News Matrox Launches Single-Slot Intel Arc GPUs

[Admin]

Matrox announces three Luma graphics cards based on Intel's Arc A310 and Arc A380 silicon.

Matrox Launches Single-Slot Intel Arc GPUs : Read more

 

[kjfatl]

This makes a lot of sense. Intel is aiming at the 90% of the market (by volume) that AMD and NVIDIA are ignoring. With this they can sell a few million of these and get the $30 or so profit that these boards bring in. Not bad when you sell 10,000 boards at a time to companies like UPS, Home Depot, Starbucks or Target for internal use.

 

[InvalidError]

If Matrox decided to pick up the A750, maybe I'd try my luck checking if one of the few people I remember the names of (I'm pathologically bad at remembering names) are still there to ask what the employee shop prices are like

 

[Eximo]

Quad DP2.1 is pretty snazzy and that seems to be the main drive behind these. I have the ASRock A380, and it still has HDMI which is just handy to have, sadly not 2.1 though.

I'm actually looking forward to Battlemage and Celestial. If they are anywhere near decently equipped when they come out, I might make the switch.

 

[waltc3]

Did anyone here also own a Matrox Millennium GPU, back in the days of yore, pre-3dfx? I owned a couple, IIRC. Best 2D GPU available at the time. Everyone expected Matrox to do really well with its 3d card--the Matrox Mystique--which I also owned--it was very poor, actually. Matrox just sort of faded away in that market. 3dfx walked off with it. The Matrox are still good for 2d displays today, I hear. Just thought I'd ask! Looks like that is where they are shooting for with the Intel chips and architectures.

 

[King_V]

I know the gaming market isn't really the target, but I'm actually glad to see Matrox is still around, and, especially, doing something like this - single slot, no auxiliary power.

Kudos!

 

[Amdlova]

Matrox make some cards to multi displays... uses amd chip but I think will be intel on next year's
Quad display single slot.... that's good

 

[Eximo]

Did anyone here also own a Matrox Millennium GPU, back in the days of yore, pre-3dfx? I owned a couple, IIRC. Best 2D GPU available at the time. Everyone expected Matrox to do really well with its 3d card--the Matrox Mystique--which I also owned--it was very poor, actually. Matrox just sort of faded away in that market. 3dfx walked off with it. The Matrox are still good for 2d displays today, I hear. Just thought I'd ask! Looks like that is where they are shooting for with the Intel chips and architectures.

My brother bought it, and while the 2D performance wasn't amazing there were a few game titles that made good use of it for about 6 months. I got his voodoo 2 and purchased a whole back catalog of Glide titles over the next few years.

Not like 3DFX lasted much longer than them either. My last 3dFX card was the Voodoo 3 3000. I do now own a Voodoo 5 5500 I got on ebay for when I get the urge to pwn some noobs in classic UT. I think I bought that back in 2008 or 2009. PCI version so it works with most of my old machines. I don't think I have a working AGP motherboard anymore.

 

[digitalgriffin]

Did anyone here also own a Matrox Millennium GPU, back in the days of yore, pre-3dfx? I owned a couple, IIRC. Best 2D GPU available at the time. Everyone expected Matrox to do really well with its 3d card--the Matrox Mystique--which I also owned--it was very poor, actually. Matrox just sort of faded away in that market. 3dfx walked off with it. The Matrox are still good for 2d displays today, I hear. Just thought I'd ask! Looks like that is where they are shooting for with the Intel chips and architectures.

I was owned the millennium 1 millennium 2 using good old window ram (wram) Mystique m3d was the power VR chip debut.

The 480 was actually highly competitive for the day and they were neck and neck with the best of cards then. After that they just gave up. It takes tremendous investment and talent to keep up. And matrox didn't want to play that game. They concentrated on multi displays niche for digital signage. Shortly there after I bought my first ATi. 7800. Then I bough the 9800pro. Those were the days you could blow $200 and get top of the line.

 

[HWOC]

Did anyone here also own a Matrox Millennium GPU, back in the days of yore, pre-3dfx? I owned a couple, IIRC. Best 2D GPU available at the time. Everyone expected Matrox to do really well with its 3d card--the Matrox Mystique--which I also owned--it was very poor, actually. Matrox just sort of faded away in that market. 3dfx walked off with it. The Matrox are still good for 2d displays today, I hear. Just thought I'd ask! Looks like that is where they are shooting for with the Intel chips and architectures.

I was a big fan of Matrox back in the day. I didn't have any of the Matrox 2D cards, but I did own the Matrox Millennium G200 AGP with 8MB SGRAM, and after that the G400 16 MB SDRAM, and after that the G400 with 32 MB. All of the above were used mostly for gaming. I long for the old days when there were so many different companies producing chips and graphics cards.

 

[Dr3ams]

Back in the late 90s I had a Matrox Mystique 220 GPU. It had 8MBs of SGRAM and ran at 220 MHz. It came with three games, but the only one I can remember is MechWarrior 2.

 

[ottonis]

Did anyone here also own a Matrox Millennium GPU, back in the days of yore, pre-3dfx? I owned a couple, IIRC. Best 2D GPU available at the time. Everyone expected Matrox to do really well with its 3d card--the Matrox Mystique--which I also owned--it was very poor, actually. Matrox just sort of faded away in that market. 3dfx walked off with it. The Matrox are still good for 2d displays today, I hear. Just thought I'd ask! Looks like that is where they are shooting for with the Intel chips and architectures.

I have owned a Matrox Mystique back in the day. It came bundled with a cool racing game ("Construction Derby 2) and two other games, the names of which I forgot.
By some people, the Mystique was named "3D decelerator" because it was so slow compared to the Voodoo 3dFx cards.
It was not even able to perform some basic bilinear filtering, so textures looked very blotchy. But hey, in motion (which by the way was very choppy at some 20-30 fps), you got a biological filtering by your own retina.

Anyways, as a young boy, I loved the Mystique despite all its shortcomings simply because it was my first 3D card and I never had anything like that experience before.
And later on, I got a Matrox TV/video capture card, with the help of which I recorded some nice video clips from TV.

 

[bit_user]

I would definitely consider picking up the passively-cooled A310, if pricing were inline with other Intel graphics cards of this generation. However, I'm virtually certain Matrox' focus on specialty market niches means they'll be charging a multiple of what such a card would normally sell for.

Since there's a lot of us old-timers reminiscing about Matrox, you might find it worth reading Guspaz comments, in these threads, for some insight into Matrox' decline:

• https://www.anandtech.com/comments/14858/matrox-acquired-by-cofounder
• https://www.anandtech.com/comments/...series-graphics-cards-with-nvidia-quadro-gpus

If you want to read about Matrox' efforts to compete in the gaming market, this site has reviews of all their cards:

​

https://vintage3d.org/​

​

 

[JoBalz]

Man, this brand is a blast from the past. Before the introduction and proliferation of gaming GPUs, Matrox was a popular brand for those with a need fore more than an on-board GPU could provide. I began building computers in he early 90s and Matrox was my go-to card until the Mystique., which tried and filed to be competitive with the likes of the Voodoo 3dFx card. As I remember, Matrox was better positioned for business-related cards and never managed to make a dent in the gaming cards. They finally realized it and transitioned over to cards for specialized markets. I check on them every few years to see if they're still in business, and glad to see they found their niche in the market.

 

[JoBalz]

If Matrox decided to pick up the A750, maybe I'd try my luck checking if one of the few people I remember the names of (I'm pathologically bad at remembering names) are still there to ask what the employee shop prices are like

If Matrox decided to pick up the A750, maybe I'd try my luck checking if one of the few people I remember the names of (I'm pathologically bad at remembering names) are still there to ask what the employee shop prices are like

In the early and mid-80s (pre-Amazon and Newegg), I used to purchase most of my computer hardware from a local computer shop in north Dallas. I was always able to pick up Matrox cards at a significant reduction over the MSRP. I'd drop by there every couple of weeks to shop around.

 

[bit_user]

I check on them every few years to see if they're still in business, and glad to see they found their niche in the market.

Yeah, but they're such a shadow of their former self that it hardly matters. They went from designing their own GPUs to now just being a board partner. They used to compete with ATI, but now they barely even compete with any of the Taiwanese video card makers.

It's a little like buying an Atari or Commodore-branded device, these days. There's no technical relation or lineage to the machines which put these companies on the map. They're literally just names + logos that get plastered on whatever the licensee wants to use them for.

 

[Eximo]

If I recall correctly this is footage from the Matrox manufacturing line in Canada. (The full episode has the credits, and they were in there)

Still haven't managed to figure out which card is being made, but LSI chips were from NEC and was involved with Matrox around then.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_HGdBVUEkA