Matrox Releases New Multi-Head PCI-E Graphics Cards

[leech]

This kind of makes me sad. I used to be a HUGE fan of the Matrox cards. Used them from the Millennium II (which I had coupled with a Pure3D Voodoo 1) and then onto the G200, Marvel G400, and then the Parhelia AGP card that had 128mb of ram.

Sadly, that was my last Matrox card. They just couldn't keep up with the performance increases that ATI (at the time) and nVidia were releasing. Sure screw all quality on the displays, and just go for speed. If you cared what your fonts looked like, Matrox was the only game in town. But then came LCDs. Pretty much all cards looked just about the same, so removed one of the advantages that Matrox had. So they mostly moved out of the GPU rat race, and focused on making kick ass multi-display technology. After all, they were the first ones to really pioneer single cards with multiple display support.

I could be wrong, but I think they were the ones who coined the phrase "Dual-Head".

Though I will say I think they made the right decision back then. Every other graphic card designer just became OEMs of the two big ones, with the exception of Intel (whom I never really consider, since it's just generic crap.)

Oh well, enough ranting from an old person.

[extide]

Yeah Matrox always had the best RAMDAC's but honestly ATI's stuff was a pretty close second. nVidia's stuff looked pretty gross until Geforce 3 and really it wasn't until the Geforce 6800 that it was great. Of course, I loved my voodoo cards, had a Voodoo 5 prior to my Geforce 3 ti 200 But yeah, I mean I had many pci Matrox G200's with 2, 4 or 6MB of RAM, as some of them had the upgraded RAM, I had a Riva 128 WAY back in the day, etc.

[leech]

Yeah Matrox always had the best RAMDAC's but honestly ATI's stuff was a pretty close second. nVidia's stuff looked pretty gross until Geforce 3 and really it wasn't until the Geforce 6800 that it was great. Of course, I loved my voodoo cards, had a Voodoo 5 prior to my Geforce 3 ti 200 But yeah, I mean I had many pci Matrox G200's with 2, 4 or 6MB of RAM, as some of them had the upgraded RAM, I had a Riva 128 WAY back in the day, etc.

Ha, I had to RMA my first G200, and I borrowed a friend's Riva 128 (I think it was that, or it was one of the very early nVidias) and it really made my brain hate itself. Text ghosting EVERYWHERE. I couldn't understand how my friend had used the card. It was so bad, I thought my monitor was going bad.

[moilami]

Though I will say I think they made the right decision back then. Every other graphic card designer just became OEMs of the two big ones, with the exception of Intel (whom I never really consider, since it's just generic crap.)

Oh well, enough ranting from an old person.

No, old man, Intel is the best at the moment because of the best free drivers. I need to bother as little of my Intel graphics as I have to bother of my NIC, as it should be. And I haven't forgot Matrox, too.

[Kivada]

Big deal, the Asus GT640-DCSL-2GD3 GeForce GT 640 has 4 outputs and the VisionTek 900573 Radeon E6760 5 outputs and both are fanless... Though it's more cost effective to get a few low end GPUs, most of which have 3 outputs...

perhaps, but for fixed installations (think airport flight status screens or wall street trading floor screens) having all the same connector type eases integration. i don't know of any other video cards on the market with six mini display port connectors on a single slot card. plus think of the possibilities when installing multiple cards into one machine...

The eyefinity6 cards have all been all mini displayport. What is weird is that since the HD5870 EF6 there hasn't been another top end single GPU EF6 card, which doesn't make much sense, because if I'm driving 6 displays off a single card I want it to be the fastest card possible.

[leech]

No, old man, Intel is the best at the moment because of the best free drivers. I need to bother as little of my Intel graphics as I have to bother of my NIC, as it should be. And I haven't forgot Matrox, too.

While I agree that having your video card be fully working out of the box with no mucking about with drivers is great, and the ultimate goal. I want a video card that has decent performance especially now that Steam is working and has a lot of games under Linux. (about a 3rd of my games on Steam are available for Linux.)

[rikkinho]

hm

amd chips?! look like they descovery a way to sell the firepro chips, rebranding

[wizard69]

amd chips?! look like they descovery a way to sell the firepro chips, rebranding

The only way discrete GPUs will continue to exist into the future is to sell one design into as many markets as possible. The market for discrete GPUs has shrunk dramatically in the last two years, so to sustain development companies like NVidia and AMD must market their chips widely.

All that being said I'm really wondering how much Matrox IP is in these cards. In the end there would need to be something there to justify the cards over run of the mill AMD based cards. Maybe custom drivers?