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When I was building a linux PC in the late 90's, I bought a Matrox Millenium with the memory expansion to 8MB which could do 1600x1200 with 24 bit color.

That was an awesome card for the time, and an incredibly stable analog signal, which Matrox was known for - other cards at the time would get fuzzy, shimmer, or have ringing / ghosting.

At the time, for good support you needed to *buy* an X11 server for accelerated graphics support. I forget which one I paid money for, but within a few years it wasn't necessary as open source had caught up.

I had the original Matrox Millenium. Just threw out the old box a couple years ago when my parents sold their house. I remember driving like 50 miles to CDW will call to get it and being amazed at the 3D demo programs. I kept it for awhile but eventually got a 3DFX Voodoo card. And then a Voodoo Rush card that was a complete POS.

My first pc had some trident video card that failed right away and the local shop replaced with a millennium (g200, I think). I definitely got the better end of that one. It was 3d accelerated and came with some 3d text art tool that made animated text gifs in the software too.

I had the Matrox Marvel G200-TV I think in the late nineties. That graphics card was a beauty. It even let me watch TV on my computer as long as I threaded a coax cable up to my bedroom!

That was an interesting read. Unfortunately I never has the pleasure of owning a Matrox. I got really close to buying a Millennium G200 back in the late 90s, but decided to go for the RIVA TNT instead. Was in the nVidia camp (with brief stints in Intel and ATi) until I swithed to ATi/AMD for good around 15 years ago.

Somewhere around early 2000, I used to work part-time with a local video editing agency. Matrox video capture cards were the really high bar, other than Avid. At least that is what I remember. We had a couple of Matrox capture cards, expensive for our tiny budget. Other than that and a few 3D cards also around that time, I forgot about Matrox.