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 1997.
History
Matrox had been known for years as a significant player in the high-end 2D graphics accelerator market. Cards they produced were
The newer Millennium card also contained 3D capabilities similar to the Impression Plus, and was nearly as limited. Without support for texturing, the cards were very limited in visual enhancement capability. 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. The answer to these limitations, and Matrox's first attempt at targeting the consumer gaming PC market, would be the Matrox Mystique. It was based heavily on the Millennium but with various additions and some cost-cutting measures.
Overview
The Mystique was a
Mystique's 2D performance was very close to that of the much more expensive Millennium card, especially at
Mystique was Matrox's most
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. It performed well for an early 2D/3D combo card, but it had questionable 3D visual quality. Its 2D support rivaled the best cards available for performance and quality, however. It was not uncommon to pair up the Mystique or another Matrox card with a
Driver support for the Mystique was robust at launch.
Mystique 220
Matrox released a newer version of the Mystique in 1997. The name gives the only significant change, that being the RAMDAC running at 220 MHz. This made the Mystique equivalent to the original Millennium for high-resolution 2D resolution support. The chip on the board was called MGA1164SG instead of MGA1064SG (original Mystique) as well. Otherwise, the card was identical in feature-set to the original Mystique and offered almost identical performance.[3][8]
A special business-oriented version of Mystique 220, called Mystique 220 Business, was launched as well. This card came with a different software bundle targeting business users and excluding the games. The actual hardware was identical.[9]
Legacy
The memory and internal RAMDAC programming interface lived on in MGA-G100 and later processors, until the introduction of Matrox Parhelia.
Competing 2D/3D chipsets
References
- ^ Imagine Media. February 1997. p. 62.
- ^ Byte Dec 1994"Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2008-05-17. Retrieved 2009-01-14.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ a b c d Hagedoorn, Hilbert. Review - Matrox Mystique 4Mb Archived 2006-11-07 at the Wayback Machine, the Guru 3D, accessed September 9, 2006.
- ^ Edstrom, Bo. Millennium RAMDAC, Google Groups, May 8, 1997.
- ^ Jeremy. Review of ATI 3D Expression, Matrox Mystique and #9 Reality 332, Google Groups, August 30, 1996.
- ^ Lupinsky, K. Kanajana's MechWarrior 2 3D Page, November 13, 2005.
- ^ Busch, Eric T.. 3D Card Update by Loyd Case (of Computer Gaming World), Google Groups, September 13, 1996.
- ^ Mystique 170 versus 220, Google Groups, November 6, 1997.
- ^ Matrox Mystique 220 -- 2 MB vs 4 MB, what differences?, Google Groups, September 2, 1998.