Matrox Mystique

The Mystique and Mystique 220 are 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.

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 the company's Millennium card, released in 1995, excelled at MS-DOS performance as well. With regard to 3D acceleration, Matrox stepped forward in 1994 with their Impression Plus. However, that card only could accelerate a very limited feature set, and was primarily targeted at CAD applications. The Impression could not perform hardware texture mapping, for example, requiring Gouraud shading or lower-quality techniques. Very few games took advantage of the 3D capabilities of Impression Plus, with the only known games being the three titles that were bundled with the card in its '3D Superpack' CD bundle: 3D fighting game, Sento by 47 Tek; 3D space combat game, IceHawk by Amorphous Designs, and Specter MGA (aka Specter VR) by Velocity.

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 CDROM 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. Based heavily on the Millennium but with various additions and some cost-cutting measures, Mystique would offer gamers more of what they wanted for new 3D game titles.

The Mystique was a 64-bit 2D GUI and video accelerator (MGA1064SG) with 3D acceleration support. Mystique has "Matrox Simple Interface" (MSI) rendering API. It was one of many early products by add-in graphics board vendors that attempted to achieve good combined 2D & 3D performance for consumer-level personal computers. The board used a 64-bit SGRAM memory interface (Synchronous Graphics RAM) instead of the more expensive WRAM (Window RAM) aboard the Matrox Millennium. SGRAM offered performance approaching WRAM, but it was cheaper. Mystique came in configurations ranging from 2 MB SGRAM up to 8 MB. Mystique also had various ports on the card for memory expansion and additional hardware peripherals. The 8 MB configuration used the memory expansion module. Add-on cards from Matrox included the Rainbow Runner Video, a board offering MPEG-1 and AVI video playback with video inputs and outputs. The other add-on was called Rainbow Runner TV, an ISA-based TV tuner card for watching TV on PC.

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