Comment by mrweasel

Loads of games from the era roundtripped their textures through lossy S3/DXT compression and then stored them as uncompressed RGB or RGBA.

I know this because I wrote a Unreal Engine texture repacking tool with a "DXT detection" feature so that I wouldn't be responsible for losing DXT compression on a texture which had already paid the price, only to find that this situation was already hyperabundant in the ecosystem.

Many Unreal Engine games of the day could have their size robotically halved just by re-enabling DXT compression in any case where this would cause zero pixel difference. This was at a time before Steam, when game downloads routinely took a day, so I was very excited about this discovery. Unfortunately, the first few developers I emailed all reacted with hostility to an unsolicited tip from what I'm sure they saw as a hacker, so I lost interest in pushing and it went nowhere. Ah well.

The article blew a huge opportunity to showcase the great diversity of “Pioneering Era” 3D accelerators (they weren’t called GPUs until later). But instead they just pretended it was always NVIDIA vs ATI, and threw in a few Voodoos.

+1 to that, when i first saw unreal tournament with the add-on compressed texture pack was a real WOW moment.

Yeah it also lacked driver support. But it was for a very brief moment the king of the hill.

The big feature of the All-in-Wonder was TV in. You could record, in glorious analog detail that could quickly use up your entire hard drive.

This was a very sweet video card.

4000 certainly did, the "shader execution reordering" gave an meaningful uplift to tasks that "underutilized warp units due to scattered useful pixels".

it seems to have helped path tracing by a lot.

I think their point is RTX is not useful.

Matrox was really halfhearted with game support. They seemed far more interested in corporate customers, advertising heavily stuff like "VR" conference calls that nobody wants. They were early with multi-monitor support back when monitors were big, heavy, and expensive. I had a G200 that was the last video card I've ever seen where you could expand the VRAM by slotting in a SODIMM. It also had composite out so you could hook it to a TV. I played a lot of games on it up until Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which was almost playable but the low res textures looked real bad and the framerate would precipitously drop at critical times like when a bunch of Nazis rushed into the room and started shooting.

Last time I saw a Matrox chip it was on a server, and somehow they had cut it down even more than the one I had used over a decade earlier. As I recall it couldn't handle a framebuffer larger than 800x600, which was sometimes a problem when people wanted to install and configure Windows Server.

The only thing the ViRGE was good for was passing through to a Voodoo2

Like virtualized NICs pretending to be an NE2000? That's interesting, do you know why they'd use a G200 and not something like an older ATI chip?

Even current Dell servers less than a year old ship with G200 graphics. If it works, why change it? A 1998 ASIC can be put in the corner of a modern chipset for pennies or less.

>This is an ad from viral marketing company

they arent a marketing company:

"Dashboards, CRMs, automations. We're a small consulting team that turns your messy spreadsheets into systems that run your business."

What are they advertising? Nvidia graphics cards?