Matrox G200

The G200 is a 2D, 3D, and video accelerator chip for personal computers designed by Matrox. It was released in 1998.

Matrox had been known for years as a significant player in the high-end 2D graphics accelerator market. Cards they produced were excellent Windows accelerators, and some of the later cards such as Millennium and Mystique excelled at MS-DOS as well. Matrox stepped forward in 1994 with their Impression Plus to innovate with one of the first 3D accelerator boards, but that card only could accelerate a very limited feature set (no texture mapping), and was primarily targeted at CAD applications.

Matrox, seeing the slow but steady growth in interest in 3D graphics on PCs with NVIDIA, Rendition, and ATI's new cards, began experimenting with 3D acceleration more aggressively and produced the Mystique. Mystique was their most feature-rich 3D accelerator in 1997, but still lacked key features including bilinear filtering. Then, in early 1998, Matrox teamed up with PowerVR to produce an add-in 3D board called Matrox m3D using the PowerVR PCX2 chipset. This board was one of the very few times that Matrox would outsource for their graphics processor, and was certainly a stop-gap measure to hold out until the G200 project was ready to go.

With the G200, Matrox aimed to combine its past products' competent 2D and video acceleration with a full-featured 3D accelerator. The G200 chip was used on several boards, most notably the Millennium G200 and Mystique G200. Millennium G200 received the new SGRAM memory and a faster RAMDAC, while Mystique G200 was cheaper and equipped with slower SDRAM memory but gained a TV-out port. Most G200 boards shipped standard with 8 MB RAM and were expandable to 16 MB with an add-on module. The cards also had ports for special add-on boards, such as the Rainbow Runner, which could add various functionality.

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