Matrox is a producer of video card components and equipment for personal computers.

Matrox is now divided in three divisions: Matrox Graphics, Matrox Video, and Matrox Imaging.

Matrox Graphics is the primary consumer and end-user brand, while Matrox Video markets digital video editing solutions, and Matrox Imaging sells high-end video capture systems and " smart cameras ", video cameras with a built-in computer for machine vision applications.

The RT. X100 Pro Suite is a real-time PCI video editing card manufactured by Matrox Corporation.

There are exceptions: Intel writes in the FAQ for their Embedded Graphics Drivers that the overlay can be attached to either one of the displays but not to both ( note: the Intel 945, G33-Q965 chipsets have dual hardware overlay, and are capable of good quality mpeg2 on secondary monitors when appropriate software is installed ), and some newer Matrox graphics card support overlay on both displays ( for example, the Parhelia Series ).

During the 1990s, the Matrox Millennium series of cards attracted buyers willing to pay for a higher quality and sharper display.

Matrox made several attempts to increase its share of the market for 3D-capable cards.

The Matrox Mystique, released in 1996, was the company's first attempt to make a card with good gaming performance and with pricing suitable for that market.

Later versions in the Matrox G400 series were never able to regain the crown, and despite huge claims for the Matrox Parhelia, their performance continued to be quickly outpaced by the major players.

To support Unix and Linux, Matrox has released only binary drivers for most of their product line and one partially open source driver for the G550 card which comes with a binary blob to enable some additional functionality.

In addition to the proprietary drivers provided by Matrox, the DRI community has provided drivers under the GPL licence for many more of the devices.

Under contract from the U. S. Military, Matrox produced a combination computer laserdisc player for instructional purposes.

* Guide to and software for the Matrox 286 / Laserdisc player

In the PC world, notable failed first-tries for low-cost 3D graphics chips were the S3 ViRGE, ATI Rage, and Matrox Mystique.

Unlike the Voodoo2 ( but like the slower Matrox G200 ) it also added support for a 32-bit ( truecolor ) pixel format, 24-bit Z-buffer in 3D mode, a 8-bit stencil buffer and support for 1024 × 1024 pixels textures.

Millennium Soldier: Expendable supports Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping, a DirectX 6 feature first supported by the Matrox Millennium G400.

* Matrox Graphics division

In addition, S3 Graphics ( owned by VIA Technologies ) and Matrox produce GPUs.

However, the NV1 struggled in a market place full of several competing proprietary standards, and was marginalised by emerging polygon-based 2D / 3D accelerators such as the low-cost S3 Graphics ViRGE, Matrox Mystique, ATI Rage, and Rendition Vérité V1000 among other early entrants.

The Matrox Parhelia, despite having several DirectX 9. 0 capabilities and other innovative features, was at most competitive with the GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 Ti 4200, but it was priced the same as the Ti 4600 at $ 399 USD.

Most AVI files also use the file format extensions developed by the Matrox OpenDML group in February 1996.

On the whole, earlier graphics accelerators by 3Dfx, Matrox and others relied on the CPU for geometry processing.

However, given the bandwidth limitations of the older PCI bus, such setups were not common, and maximum overall graphics performance could be obtained only by using specialty solutions such as the Matrox G450, which features four outputs from one graphics adapter.

* Matrox Mystique, 2D, 3D and video acceleration card produced by Matrox in 1996 / 97.

Since then, Matrox has continued to shift the focus of its card designs towards specialized, niche markets, moving more deeply into enterprise, industrial, and government applications.

Matrox MXO2 Mini: Starting with Media Composer v5, Avid has added support for the Matrox MXO2 Mini interface, as a breakout box with no additional processing.

Several Open Source DRI drivers have been written, including ones for ATI Mach64, ATI Rage128, ATI Radeon, 3dfx Voodoo3 through Voodoo5, Matrox G200 through G400, SiS 300-series, Intel i810 through i965, S3 Savage, VIA UniChrome graphics chipsets, and nouveau for NVIDIA.

However, the Direct3D renderer, released initially to support the new Matrox G200, was less capable and slower than the Glide support, especially in the beginning when it was unstable, slow, and had many graphics quality issues.

* The Matrox Parhelia, a series of computer graphics processors

PowerVR's initial products were available as the OEM graphics on some Compaq models, and as PCI cards from vendors such as Matrox.

As the ATI Rage / 3D, S3 Virge / 3D, and Matrox Mystique delivered 3D / graphics of questionable benefit, id Software's vQuake and Eidos's Tomb Raider were influential in fueling consumer interest in 3D / gaming hardware.

Companies such as Matrox and Avid also focus on specialized hardware-accelerated graphics cards intended primarily for DCC.

While these cards, such as Matrox Mystique, S3 ViRGE, and ATI 3D Rage, offered unquestionably inferior 3D acceleration, their lower cost and simplicity often appealed to OEM system builders.

The end result in benchmarks showed the card performing ahead of the prior generation of cards ( Matrox G400, ATI Rage Fury MAXX, NVIDIA RIVA TNT2, 3dfx Voodoo3 ) but it did not always keep up with the GeForce 256.

In VESA VBE 2. 0 display mode, Vérité's speed was outstanding, comparable to other top-rated cards of the era ( such as the Matrox and ARK Logic PCI VGA chipsets.

* Matrox Mystique 220 ; Matrox Millennium II and Matrox m3D

de: Matrox Electronic Systems

Some of their previous competitors included Matrox and Pinnacle Systems.

* Matrox Imaging division

* Lorne Trottier — co-founder of Matrox

* Matrox Digital Video Solutions division