Matrox G200

Matrox, seeing the slow but steady growth in interest in 3D graphics on PCs with NVIDIA, Rendition, and ATI's new cards, began experimenting with 3D acceleration more aggressively and produced the Mystique.

Mystique was their most feature-rich 3D accelerator in 1997, but still lacked key features including bilinear filtering and alpha blending.

This board was one of the very few times that Matrox would outsource for their graphics processor, and was certainly a stop-gap measure to hold out until the G200 project was ready to go.

G200 takes advantage of DIME (Direct Memory Execute) to speed texture transfers to and from main system RAM.

The chip is a 128-bit core containing dual 64-bit buses in what Matrox calls a "DualBus" organization.

Each bus is unidirectional and is designed to speed data transfer to and from the functional units within the chip.

With 3D, it scored similar to but generally behind a single Voodoo2 in Direct3D, and was slower than NVIDIA Riva TNT and S3 Savage 3D.

[3][4] G200's 3D image quality was considered one of the best due to its support of 32-bit color depth (assuming driver bugs weren't a problem).

This hurt G200's performance dramatically in these games and caused a lot of controversy over continuing delays and promises from Matrox.

In Unreal, for example, there were problems with distortions on the ground textures caused by a bug with the board's subpixel accuracy function.