Matrox

Nice and calm

Our next meeting was with Matrox, and the Matrox room just happened to be on the other side of the hall from Nvidia's room. It was the easiest meeting to meeting commute we had in the entire trip. Stepping into Matrox's room was an interesting change of pace. In the meetings with 3dfx and Nvidia there was this urgent, competitively charged feeling in the air. Matrox, on the other hand, was very serene. Maybe it was the normal, bright lighting with plain white walls, or maybe it was the open atmosphere, or maybe it was just the potted trees.

Whatever it was, it just felt pleasant. Matrox somehow found a way to stuff Canada into a Comdex meeting room. While 3dfx and Nvidia have been fighting out the battle for high-end 3D, Matrox has been taking a nice, easy stroll with the G400, picking up OEM design wins left and right without worrying about being the best in 3D.

The G400

When Matrox first released the G400, the card only had one real weakness: OpenGL performance. When the card first came out, the OpenGL was in need of significant help. Even with this severe weakness, the G400 managed to win our Editor's Choice Award on features alone, which is no small feat considering us hardware guys are all a bunch of FPS (first person shooter) freaks over here.

Just over a month ago, Matrox released the new G400 driver set that included a new TurboGL driver which boosted G400 Quake 3 performance up to TNT2 Ultra levels (only on Pentium 3 and Athlon systems). The TurboGL driver filled the only real weakness in the G400. Now Matrox is free to tout the G400 as a feature rich chip with excellent 3D performance.

How was the room?

The Matrox room was split into two halves divided by a row of potted trees. The left half of the room had all the demonstration stations where Dual Head was definitely in full effect. Every system had two displays: monitors, flat panels, and televisions. One system was showing off Microsoft's Baseball 2000's new Dual Head capabilities with one monitor displaying the pitcher's view while the other displayed the batter's view. There was also a Marvel G400-TV display playing the Matrix on the secondary TV output. There was another display demonstrating the Dual Head Zoom feature for Photoshop. The demo area was basically a Dual Head/EMBM (environmental bump mapping) lovefest.

The right side of the room was reserved for the meeting areas and a nice little catered spread. Our meeting with Matrox's Andrea Simmons was pretty interesting, but uneventful report-wise. We asked about the status of the OpenGL ICD, and Andrea told us that another release was probably a month or two away. We asked the usual next-gen questions, and Andrea responded with the same "we don't comment on unannounced products" that we expected. It doesn't hurt to try. We'll just have to wait until Matrox decides to announce something.