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GPUs and CPUs

Matrox Millennium

6owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
4/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and display; criticized for value.

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What owners wrote

Doesn’t like it
I had a Millennium II PCI card. I remember its 32bit color mode (which not every card had at the time) was much faster than 24bit. Even though the card was expensive, it didn't have Direct3D acceleration like my classmate's Riva TNT (or 2?). So gaming wasn't impressive at all. At the time we were playing Need for Speed 2, I remember the image wasn't noticeably different than a 3DFX Voodoo. However, when Need for Speed 3 Hot Pursuit came out, Riva TNT could do realistic shading and reflection-like environment mapping on cars which was indeed a leap. One other thing I remember is that the graphics card had memory slots on it, like a socket for a chip. I think it was called 'WRAM', and its price was much more expensive than the card itself.
Likes it
I have some pretty fond memories of Matrox. Saw the Millennium at a trade fair, as pretty much the first sign that 3D will reach the PC segment (I also saw a SGI Onyx there). And later I got one as pretty much the most solid Linux graphics card, which even was capable of going dual screen. And while I don't miss XFree86 modeline configs, it was nice when there wasn't just a GPU triopoly.
Likes it
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.
Likes it
Matrox used to have the best back in the day. Ai were ok and Nvidia were the worst. Even a lay person could see that difference between the tnt out put vs a millenium. It was so great that i used to use an older matrox card think it was the g450 since it worked great under Linux and the pq was amazing.
Doesn’t like it
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.