History
Matrox had been known for years as a significant player in the high-end 2D graphics accelerator market. Cards they produced were excellent Windows accelerators, and some of the later cards such as Millennium and Mystique excelled at MS-DOS as well. Matrox stepped forward in 1994 with their Impression Plus to innovate with one of the first 3D accelerator boards, but that card only could accelerate a very limited feature set (no texture mapping), and was primarily targeted at CAD applications.
Matrox, seeing the slow but steady growth in interest in 3D graphics on PCs with NVIDIA, Rendition, and ATI's new cards, began experimenting with 3D acceleration more aggressively and produced the Mystique. Mystique was their most feature-rich 3D accelerator in 1997, but still lacked key features including bilinear filtering. Then, in early 1998, Matrox teamed up with PowerVR to produce an add-in 3D board called Matrox m3D using the PowerVR PCX2 chipset. This board was one of the very few times that Matrox would outsource for their graphics processor, and was certainly a stop-gap measure to hold out until the G200 project was ready to go.
Read more about this topic: Matrox G200
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