Matrox Graphics, Inc. is a producer of

video card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer m ...

components and equipment for

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or te ...

s and

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workst ...

s. Based in

Dorval Dorval () is an on-island suburban city on the island of Montreal in southwestern Quebec, Canada. In 2016, the Canadian Census indicated that the population increased by 4.2% to 18,980. Although the city has the largest surface area in Montr ...

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirte ...

, Canada, it was founded in 1976 by

Lorne Trottier Lorne M. Trottier, OC (born 15 June 1948) is a Canadian engineer, businessman and philanthropist. He co-founded Matrox, a computer corporation that specializes in computer graphics. Trottier sits as an advisor to Canada's Ecofiscal Commission. ...

and Branko Matić. The name is derived from "Ma" in Matić and "Tro" in Trottier.

Company

* Matrox Graphics, Inc., the entity most recognized by the public which has been making graphics cards for over 30 years. ** Matrox Video Products Group, which produces video-editing products for professional video production and broadcast markets. A division of Matrox Graphics, Inc.

Former Divisions

* Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd., the former parent company. Sold to

Zebra Technologies Zebra Technologies Corporation is an American mobile computing company specializing in technology used to sense, analyze, and act in real time. The company manufactures and sells marking, tracking, and computer printing technologies. Its product ...

as part of the divestiture of Matrox Imaging on June 6, 2022 and succeeded by Matrox Graphics, Inc. ** Matrox Imaging, which produces frame grabbers, smart cameras and image processing/analysis software. ** Matrox Networks, which produced corporate-grade networking equipment. Date of closure unknown.

History

Matrox's first graphics card product was the ALT-256 for

S-100 bus The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 ''(withdrawn)'', is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800. The bus was the first industry standard expansion bus for the microcomputer industry. computers, consisting of p ...

computers, released in 1978. The ALT-256 produced a 256 by 256 pixel monochrome display using an 8 kilobyte (64 kilobit) frame buffer consisting of 16 TMS4027 DRAM chips (4 kilobits each). An expanded version followed, the ALT-512, both available for Intel SBC bus machines as well. Through the 1980s, Matrox's cards followed changes in the hardware side of the market, to

Multibus Multibus is a computer bus standard used in industrial systems. It was developed by Intel Corporation and was adopted as the IEEE 796 bus. The Multibus specification was important because it was a robust, well-thought out industry standard with ...

and then the variety of PC standards. Matrox Mystique 220 Business (Rev 644-03A)

During the 1990s, the Matrox Millennium series of cards attracted buyers willing to pay for a higher quality and sharper display. In 1994, Matrox introduced the Matrox Impression, an add-on card that worked in conjunction with a Millennium card to provide 3D acceleration. The Impression was aimed primarily at the

CAD Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve c ...

market. A later version of the Millennium included features similar to the Impression but by this time the series was lagging behind emerging vendors like

3dfx Interactive 3dfx Interactive was an American technology company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the field from the l ...

. Matrox made several attempts to increase its share of the market for 3D-capable cards. The

Matrox Mystique The Mystique and Mystique 220 were 2D, 3D, and video accelerator cards for personal computers designed by Matrox, using the VGA connector. The original Mystique was introduced in 1996, with the slightly upgraded Mystique 220 having been released in ...

, released in 1996, was the company's first attempt to make a card with good gaming performance and with pricing suitable for that market. The product had good 2D and 3D performance but produced poor 3D images with the result that it was derided in reviews, being compared unfavorably with the Voodoo1 and even being nicknamed the "Matrox Mystake". Matrox morphis frame grabber IMGP2024 wp

Matrox morphis frame grabber IMGP2024 wp

Another attempt was the Matrox G100 and G200. The G200 was sold as two models, the Millennium G200 was a higher-end version typically equipped with 8 MB SGRAM memory, while the Mystique G200 used slower SDRAM memory but added a TV-out port. The G200 offered competent 3D performance for the first time, but was released shortly before a new generation of cards from

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

and

ATI Ati or ATI may refer to: * Ati people, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines **Ati language (Philippines), the language spoken by this people group ** Ati-Atihan festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines *Ati language (China), a ...

which completely outperformed it. Later versions in the

Matrox G400 The G400 is a video card made by Matrox, released in September 1999. The graphics processor contains a 2D GUI, video, and Direct3D 6.0 3D accelerator. Codenamed " Toucan", it was a more powerful and refined version of its predecessor, the G200. ...

series were never able to regain the crown, and despite huge claims for the

Matrox Parhelia Matrox Parhelia-512 is a graphics processing unit (GPU) with full support for DirectX 8.1 and incorporating several DirectX 9.0 features. Released in 2002, it was best known for its ability to drive three monitors ("Surround Gaming") and its ''Co ...

, their performance continued to be quickly outpaced by the major players. Since then, Matrox has continued to shift the focus of its card designs towards specialized, niche markets, moving more deeply into enterprise, industrial, and government applications. This includes solutions for when a large number of monitors attached to the same PC is required. In recent years they have held no more than a 3–5% share of the total video card market. Matrox is now divided in three divisions: Matrox Graphics, Matrox Video, and Matrox Imaging. Matrox Graphics is the primary consumer and end-user brand, while Matrox Video markets digital video editing solutions, and Matrox Imaging sells high-end video capture systems and "smart cameras", video cameras with a built-in computer for

machine vision Machine vision (MV) is the technology and methods used to provide imaging-based automatic inspection and analysis for such applications as automatic inspection, process control, and robot guidance, usually in industry. Machine vision refers to ...

applications. On September 6, 2019, the company announced that its co-founder Lorne Trottier had acquired 100% ownership of the Matrox group of companies, including its three divisions—Matrox Imaging, Matrox Graphics, and Matrox Video. On June 6, 2022,

announced they had completed their acquisition of the Matrox Imaging division.

Driver support

To support Unix and Linux, Matrox has released only binary drivers for most of their product line and one partially

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

driver for the G550 card which comes with a

binary blob In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source ope ...

to enable some additional functionality. These drivers were tested and are allegedly supported for quite old distributions.ftp://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/archive/linux/2009/1.4.7/readme.txt They do not work on newer Linux kernels and X.Org Server versions. In addition to the proprietary drivers provided by Matrox, the DRI community has provided drivers under the GPL license for many more of the devices.

References

External links