Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
Lorne Trottier was born on the 15th of June in 1948 in Montréal. Trottier describes himself as a space and science geek, and he’s had a lifelong interest and passion in both space and electronics. In particular, Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight on the 5th of May in 1961 and Apollo 11 in July of 1969 made a lasting impact on him. He attended Baron Byng High School and McGill University. He attained his master’s in engineering in 1973. Realizing that there was a market to be had in interfacing CPUs and video output, Lorne had an idea for a company. He and his friend, Branko Matić, started working on some ideas in their spare time. Trottier had a second telephone line installed at his family home, his mother served as the receptionist, and he kept a day job. It was in 1976 that Trottier and Matić founded Matrox (Ma from Matić and Tro from Trottier) in Dorval, Quebec, and they launched their first product the same year. As with many other technology companies at this time, success was built and failure found via the press, and more specifically, via magazines catering to specific interests. For Matrox, the publication was Electronics. They secured free placement in the new products section, and they managed to get 20,000 worth of orders for their Video RAM (MTX-1632). This made the company immediately profitable, and they were able to make more products in rapid succession.
Trottier and Matić undoubtedly read about the launch of the Altair 8800, but despite appearances, their first products weren’t intended for the S-100 bus machines despite being used with them. This was the MTX-1632 which provided 512 bytes of 650ns video memory while generating 32x16 ASCII display output. It was priced at 198 (~ 1166 in 2026 dollars).
Just shortly after the release of the 1632 came the MTX-2562. This provided 256 by 256 dot raster resolution and was built of at least two separate units: central timing unit (CTU), image memory (IM). As noted, this wasn’t initially intended for the home microcomputer market, and it wasn’t plug compatible with any home system. Yet, around August of 1976, this was the best display adapter setup per dollar and interfacing with a bidirectional microcomputer bus wasn’t particularly difficult. At this time, for around 100, one could have purchased a 96 by 64, byte parallel, display adapter kit that required programmed I/O for each point. Moving up the scale, you had the Matrox MTX-2562 at 630 (~ 3710 in 2026 dollars) interfaced with DMA providing multiple video modes and 256 by 256. For around 14,000, one could purchase the DEC GT-40 which offered hardware vector graphics and character generation, DMA, a built in display, a resolution of 1024 by 768, and a whole PDP-11/05 to drive the thing. For the financially successful or radically enthusiastic hobbyist, the Matrox was an obvious choice. Nothing else in the market offered a “high resolution” display with DMA for under 1000.
With two products (technically three, as there had been a less refined version of the MTX-1632 with no product designation, it was just “Video RAM”) on the market, Trottier made his way to the Personal Computing Consumer Trade Fair (better known as the Personal Computer Festival or PC ‘76) held at the Shelburne Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey on the 28th and 29th of August in 1976. This was an extremely important event for the industry with around five thousand people attending. Companies like Apple, Byte, Cromemco, SWTPC, DEC, Processor Technology (Sol computer series) among others were present, and rather importantly, it was Apple’s first major public debut with Jobs and Dan Kottke manning the booth (Woz mostly hung out at the Hotel working on AppleSoft BASIC) and showing off the Apple I in a fully enclosed wooden case with integrated keyboard. At this time, however, the hot product was the Altair 8800, and next hottest products were S-100 bus cards and Altair clones. Trottier collected every computer data sheet and other documentation he could get his hands on.
Having had this experience with PC ‘76, surrounded by S-100 technology, it is no surprise that Matrox’s next product would be an S-100 bus card. The manuals make reference to 1977, but my suspicion is that the product was completed in 1977, and it was almost certainly released early in 1978. From the manual’s introduction:
The Matrox ALT-256**2 is a fully tested, assembled, and burned-in interface card which provides capability for a complete graphic system at a fraction of the cost of any other commercial graphic system. The card contains all interface electronics, a TV sync generator, and its own 65,536 x 1 bit refresh memory. It plugs directly into one slot of any S-100 bus compatible computer. The built in refresh memory allows much greater flexibility and speed since no CPU time is required to refresh the screen.
The output is a composite video signal which can be connected to any TV monitor or the video portion of a TV set. The unit produces a high resolution 256 by 256 dot raster. The complete screen can be cleared or preset by a single instruction.
The ALT-256**2 board occupies a single S-100 bus slot and requires 4 output ports and 1 input port (port address is selectable on the card with jumpers).
Compared most other S-100 bus graphics adapters, the ALT-2562 offered around four times the resolution. It also offered both color and gray scale, as well as compatibility with both European and US TV standards. Combined with the ALT-2480, an S-100 machine would now have the power of both alpha-numeric display and graphics display. The ALT-2562 was quickly followed by the ALT-512 which increased the resolution to 512 by 256, or if a user wanted, could be used to provide two 256 by 256 displays. The York University Computer Museum lists two paper tapes that shipped with these cards: Matrox 8080 Graphics Package, Graphics Package Demo.
In 1978, Matrox was able to boast that their products had been used “in more than 10,000 installations” and they made sure to state that these installations included the ground control displays for NASA’s Viking mission. The company then moved into Wall Street in 1979 providing the Quad Video to system integrators supplying financial companies, which true to the name, was a single board display adapter that could drive four displays.
As the company began to grow, Trottier made an intentional decision to engage in profit sharing with employees, offer daycare and recreational facilities at the company’s offices, and try to keep a rather relaxed and informal atmosphere. He credits the managerial styles of Bill Hewlett and David Packard as the inspiration for this. The company was built of fifty people by 1979, and it was growing at around 200% per year.
By 1980, Matrox was still heavily advertising the ALT-256, ALT-512, and ALT-2480, but they produced cards of roughly equivalent capabilities for Multibus, DEC PDP-11, and several others.
Between 1983 and 1985, Matrox demonstrated and released the GXT-1000 color graphics terminal, the GXB-1000 graphics controller made of two boards and supporting a maximum resolution of 1000 by 1000, and the SX-900 which was a less expensive single card derivative of the GXB-1000 offering 640 by 480 at 60Hz and supporting 256 colors on screen. The SX-900 was around 2000, the GXB-1000 was around 3500. This cheaper card was capable of a 20 MPixels/sec fill rate, which is quite impressive given the time. This was made possible by using an Intel 80286 at 4MHz as the processor handling all of the high level commands and controlling the rest of the hardware. The actual processor handling the graphics primitives and pixel processing was an NEC uPD7220. These CPUs were backed up 640 bytes of 25ns ECL SRAM and 16K of 120ns CMOS SRAM. The firmware was the same on the both high-end and low end cards. Sadly, I can’t find reliable information on the more expensive unit.
Despite having rather awesome kit available for Multibus, by 1985, the IBM PC and XT had achieved market dominance, and the AT was available. To address this, the company adapted the ALT-512 series hardware for yet another platform and it became the PIP-512 frame grabber and MIP-512 video adapter, but now on the 8bit ISA bus.
In 1986, the company won a major contract worth around 72 million with the US Army to build a multimedia computer system for the training of soldiers. This was the EIDS (Electronic Information Delivery System) that offered real-time video simulation at a far lower cost than more common graphical simulators. In the earliest versions of EIDS that I could find any reference to, the system utilized Sony SM-70GP microcomputer combined with the Sony LDP-1400 LaserDisc player, and 5.25 inch floppy disk drives for caching video sequences. The contract Matrox received was to implement the best possible graphics on IBM-compatible hardware. Matrox was chosen for their expertise in simultaneously generating color graphics, grabbing frames, and handling digital audio in a single add-in card. In particular, this allowed some other components to remain unchanged, such as the LaserDisc systems and their discs. This also meant that the Army was no longer reliant on a single computer or LaserDisc player vendor.
The company released the Matrox PG-1281 in 1987 as a relatively high-end card at 2995. This was on 16bit ISA and offered up to 1.5MB of VRAM. This card was built around the 32bit TMS34010 at 50MHz; the same chip used in arcade games like Mortal Combat, NBA Jam, and Hard Drivin’. The 1281 offered a maximum resolution of 1280 by 1024, could push 65,000 vectors per second, and had drivers available for Microsoft Windows, UNIX and UNIX-like systems using X Windows, and it had optional add-ons for more modes and 3D coprocessors. Later revisions would push the RAM limit to 4.5MB, and later variants were made for Microchannel, Multibus, and VMEBus.
Also in 1987, Matrox launched the SM-640 with the Geometry Engine. This was the first 3D AIB and it utilized Matrox’s PG-640 as the 2D part (640 by 480 with 256 colors at 60Hz), and the Geometry Engine was on a second layer mezzanine board. The card was capable of 6000 shaded polygons per second, and it was priced at 4995. With this card, Matrox was counting on the IBM’s PCs popularity to draw 3D software vendors to the platform. By offering a high quality and high performance part for the PC, Matrox would have naturally become a market leader. Sadly, this was not the outcome. The SM-640 was a failure in the market as there were too few applications capable of making any use of it. Minicomputers and workstations continued to hold that particular market segment for a while longer.
In 1989, Matrox began making chips of their own design. These were used in multi chip cards such as the Matrox IP-8, Illuminator 16, and Illuminator Pro.
In 1993, Matrox produced their first cards utilizing a single chip video processor known as the MGA which offered some 3D acceleration. These went on sale in 1994 and offered XVGA support with a maximum resolution of 1600 by 1200 on 16bit ISA, 32bit VLB, or MCA, and the Ultima supported a maximum 2MB of VRAM while the Impression supported a maximum of 3MB. These were intended for professional markets.
The Matrox Millenium was released in October of 1995, and it set the standard for 2D image quality and Windows GUI acceleration. The PCI card offered 2MB or 4MB of WRAM, was expandable to 8MB, and offered a maximum resolution of 1600 by 1200. It also supported OpenGL and Direct3D.
The Matrox Mystique was released to the market in May of 1996. Like the Millenium, the card offered a maximum of 8MB of memory, but this board utilized 64bit SGRAM rather than the more expensive WRAM. With 256 colors, the card could achieve 1600 by 1200; with 64k colors the card could achieve 1024 by 768; and with 16.7m colors the card could offer 800 by 600. It supported Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, VESA VBE 2.0, and SVGA standards, and offered a new texturing engine with perspective correction, transparency lookup table, lighting with true color, and dithering. What it lacked was bilinear filtering, fogging, mip-mapping, and anti-aliasing. Despite those limitations, the card wasn’t bad at launch given little competition and the fact that the Mystique could produce 25 million perspective correct, Z-buffered, transparent, Gouraud shaded texels per second for just 499. It also shipped with MechWarrior 2, Destruction Derby 2, and Scorched Planet. The issue was, Matrox’s first consumer-targeted card gained very serious competition a few months later. The first 3dfx Voodoo card would launch on the 7th of October in 1996, and it made Matrox’s performance quite unimpressive. The answer from Matrox was to increase the clock speed. The first Mystique shipped with an MGA chip running at 50MHz and memory at 75MHz, while later revisions would push these figures to 60MHz and 90MHz respectively. The Mystique 220 would l