Upgrading by downgrading...

[AlphaKilo470]

Well, I'm not sure if I upgraded or downgraded my desktop tonight... I took it apart and threw an old (circa 1995) Matrox Millennium 4mb card into a spare PCI slot and am using that as my primary card right now. Text and pictures and pretty much anything not requiring 3D power just looks sooooo much better coming out of this old card than from the Radeon 9000 128mb card occupying my AGP slot. With the Radeon card, I thought I couldn't get good looking images and text above 1020x768 screen resolution because of my monitor (a 17" ThinkVision C170) but with the Matrox card, everything is crisp no matter how I set my display.

[virge]

I have one of those Matrox cards sitting in my garage right now! Its an AGP version though. It was a well rated card for business applications back in its day. I had it in my PII366 machine in college-- I kept that setup as my desktop machine for almost 6 years! That and my 560/570 machines got me through school.

[AlphaKilo470]

I'm not sure what sparked me to put the Matrox card in my system but whenever the most intensive games on your computer include a bunch of Genesis emulator roms, Duke Nukem 3D and that Pinball game that comes with Windows, you start to appreciate the kind of effort that used to go into 2D acceleration.

[RealBlackStuff]

I have had Matrox cards since the 1990s, among them the G100, G200, G450 and G550
Currently I'm running a Matrox Millennium P650 with Parhelia chip.
Matrox have always been the very best for displays ever, if you are not a gamer.
They are almost a must if you do web design!
I swear by them!

[Unknown_K]

Actually Matrox had some decent gamer cards in the 90's like the Millenium 1/2 (2D gaming), Mystique line for budget 3D, and G400Max (3d gaming with cool bump mapping).

The visual clarity has more to do with the RAMDAC then the processing chip, and what refresh rate at the desired resolution is. The cheap RAMDAC (these chips used to be seperate and now are incorperated into all video chips) look bad at higher resolutions and refresh rates (on CRT). At say 640x480 and 75Hz jst about all cards look decent.

[AlphaKilo470]

With the Radeon, I run my screen at 1024x768 with 32-bit color and a 100mhz refresh rate. I ran the matrox at 1024x768 with 24-bit color and an 85mhz refresh rate. However, regardless of refresh rate, color depth and resolution, the age-old Matrox card looked significantly better than the Radeon.

[RealBlackStuff]

I think it's the built-in default font of the Matrox cards that's WAY better than most other cards.

[NorrisCell]

I'm not sure what sparked me to put the Matrox card in my system but whenever the most intensive games on your computer include a bunch of Genesis emulator roms, Duke Nukem 3D and that Pinball game that comes with Windows, you start to appreciate the kind of effort that used to go into 2D acceleration.

"Old" 2D games are 95% of the games I play, so I'm with you on that. If only Vista had a true DOS environment...