise to step away from playing the gamer catch up churn market and leaving that to the ATI and Nvidia.
But, for support - can anybody come close to them, even today? Suspect not.
Exactly, the image quality of nvidia is rubbish at that time, Ati came close.
nice video and i also love the ty the tasmanian tiger music u had in the vid great choice of music
I actually had one of these in around 2003, before I replaced it with the Radeon 9700 Pro soon after. Local computer shops were clearing out these outdated cards after the Radeon 9000 series came out, and IIRC, I got mine for the same price as the Radeon 9200. The image quality was incredible, but sadly, the same couldn't be said about game support, so I regretted not spending a little more for the Radeon 9500 instead, which was also on clearance then (and can be soft-modded to 9700).
It was a different time. The big thing Matrox had support for more than 3 monitors. Most cards at the time only offered 1 or 2 monitor support. They also was the low end market for drafting, and had cards that supported Coax based RGB composite. They still make kinda graphic chips.They make a large number of physical chips for Lenovo, Dell, and HP IMMs/IMIMd. Server intetfaces to control hardware.
I really enjoyed watching the video and will be waiting for more videos about graphics cards and low budget builds :).
I'll never forget the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, that card screamed power.
I remember cause I was rocking a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 and it could not handle Doom 3. But that Radeon 9700 Pro chomp through that game with ease with that DirectX 9 support.
NVIDIA had moved to the Geforce FX line and that card was a flop.
Really interesting, and really well made. Thank you for this bit of history made understandable to a layman like me.
I love the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger music.
I wanted that card badly. Actually, MANY of my friends wanted one... except... it was prohibitively expensive compared to ATI/NVIDIA offerings. So, I never bought one. It probably sounds silly nowadays but back then image quality was a great selling point. Matrox was a legend on the market in that regard. Many peeps I knew had a Matrox for 2D and some other card for 3D. No kidding. Me included. By the way, Voodoo probably had the worst image quality, at least that is how I recall. They went to great lengths to squeeze out every so slightly more performance and were willing to sacrifice anything in order to do that. Also, Voodoo3 had the TV version (3500 maybe?) which also made it quite popular back then. But, again, too expensive. I sold a Voodoo3 (not a tv version) a few months ago for $200. They go for a fortune nowadays. Also sold last year an ISA sound card for $300. Retro gamers pay nice penny for them.
9:46 This kids, is the chad way to turn on your PC.
At the same time, Number 9 : graphics cards smashed Matrox. I had Number 9's and were side kick of Silicon Graphics. The filters on Number 9's set them apart.
This is convenient timing, I just installed drivers for a matrox G200eH today on my Haswell based server
google is watching
They made versions of this with AGP, PCIe, and something ultra-rare for a video card, PCI-X. I used to have a motherboard with PCI-X, too, I wish I hadn't tossed it.
Make a video about the Nexus 5X. They go for around 60 to 30 dollars on E-bay, even cheaper sometimes. The Nexus 5X also has a huge XDA modding community, making a great video.
Really nice seeing old hardware that can still cut it in today's world. I wonder if there is anyone one out there who's made a home brew driver for this card. It would be cool to see what other things it could be made to do.
Ah Matrox! They still exist you know. They're just a bit west of Montreal. ATi still exists too. They're just a bit north of Toronto. I'll never forget just how odd the Matrox Millennium card was. It looked like two cards sndwiched together like a folded slice of pizza. We Canadians seem to be pretty good at tech. LOL
Proundly running a Matrox M9138 Graphics card in my work PC. It's awesome :)
Matrox didn't bite the bullet, they are still going today. They shifted their focus away from end users and into the medical/scientific field and more recently into capture and streaming for the professional world. They realised early on that dealing with end users is a pain in the ass lol. They make hardware similar to Extron but more on the computer controlled kind of thing.
I'd recommend watching the video
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial I did
I wonder if we'll ever look back on the graphics cards of today like we do with these vintage cards? Oddly, I sort of doubt it. A lot of what has been released in the last 10 years has felt soulless and uninteresting. Sure, modern cards are amazing capable machines. But will they ever hold any interest 20 years from now? Yet to be seen.
I wonder if we'll ever look back on the buildings of today in the 19th century like we do with those buildings from the 1700s and earlier? Oddly, I sort of doubt it. A lot of what has been built in the last 10 years has felt soulless and uninteresting. Sure, modern Victorian buildings are amazingly capable. But will they ever hold any interest 100 years from now? Yet to be seen.
@@eddiehimself I think you're missing the point of why people look back on old computer hardware. The main point of interest is that it's a different format. All of these vintage PC channels feature DOS based systems (up to and including Windows 98 SE, and Windows ME). However, once systems crossed over from DOS to Windows NT (Windows XP and beyond) it all became nebulous. It's yet to be seen if people will become nostalgic for Windows NT based systems because we're still using Windows NT based systems today (Windows 10). In my opinion, Windows NT needs to die to bring it into the realm of nostalgia. The same thing would apply to VHS tapes if we still used VHS tapes today. No one would be nostalgic for them.
Actually I think you're missing the point. People look back on this stuff because it reminds them of their childhood and days that have gone by. There is absolutely no need for Windows NT to 'die' for people to be nostalgic about it; by that logic there's no way anyone could possibly be nostalgic about x86 based PCs since that's what we're still using today lol.
I like my 780TI quite a lot, it's holding up really well from a card released in 2013, can still play most stuff on ultra or high.
@@tilburg8683 Right but in 10 years you'll have a graphics card that's still the same architecture so how easy will it to be to feel nostalgic about your 780TI? Maybe I'm wrong, I just feel like an era needs to end to start nostalgia. Like I was saying, if we were still using VHS tapes to watch movies in 2020, like VHS was still incredibly popular... Would anyone be nostalgic for VHS tapes? Or would it just be a usual thing we use with nothing to be interested in.
they have several gpgpl compute cards that are veeeeery fast and stupid expensive they are used for decoding isotopes and molecule structuring
I got this card with an old Pentium 4 541 and 2gigs of DDR. I love it for some reason it, I know it's not as compatible as some cards but it is a rather uncommon card now and has a great feature set for a direct x 8.1 GPU :) Runs Need for Speed Underground as well which surprised me as a lot of people say that this card is good for anything from the late 90's up to 2002 :)
By the way, Matrox is the best example of when driver optimisation is more than powerful and advanced hardware. Nvidia always had the best driver support and to this day.
No Nvidia does not have the best driver support to this day, AMD has been stepping up their game big time, install a good Linux distro like Manjaro Cinnamon, take system update, reboot take the latest Linux kernel updates, install STEAM enable beta updates, enable proton for all games(no it's not perfect, but really good), install your games, and you are good to go. no hunting down the latest installer for the driver, it's just all right there in the latest updates.
@@CommodoreFan64 Nvidia does better with far less ''HW power/TDP'' because they've got the money to optimise every game that matters on the market. It's also apperent with ATi/AMD cards, that get better with age. Meaning, the longer a ATi/AMD was on the market, better it got. Nvidia was ''perfect'' from the day one.
I remember seeing Parhelia on the shelves back in 2002. What seemed weird to me is how the box advertised how well it ran Warcraft 3. Except even integrated GPUs ran Warcraft 3 well. It was not a demanding game at all. Killer apps for 2002 were Morrowind and Unreal Tournament 2003. Of course Matrox didn't advertise Parhelia for those.
I got one of these and a top of the line AMD card at the time and the matrox blew it out of the water in almost every game. Was so disappointed it didnt work out for them.
i miss you matrox i never forget you having you in my old system from 2001
“Beginning of the decade” you had me thinking this was 2010 and now 2001...
Excellent work man; really well put together! Loving the Matrox series, I knew the cards were around but they were never really on my radar in terms of gaming performance. Good to see they are getting the attention they deserve now. Things like the W7 Drivers installing hassle free with Steam support are the kinds of things that would personally impress me the most. Legacy support is such an underrated thing.
What Matrox truely had earlier was a noice free VGA output. Compare to most cards at the time they where sharper than the most. I always went for Matrox for office users, for 2d they where second to none.
Looks like this card is a lot of wasted potential with perfectly future-proof drivers. Wish the company was still alive, because it would be a promising start for Matrox's consumer-grade GPU's.
They are still around with some very niche stuff like compute cards, and such, just nothing for the consumer market.