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Guspaz
Guspaz
MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC

Guspaz to upsidedown

MVM

to upsidedown

Re: Canada's Tech Sector, straight into the ground.

Matrox was still in on the multimonitor thing. I remember when I worked for Matrox, walking to the cafeteria for lunch, you'd pass by a giant wall of monitors. I didn't count how many it was, but it was dozens of monitors all being run off a single computer. They also had the dualhead2go and triplehead2go stuff, which was the only way to get multi-monitor output from an iGPU consumer laptop at full performance until very recently (IvyBridge finally added support for three monitors). Even today, it's a good way to multiply the maximum number of monitors supported by a computer. Some GPUs from AMD support six displays, but with two triplehead2go, you can get 6 external displays on a modern laptop. That's a pretty niche application, though.

Personally, I think the downfall of Matrox was the Parhelia. The G400 was their last popular and successful card, and the Parhelia took too long to come out (the G400 was three years old by the time it did), and when it finally came out it was the laughingstock of the GPU market. The design was so terrible that it performed like graphics cards that cost half as much, and then a few months later the Radeon 9700 came out at the same price as the Parhelia which just crushed it (basically it had a two generation performance advantage at the same price).

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone

Premium Member

Yeah, Parhelia sealed their fate in the consumer graphics market.