Matrox Mystique

However, that card only could accelerate a very limited feature set, and was primarily targeted at CAD applications.

The Impression could not perform hardware texture mapping, for example, requiring Gouraud shading or lower-quality techniques.

The only game to be accelerated by the Millennium was the CD-ROM version of NASCAR Racing, which received a considerable increase in speed over software rendering but no difference in image quality.

It was one of many early products by add-in graphics board vendors that attempted to achieve good combined 2D & 3D performance for consumer-level personal computers.

[4] Its 2D performance was measured as excellent, beating its peers such as the S3 ViRGE-based and the ATI Mach64-based video cards.

[5] Mystique was Matrox's most feature-rich 3D accelerator in 1997, but still lacked key features including bilinear filtering, fogging, and anti-aliasing support.

The company's reasoning for not including the higher-quality features was that performance was more important than visual quality.

Matrox's words were not without weight because the Mystique did handily outperform the other 2D/3D boards at the time, such as S3 ViRGE and early ATI Rage products, although its visual quality was lower than those accelerators.

[6][7] In general, compared to its peers, the Matrox Mystique was a competent board with its own set of advantages and disadvantages as was typical in this era of early 3D accelerators.

[9] The memory and internal RAMDAC programming interface lived on in MGA-G100 and later processors, until the introduction of Matrox Parhelia.