Worst Game Graphics Cards - Matrox Mystique 220

Retro review of 1st 3D graphic cards Mystique and Mystique 220 from Matrox.
Big THANKS going to F2bnp for english voiceover and comment editing.
Test in many other games can be found at vintage3d.org/m...
Drivers can be downloaded at Matrox site
www.matrox.com/...
List of MSI supported games can be found at www.vogons.org/...
Chapters:
Matrox history - 0:42
Tested cards - 4:08
Final Reality - 5:17
3DMark 99 Max - 7:50
Tomb Raider 2 demo - 8:21
Forsaken - 9:54
Carmageddon 2 demo - 11:47
GLQuake - 13:08
Turok demo - 14:31
Croc - 16:20
Incoming demo - 17:12
Half-Life - 19:04
Wipeout 2097 - 19:48
Expendable - 21:03
AvP Gold - 22:19
Unreal - 23:45
Bus mastering - 25:22
Conclusion - 26:39
3DMark 99 Max demo - 27:45
Matrox Mystique Promotional Video - • Matrox Mystique Promot...
Other videos of MSI games:
Battle Arena Toshinden - • 3D Acceleration Compar...
Mechwarrior 2 - • 3D Acceleration Compar...
Screamer Rally - • Screamer Rally on Matr...
Tomb Raider - • Tomb Raider (Matrox My...
Background music:
Babylon - Disco Ultralounge by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommon...)
Source: incompetech.com...
Artist: incompetech.com/

[@rebeccaschade3987]

For people who didn't grow up in the 90's, it might be difficult to put things into perspective, but when the Mystique was released, not that many games supported D3D, or any hardware 3D acceleration for that matter. And the progress we saw in both hardware and games year to year was SO much bigger during the 90's than any other period since. A 1996 PC would look totally outdated in 1997, and a 1998 PC would make a '97 PC look laughable. Especially in terms of graphics cards. So you couldn't buy a graphics card in 1996 and expect it to be able to keep up with gaming "for a couple of years". Once the Voodoo 2 was released in 1998, "proper" 3D acceleration finally became much more mainstream, due to the hardware being much more powerful and support for hardware accelerated 3D being much more widely available. I had a Mystique 220 back in the day myself, and I can't remember playing more than perhaps a couple of games that used any sort of hardware 3D acceleration. And in '98, I bought a Voodoo 2 to sit next to the Mystique 220. Great combination. Fast 3D from the Voodoo 2 and sharp 2D image quality from the Mystique 220. Those were the days :)

[@Ace12GA]

As someone that gamed in the 90's, and was there for the explosion of 3D, these weren't as bad as portrayed here, at the time. OpenGL support was just not important when these cards were developed. It was really John Carmack running an Intergraph setup, and then porting VQuake to OpenGL that drove that. It wasn't relevant until 3DFX dropped the glide opengl wrapper, that OpenGL became important. At the time, it was very common to run games at 320x200. 512x384 was more high end. 640x480 was the dream. When Voodoo 2 dropped, and you could run 800x600 on the 12MB models, that was epic; 1024x768 with Voodoo 2 in SLI on a Pentium III 500 was one of the coolest things to behold. LCD's make these oddball and low resolutions look like garbage. On CRT's, these looked much better; 14" and 15" CRT's. Don't get me wrong, I ran an ATI 3D Rage Pro and Diamond Monster 3D card. I did try both the Matrox Mystique, and Millennium. I preferred the Millennium. I even ran the Millennium for a while with the Monster 3D. ATI dropped an OpenGL driver for the Rage Pro in 97, and I went back to the Rage Pro, and just never went back. That OGL driver for the Rage Pro was neat. Ran 33% slower than the Voodoo 1, but looked way sharper and less muddy. I think that lasted one or two driver versions before they pulled the support; I imagine because of performance. Either way, that was a neat thing. And yes, the Rage Pro would absolutely beat down the Matrox Mystique.

[@AncientElectronics]

That clown on the Mystique box always freaked me out

[@SeñorDossierOficial]

0blivi0n100 Pennywise :V

[@CraaaaaabPeople]

OMG I remember being unsettled by it at the time.

[@pc-sound-legacy]

I hate clowns 🤡

[@stevec00ps]

Ah it was a great card just missing a couple features like bilinear filtering. The 2D image quality was second only to the Millennium. I used to beta test for Matrox for their G-series and Parhelia cards and have quite a few Matrox cards in my collection :) Mechwarrior 2 was brilliant. You have to give them points for having their drivers still on their website for old cards too.

[@vgamuseum]

Yep, only one company with drivers goin back to 80s. Others should learn from them (pointing at ATi). Too bad that none of them never released datasheets or programming manuals for their old cards. Got few of them, but only from unofficial sources....

[@georgH]

We had a millennium G200, and the signal quality of the VGA outputs was superb. I even compared it against an S3 Virge and other VGA cards we had at home with the same CRT monitor, and while the G200 was extremely crisp and clear, all the others were blurry and not good. Guess what? Everywhere else would have shitty cards and the G200 made me aware that all other PC I was using were shit 😅

[@erikfriend]

Just my personal opinion. Some may disagree. The Mystique was an EXCELLENT card back in the day. To appreciate it, you have to remember that 2D acceleration was still a thing... DOS and Windows were used side-by-side. You needed a good 2D accelerator to allow high resolutions and true-color in Windows. There were like... a dozen 3D games, most of which were DOS games running software-rendered at 320x200 resolution. The hires games were oddities, and 3D acceleration was a flat-shaded novelty until... the Voodoo. The Voodoo was fast and had bi-linear filtering. But the Voodoo was not a complete graphics card. It only did full-screen 3D (non-windowed) and it required a separate pass-through 2D card for the normal DOS and Windows duties. You needed both. The Mystique was the 2D champ, especially in Windows at high resolutions with high refresh rates, and the Voodoo was the add-on that let you play the new "Glide" 640x480 versions of the popular games at the time. Eventually, the ATI Rage 128 and the nVidia TNT showed up and eliminated the 2-card setups and Matrox and 3DFX Voodoo faded into history. Those were the days. On a side note. MotoRacer and Monster Truck Madness were better on the Mystique, in my personal opinion. It allowed high-res modes (despite the linear filtered textures), while the Voodoo was locked at 640x480 and was somewhat blurry by comparison. Oh, nostalgia taking me away...

[@pablosarti1216]

Dude, you got that right. I´ve had them both back in the day and it was just like that. I watched the video because the title seemed weird. The cards were the best at that moment.

[@Nine-Signs]

Those were the days I miss. Games were not as flashy as today, but they were miles more fun, more unique, and did not require a second life nor physics degree to master them. Syndicate wars, Theme hospital, Total annihilation, Quake, Unreal, Dungeon keeper, Freelancer, and more, all while I squeezed every last drip i could out of a 486 platform for Quake (practically a slide show) due to being a piss poor kid from a piss poor family who got most of his parts via paper round money for second user and rampant skip diving. My mother used to hate it when i was late home from school because it usually meant I had found a skip full of old PC's and was inevitably going to bring back a chink of it. I had many a free 286 PC, ram chips, hard drives, power supplies, graphics memory chips, those I especially prized as before the 486 I had a 386 that had a cirrus logic card in and you could literally pull out the graphics card ram chips and push in new modules with a higher capacity. Obviously Nvidia nor AMD could ever figure out how to do such a thing today.... no no no... far too difficult... -.- Today, according to future mark via my overclocking, I have the second fasted 3070 rig on the planet. I play Star Citizen, a half billion dollar production, at 1440p max graphics under Vulkan, and have played this for years on and off since purchase in 2015. And do you know what.... like most games today... It is boring as f****. 🤷‍♂🤷‍♂

[@francescobarile4174]

Many people couldn't afford both the Mystique 220 and the Voodoo 1... So I suppose I'd have been happier with a Riva128 or a Verite V2200 card . But I got a Matrox G200 in mid 1999 and It was very good for me. The G200 could handle every 3D game I wanted to play, till hardware T&L became a requirement.

[@bread9276]

I have both a mystique and a voodoo 2, time to do something

[@lemagreengreen]

I remember feeling a little sorry for all these non-3DFX manufacturers back then lol, they were all trying so hard but just got stomped. I remember Matrox cards still being well regarded as 2D cards during this time though, combine this with SLI Voodoo2's and you had a sweet setup in 1997/1998.

[@dagda3000]

The Mystique was my first card. Good old times.

[@conqueringbarbell2101]

Same, my very first card. Then I grabbed an Orchid Righteous 3Dfx card from Electronics Boutique, lol good times

[@slckb0y65]

same here ;)

[@goldcd]

and mine My first build wasn't the gaming success I'd hoped for - between trying to find game patches for the matrox and the f'in awful floating-point performance of the Cyrix 6x86...

[@SigSantilio]

It wasn't a bad card, it just missed bilinear filtering. It actually boosted 96/97 games which were able to run in 640x480 and 65K colours at decent framerate. A better choice than 3D Blaster or Virge, and 3Dfx was an add-on and more expensive.

[@FeisarX]

Rendition made good all in one cards at the time .. V2200?

[@ajax700]

Se mia nonna avesse le ruote, sarebbe una carriola’...

[@michalzustak8846]

Way too many people compare this card to the Voodoo which was a 300 USD card that only accelerated 3D with no 2D capability and which IIRC postdated Mystique. This card competed with ATI Rage and S3 Virge and unlike them could actually deliver a playable framerate in real games.

[@nurbsivonsirup1416]

The lack of bilinear filtering was one of the major criticsms aimed at these cards back then. But looking back, games just didn't look that great with it and even today, many developers going for a retro style choose a more pixelated look rather than the washed out blur of early 3D games with texture filtering. Back then pixels were the enemy, now they can be seen more like brushwork on a painting, giving you a very distinct visual style.

[@micb3rd]

Ah I had a Matrox Mystique 220 as a 2D upgrade from the Cirrus Logic 5434 paired with 3Dfx Voodoo 1 for 3D, a perfect match of 2D and 3D.

[@Agnus78]

All Matrox cards are great to use them in tandem with VooDoos. They can provide very good image quality because their VGA filters are of good quality.

[@Oosystem]

I remember seing these in magazines, like they were monsters, that would make your PC fly to the stars. or something like that

[@Nine-Signs]

I prefere the colour tones of the Matrox card by far, just needs a 3D accelerator strapped on it but I genuinely think it does colours better despite the choppy performance and texture problems.

[@dominikpsutka9687]

Regarding the lockups when running 3D accelerated, check your BIOS for the setting Assign IRQ for VGA and enable it. I had a non-220 Mystique and that solved the freezing issue.

[@tdome3000]

I don't know what you've done with your PC, but I had a blast with the Mystique 220 for a few years. The only real problem was the missing alpha blending It ran much faster than any Voodoo 1 on my PC, because my overpowered Cyrix M2 200+ more than made up for the lack of hardware triangle setup in the Mystique.

[@E5150.]

Can you explain the influence of FRAPS FPS counter on results? Also, is there an full explanation on how these are tested?

[@nurbsivonsirup1416]

Funny how TR2 looks so much more vibrant on the Matrox without texture filtering ...

[@virtualpilot1783]

I had this as a 2D card with 3D Voodoo 1 and later Voodoo 2. Great combination, great 2D quality. Good memories.

[@SJ-co6nk]

The other thing that you can't see easily in the video since it's hard to compress is that there was no alpha blending in most modes. Instead it'd only render a certain % of pixels of the "blended" texture. I had one of these and a virge, and between them I chose this one often because at least it ran fast

[@houstonhelicoptertours1006]

The Mystique was pretty good at 2D, like most Matrox products. I'm sure most people paired it with a 3dfx card for 3D.

[@spitzspitzer6117]

Had this config, together with Diamond Monster 3D II 12MB, great setup.

[@michaelheinrich6753]

Had this config also. Nobody I know really used the Matrox for 3D Gaming.

[@MicroMacroUniverse]

Curious about those 12 MSI supported game performances.Great video btw, loved that card playing Scorched Planet and Sub-Culture. I have to try that Bus Mastering on my Pentium MMX also :D

[@veldringr]

I had the Mystique 220 and I had the same problems again and again. Direct3D when it came to bilinear filtering was always problematic with this card. It got a bit better when a year and a half later I paired it with the Matrox m3D powerVR. A great chip, with extremely limited support. However, I always remember it with a smile as it was a part of my first 32bit computer, paired with an AMD K6 @200MHz (had an 8088 until then). Great games we had back then...

[@TheVanillatech]

Mystique didn't support bilinear filtering. It wasn't listed on the box when you bought it. So not sure why that would be "problematic". That's like saying "painting with the colour blue gives very poor red". The Matrox Mystique was a great card, less than half the price of a 3Dfx, but enabled gamers to run the latest 3D games at HD resolutions like 640x480 and with blistering performance compared to software rendering, while enabling the full 65k colour options. Games like Screamer 2, POD, Tomb Raider, Motor Racer etc all ran perfectly smooth on the Matrox card. Also the Mechwarrior 2 bundled with the card was the best 3D accelerated version out there, with the original scores and awesome atmosphere. Side by side, sure my friends VooDoo rig was better looking with his bilinear filtering and Glide support in Quake II, but his Orchid Righteous cost £200, compared to my £77 Mystique. Once I bought a VooDoo card, I kept the Mystique for it's amazing 2D fidelity in windows and 2D games for many years.

[@veldringr]

@@TheVanillatechit's nice going through that information with the help of the internet to make you sound like a commercial. Tomb raider did not run smooth as textures were not always loading up correctly. 640*480 in 1996 was already outdated, especially when paired with my EIZO F35 of the time. You mention what was on the box, but forget that many magazines of the time, promoted the card like it was the best thing since the invention of the wheel. Same goes for Matrox itself, where even on its bundled CD was giving too many promises on what the card can do, and what it cannot. For a 12-year old child, like myself back then, that was all that was needed. It's nice looking at things on paper, it's even better if you actually take the ride yourself. The Mystique in 2016 was definitely not £77, and Voodoo as a standalone card came at least a year and a half later.

[@TheVanillatech]

@@veldringr It must be difficult to be THAT paranoid. I bought a Mystique on the week of release for my Pentium 200 vanilla non-MMX PC. I still have it. I have, in fact, somewhere in the region of 250 GPU's from over 10 different manufacturers. Hence my name here. Nobody said the Mystique in 2016 was worth £77, I'm not sure where you are going with that. I paid £77 for mine from PC World, back in the day. And of course, to any collector, antique card's values are subjective and personal. I sold an Asus GF 3 Ti 500 in box for £150 to an American gentleman a few years ago, which I would never dream of paying, but to him .... it was obviously worth it. You said that 640x480 in 1996 was already outdated, yet 90% of people in 1996 were gaming mostly at 320x200 or 320x240. Only people with 3D cards could hope to play 3D games at SVGA resolutions with decent framerates. Try running Total Annihilation on a Pentium 233MMX at 640x480. Please, stop being paranoid, and accept that you are wrong. Just look at the comments for the video, or .... even better .... build a rig and see for yourself. Thanks.

[@veldringr]

@@TheVanillatech you're the one that gets heated answering a comment from 3 years ago, and you think I'm the one being paranoid? I've got some bad news for you and your self-serving arguments, which are either contradictory, invalid, or make zero sense.

[@TheVanillatech]

@@veldringr You'll have to forgive me, or grow a thicker skin. When I was younger, I didn't tolerate fools mildly. Now I'm older, I don't tolerate them at all. Still waiting on that bad news, by the way...

[@10p6]

Interesting video but the bus mastering issue is the Mystique cards were made for the Pentium processor, not P2 and certainly not P3. However I bought one for my Pentium 150 to replace the Rage card I had and hated it for 3D. For 2D the Mystique was awesome.

[@d3v-z3r0]

I had this before the Banshee. However afaik 3dfx wasn't that a thing yet, as this card came up. It was great combining it with a voodoo 1 or 2.

[@Ratherniche]

What a great video. I recently did a podcast about Retro Regrets and one of mine was getting the Matrox Mystique. I'm so glad to see that I didn't imagine that games like Destruction Derby ran at about 10fps (no exaggration) LOL.

[@armorgeddon]

Destruction Derby 2 had a Matrox MSI API version that ran very well. In this video they don't use Matrox MSI games at all.

[@Bristecom]

The Mystique 220 may have sucked but the Mystique G200 in 1998 was great. It had by far the best 2D and VGA analog signal quality. I remember comparing it to my new nVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti that came out 5 years later and noticing how much clearer the Matrox still looked. It was actually quite decent at 3D too - only slightly behind the top 3D cards at the time. I could easily play all the games of its era on it and even emulate PS1 games with good frame rates usually. I think it really was the best choice for me for my first graphics processor. I was really disappointed with nVIDIA and ended up going with an ATI card and being much more satisfied with its image quality and digital connection. I've preferred ATI/AMD ever since.

[@radiozelaza]

I never had sound issues with Matrox, I used Gravis Ultrasound PnP

[@vBDKv]

Huh? Matrox Mystique did boost my gaming performance by quite a bit, however, it didn't have any of the advanced features the 3dfx had. However if you combined the two, you were in for some serious gaming bliss.

[@lordpolvo222]

really loving these videos :) wish there were more. looks like you havent done a retro card in a while but i hope everything is going well for you :)

[@vgamuseum]

Well i was moving to new flat and now im just lazy to do next one. Really wanted to do chromatic mpact, before i found that my testing board isn't compactible (freeze at boot memory counting screen), so for that one i'll have to record all compare videos again on other board....

[@thebayandurpoghosyanshow]

I have a hypothesis. What if in GLQuake, it's not about textures not loading. What if the engine draws the textures then alpha-blends pre-baked lighting. We have seen that Mystique does not do alpha blending. So perhaps it just renders the light maps on top of the of the textures?

[@alex76gr]

You review is very accurate. I bought a Mystique (not 220) and paired it with a Cyrix 133MHz back in 1997. It sucked big time in 3D gaming and software rendering was my only choice. 2D titles and productivity software was working without any issues from what i remember. Later i bought a PowerVR add on card which suffered from instabilities and luck of support. At the end and about a year before i upgrade to a P4 machine, i got my hands on a Viper V330 with the Riva 128 chip and manufactured from Diamond. That was a totally different machine! I played all my 3D games with the Viper and they looked nothing like i knew. I still have this Viper card in a drawer. :)

[@markleuck]

The problem was likely not with the Mystique but with the Cyrix processor which because of the way it was designed was terrible when playing early 3D games like Doom and quake

[@alex76gr]

This is quite possible. Later i upgraded to a Pentium MMX @ 233MHz but i don't remember any improvement on the situation. Of course a lot of time has gone by and maybe my memory plays games on me.

[@armorgeddon]

I'd guess you combined that Riva 128 with the P233, because paired with a Cyrix 133 I highly doubt the Riva 128 could do wonders.

[@ThyTrueMaverick]

The Mystique was an awesome card. The included games showed what that card could do. The first nVidia chip was a shitshow back then. And the Voodoos were mostly used for Glide games. A Mystique and a Voodoo card was an absolute killer combo.

[@aaadj2744]

Voodoo was the top tier back in the day

[@christophero1969]

This guy is clearly biased and his testing methodology is a joke. There were a ton of gamer magazines testing and praising this card.

[@Ojisan642]

I worked in IT in the late 90s and we used to buy Matrox Mystique 220 cards by the case. We used them to replace failed graphics cards in the Dell desktops we had deployed, or to boost up older Dell’s to run Windows 95/98 more smoothly. They were cheap and reliable, and did just enough 3D to keep our users satisfied with their Windows PCs. They were definitely not great cards, but I remember them fondly. You could play Doom and Quake with them, if you reduce the screen size enough. We had so many of them laying around that they were like scrap, littering the IT shop. You could blindly reach out a hand in any direction if you needed a video card and find one.

[@AndreiNeacsu]

I reconciled with my past. The S3 Virge DX 4MB that I had in 1997 was a good card, now that I think of it. I used SciTech Display Doctor to get primitive D3D to OpenGL 1.2/1.3 support when other specific wrappers and binaries were not available.

[@JefersonPaivFerreira]

Quake 1 missing textures with the Matrox Mystique looks like when the Doomguy picks up the invulnerability orb. 😂😂😂

[@decfairlight3228]

It's kind of wild seeing the rapid strides made in the 90s in PCs. These days a 780 TI is a relatively acceptable card where as a 5 year old GPU in 1999 was unusable.

[@wishusknight3009]

The garbled audio was due to PCI latency settings. Most likely would need to be increased. The sound blaster cards also were real offenders of bus mastering abuse.

[@lukassteinbrink322]

The Matrox Mystique 220 is my favorite card cause it also supports Windows 3.11 adn games like Tomb Raider 2 from Eidos or Sub Culture from Criterion Studios work perfectly with the card in D3D mode :)

[@enilenis]

Have Mystique and Marvel G200. Thanks to these cards I got into video editing back in the 90's. And watching TV on the computer - that was something special back then. 12GB hard drive was big enough to store a 30 minute clip in standard definition, and Windows only took up about 100MB.

[@pc-sound-legacy]

The audio issue made the bad 3D experience even worse.

[@baliebox4916]

5:54 gives me ptsd flashbacks of trying to run active worlds, old school runescape (then known as runescape 2), epsxe, project 64, and the game that made me eventually throw out that pc back in 2011 minecraft on my dell optiplex gx1 running windows xp back in 2008-2010 shortly after my father passed away luckly i have a somewhat decent pc from 2018 (for now at least)

[@testerrtestowwyyy3941]

Matrox Mystique - I bought this card [1997] because I couldn't afford anything better or more expensive, it served me for about 3-4 years until I replaced my PC, I have many nice memories with this equipment, if you don't have what you like, you like what you have !

[@wishusknight3009]

I would liked to have seen video samples of these games at lower resolutions where the card wont choke the textures.

[@i_am_the_void]

looking these videos i'm glad that radeon 8500 was my first 3d card🥲

[@maciek6919]

Display quality of matrox cards was way more superior than any other available on market. 1600x1200 75Hz over VGA cable on 17inch monitor. Unbelievable quality. You could see edges of letters, or see lines in thinnest option in autocad. Flat screen CRT monitor with this card could challenge 4K OLED monitors even today.

[@greg6500]

I had one of these, Seem to remember being pretty happy with it but I did need a 3dfx add in, then added a rainbow runner and rainbow runner tv pretty much a brick of cards to get the video stuff sorted 😃

[@janwitkowsky8787]

Good review. I had a Mystique myself backmin the day and I do remember that some games were horrid. I will not lie, some of it, made me almost rage in frustration, but then again, I was 11 years old in 1996. A couple of months later, I got the Orchid Righteous 3D Voodoo 1 card. And games were great to play and a joy for the eye. One cannot deny that Mystique was lacking in many points, but it did have strong 2D support. Which basically meant it was a card, by sheer accident, that was the near perfect mate for the 3dfx cards of the time. I even kept the card, when I got my Voodoo 2 card. It was still a good match for it. xD

[@honkhonkler7732]

The most common weakness I'm noticing with these very early pre-voodoo 3D cards is texturing. They almost all either just absolutely butcher the texture quality, leave them out entirely or have a ton of glitchy artifacts. Or in the case of the S3 ViRGE, are horrendously slow when drawing them.

[@gamecomparisons]

I paid less than $300 for my entire Cyrix 133mhz PC with Matrox Mystique in late 1996. The games that were optimized for mystique, like Mech Warrior 2, Destruction Derby 2 and others were amazing for the time. Quake runs fine, I never attempted running GL Quake. My tests with some of these other games have some of the same issues seen here. Voodoo 1 was *way* out of my reach, as was Voodoo 2. I picked up a Matrox m3D sometime after its release though.

[@Scalibq]

The sound slowdown is because of the bus mastering feature that Matrox applied to maximize Windows acceleration performance. There should be a checkbox in the PowerDesk configuration to turn it off.

[@vgamuseum]

It was off, because with enabled bus mastering card was much faster in for example Turok, but usually everything freezed in about 10 sec. Some games freezed instantly....

[@drzeissler]

Mystique is an excellent card, you have to check it on very early 3dstuff and your driver should have broken 2d hardware-acceleration with v-sync in win95, dos still works. check this on some scroller-games.

[@BurningFlame1999]

Excellent video!

[@richardward5135]

Forgot I brought a matrox mystique as my first 3d card. After seeing quake World a few weeks later and no matrox support brought a 3dfx 1 to replace. Great living at home working with zero debt 😁

[@brucetungsten5714]

Along with the MilleniumII still my favorite card for older PCs - speed and picture quality(Rivas are nice too). Only downside is they have no VESA 320x200x16/32 support out of the box unlike some other older cards. I think I got my first Mystique in December of 1995 and never got it to work on my P60 in windows due to resource conflicts.

[@d0ugk]

What sound card was used for this review? It sounds like a software AC97 sound system, not a real sound card like a sound blaster that could have used DMA to fetch audio on its own and not been all glitchy from the overworked CPU

[@vgamuseum]

Cmedia CMI8738/PCI-SX PCI sound card. Other cards working fine and without sound errors. Only other one card with these problems was Alliance AT3D.

[@rasz]

AC97 does use DMA, actually every single PC sound card does. You have to use pc speaker or Covox to not use DMA.

[@SebastianS72]

I had both, the Mystique and the Mystique 220. I didn't like or played any of the 3D games of that era so the Mystique mainly had to run 2D Games an Office applications. And it worked great. I had a 15" 1024x768 Monitor at the time and then got a similar 2nd Monitor for free. I tried to run both at a time on Windows 98 only to find out that Dual Monitor Setups had to have similar chipsets to work. So I went downtown and found the Mystique 220 on sales for as cheap as $20 or so. That was the moment that changed my life because from that day on I never ever had to work with less than 2 Monitors. 😁

[@rebeccaschade3987]

I had a Mystique 220 back when it was new. It was actually pretty decent. At that time, nothing, and I truly mean nothing, even came close to 3dfx when it came to 3D acceleration. Hardware 3D wasn't yet a big thing in gaming, so the Mystique 220 actually wasn't a bad product back then. Moto Racer ran silky smooth on the Mystique 220. I also think that what a lot of people, at least the ones who are too young to have "been there" during the gaming era of mid to late 90's fail to realize, is that before the release of the Voodoo 2, there wasn't really ANY 3D graphics card that could but the mustard. Hardware also didn't generally stay relevant for more than a year, at best. A 1997 graphics card couldn't be expected to run the latest games a year later. If you compare a high end system from 1995 to a high end system from 2000, the difference is literally like night and day. The same goes for the games. Running a 2000 3D game on 1995 hardware, was an exercise in futility. Unlike today, when a high end gaming rig from 2014 probably can still play most of the current games, although perhaps not at the highest settings. So in retrospect, some of these cards seem worse than they actually were. Personally, I only used hardware 3D on perhaps 2-3 games before I got a Voodoo 2. Before that, it just wasn't worth it compared to software rendering.

[@blakegriplingph]

They didn't nickname this card the "Matrox Mistake" for nothing 😂

[@MaxiM_PL]

"Slow and ugly Virge"? Pure heresy, mate. Back in 1997 I have actually managed to install 3Dfx drivers on my S3 Virge DX 4MB and the games would run with bilinear filtering in D3D! Only problem was, there was no transparency so all transparent sprites had black background. Everything else though was running OK. My friends back then were shocked (even though they all had 3Dfx already at the time). I remember playing Subculture, Fighting Force and a couple of other games like this before I got a proper Voodoo 1 ;]

[@vgamuseum]

Well don't belive you used Virge for playing games under Glide. Virge was widely supported by develepers through direct3D, but all models had problems with transparency a most games were playable only in 320x240, max 400x300 resolutions. These cards were too slow and buggy compared to 3Dfx. Their only advantage was good price. I remember only one good looking and playable game on mine Virge/DX - Wing Commander Prophecy. Maybe also Warhammer: Dark Omen, but dont remember if i played it on ViRGE or Savage3D - its long time....

[@xirux01]

Honest i hate the effect that texture filtering has on all games You can see this as a washed-out effect, the graphic becomes less distinct. if you look at this video it becomes very obvious what i mean the matrox have more and clearer shapes and colours. and thats why i prefered the graphic on sega Saturn and PS1 instead of the N64

[@ZX3000GT1]

John Davis This is me as well. I would rather seeing a sharp jagged image rather than blurry smooth image.

[@armorgeddon]

I know what you guys mean, but I think it's also depended on if the developers designed the textures with or without filtering in mind. In case of Tomb Raider it was very early days in terms of 3D engines and so the texture filtering was more of an attachement to an already finished product.

[@raineyjayy]

Thinking about pairing this (the 220) with a 3dfx Voodoo 1 in a vintage pentium pro build

[@Dr.MSC.W.Krueger]

Pretty good when paired with some 3D-only cards of the time

[@youjib]

Still have mine a 220, it was considered as a very good 2D card and an okeyish 3D, it was an upgrade from old S3 trios and Tridents comparing it to voodoo is not fair. Pricey but Assemble in USA and Ireland. 3D side was probably way more broken than advertised. Matrox was struggling with 3D. Still highly respected brand at the time.

[@michaelcox9855]

My uncle had this one back in the day. Now I see why it was in the box and not in a pc.

[@wolfgangengel4835]

I remember that one. Got it in 1997, and everyone was like:"That's a great card, awesome." And a bit later it was like "You can't run that game, you can't run this one." This card was high end for 90ies 2D games, but it struggled with a lot of the upcoming 3D graphics in games back then. It was "in between-tech". Too good for a lot of needs, but not good enough for the future.

[@ClassicTrialsChannel]

Im sure i still have my Mystique in my spare room.

[@cbeagle]

I saved up and purchased a Mystique, got it the first week of launch in the UK, came bundled with Mech Warrior, I thought it was amazing to start with, then realised it was pretty poor at games. w worked well with AutoCAD.

[@gurujoe75]

I have overclocked my Diamond Voodoo 1 to 55Mhz /+10%/ since the beginning, stable, without a single error, for many years. However, I have cooled the card with an extra fan mounted directly on all the chips.

[@boowiebear]

I had this card. I dealt with the slower 3D for the superb 2D. It was an interesting time for video cards.

[@redavatar]

I own both Mystiques and don't use any in my retro PCs. For 3D it's pretty much useless but even in 2D it has its problems. For Windows 9X it's fine but I ran into quite some problems with DOS games, especially ones using VESA. I went back to a fast Cirrus Logic card instead.

[@wrmusic8736]

In Final Reality it looks as if Mystique supports only a single transparent layer at once, completely disregarding every other behind it, and even then it can't properly do it and uses dithering to only simulate transparency. Not unlike Sega Saturn. Except Saturn had software specifically written trying to work around that, but obviously Final Reality was made for better chips. Almost as if Matrox tried to emulate 3D with the 2D hardware they had (which would also explain the terrible performance), not unlike Saturn. In fact all following games confirm that it couldn't do transparency.

[@ravengaming4143]

Looks like the SNES Super FX version of Quake. Gotta love the Unreal software renderer though, with a fast CPU it beat the crap out of the crappy 3D accelerated (decelerated) version.

[@3DfxAslinger]

I think that the mystique drivers are too old for newer games/benches, so you see this white textures, for example in 3dmark99.

[@MaliVirEddy]

Best RamDac, very clear & steady professional class 2D even for 2day standards

[@simonriddick]

It was my first performance card. I think I did play Mech 2 and I76 with it. Later I had a Viper v770. Not sure what my card after that was. I had a Voodoo rush at sometime too.

[@BrassicGamer]

Wow, what a munter of a card. I'm sure I remember the gaming press raving about Matrox cards at the time they came out yet they are now generally derided.

[@WXSTANG]

Otherwise reffered to as the Matrox Mistake. haha... but frame rate back in the day wasn't always everything. I had the priviledge of owning a Voodoo2 card, ATI Rage Pro, STB Velocity 4400 (nvidia), and a Matrox G400. For the most part, the Voodoo2 was the smoothest and overall best, but there were many times I preferred running the ATI Rage Pro over it because the image quality on the Voodoo was always washed out in comparison. The Nvidia card while also fast, and image quality between those two often hitched and made the game unenjoyable. I ended up settling on the G400 because of it's amazing colors, definition of image, and overall picture quality, while still offering smooth frame rates. It seemed to just work. I was really dissappointed the Matrox Parhelia didn't do better, because it would have been great to have an extra player in the 3D card game today, but ATI hit a home run with their next gen and dominated everyone putting to bed even 3dfx, and nearly bankrupting nvidia. If it wasn't for Sony bailing them out, Nvidia would be bankrupt. Wild times.

[@lukelegg9915]

thanks for this really helpful

[@wfp9378]

I still have my Mystique from 1996. Or should I say "Mistake"? I replaced a Matrox Millennium with it having believed the hype in the adverts Computer Gaming World. I asked a retailer to especially bring it into the country for me (Malaysia) so may be the only card ever brought in and sold here. After plugging it in and starting up the bundled games I had buyers regret. Today it sits inside my Pentium Pro 150, paired with a Voodoo 2. This is a great match and I have the satisfaction of knowing this nearly 30 year card can still do a very sharp Windows 98. I believe its slightly faster at 2D than my Millennium, which is sitting in a box gathering dust waiting for my wife to throw it away once I am gone. Hmmm that sounds a little dark 😛

[@dragonbleu1205]

Thanks very interesting for my education.

[@ZaPpaul]

I had one of these in my very first Gaming PC by Gateway. I replaced it with a 3DFX to play GLQuake :)

[@steff-the-ghoul]

This was my first graphics card, good old memorys. Just me the pc and mechwarrior 2.

[@AN-ix9lg]

Matrox 220 Mistake not mystique, had this (1 month) with add-on video card. With this UI 's menu respond was laggish.

[@m7hacke]

Does anyone know the name of the shoot-em up game in this video that starts at 21:03? I used to have it and I am trying to find it.

[@yosuhara]

Expendable

[@m7hacke]

@@yosuhara Thank you. Any idea where I can download it?

[@yosuhara]

You can buy it DRM free on GOG platform for 5,29 EUR, which is the path I would recommend: www.gog.com/game/expendable It should run right after you download it from site. If you want to download it from somewhere else, then google :) PS: it is not abandonware yet.

[@m7hacke]

@@yosuhara Thank you, but I downloaded a CD image of it from some where else, burned it onto a CD and installed it. The setup within the application runs, but the game will not start. It doesn't give any error messages. I tried all of the suggestions mentioned on gog.com and it still won't start. I actually found a few more things to try on gog.com. I'll try them tomorrow and see what happens.

[@warrax111]

Ahoj, aky program pouzivas na to zlte cislo FPS v rohu? -Je to fraps? -Funguje aj pod win98 a win95? -Funguje aj pod Glide? OpenGL? Direct3D? -Je ten vysledok dost presny (teda neodobera na pomalsich CPU ako Pentium 100 alebo Pentium 133 prilis vela vykonu pri merani? Povedzme 5 alebo 10%?)

[@RandomlyDrumming]

I still have this in combination with Voodoo 2 (in Pentium 2 266MHz). It's not really that bad as a 2D card, but it can't perform quite a few fairly important (for the time) 3D rendering effects and is also visibly slower than Voodoo Graphics, let alone Voodoo2.

[@i3l4ckskillzz79]

I am really looking forward to build my own retro gaming pc for doom etc.

[@donkeystyle3200]

I never knew there was a PS1 port of Turok. Oh wait…

[@mikespikeey4625]

its not matrix its trox matrox

[@evildiesel1709]

I came to say the exact same thing. It's so annoying.

[@madcommodore]

This wasn't meant to be a top end 3D or gaming card lol it was the basis for a video graphic system, with various add-ons like Rainbow Runner, to make your PC less of joke of a computer that could do creative things as well as an Amiga 4000 or Macintosh Quadra. A bit like an AMD APU computer today vs an i7 + 2080 Ti RTX combo :o)

[@AncapDude]

Just buyed one for 20 bucks. This card is awesome fast in plain DOS. For accelerated 3D a voodoo sits beside.

[@JoystickVersusMachine]

I'm not sure that lacking bilinear filtration for games this old is THAT big of a disadvantage. I thought it was so cool back in the day, having everything look smooth. Now it looks like someone smeared vasoline all over the screen. The lack of transparencies is the killer, though. It really makes a lot of these games look like you're playing them on a Sega Saturn. Except most Saturn games made better use of mesh transparencies and honestly seemed to handle colored lighting better than this card.

[@stopthrm]

Are there any Matrox video cards that you like? I've heard my uncle praising Matrox cards back in the day.

[@Bristecom]

The Matrox Mystique G200 that came out in 1998 was arguably the best overall for the time. Matrox always had superior VGA output quality, so up until that no longer mattered with DVI (digital), they had their place for everyone but the most hardcore gamers. I had a Mystique G200 with a Sony VAIO in 1998 and it performed very well and handled most games just fine until I upgraded in 2003. Matrox was really underrated I felt.

[@retrogeek4372]

A always thought about Matrox being the best to complement a Voodoo. Thus you have an excellent card for each specific area. A Matrox to handle 2D and a Voodoo for 3D.

[@ramonmarcondes3915]

Quake "Noir Edition" at 13:20

[@hartsickdisciple]

Cards like the Mystique are why the Voodoo 1 is such a legend. The Voodoo offered all the features, and was fast enough to be worthwhile. The Mystique was a massive chud. A 3d card without bilinear filtering is like beer without alcohol. Just pointless.

[@jmbrosendo]

I had this card on a p200 mmx, worked fine for 2d games, crappy for 3d, hit and miss on those, second installment of Tomb Raider worked nice though without mipmapping. Ah, nostalgia....

[@spitzspitzer6117]

Wait wait wait. It's 96/97. That card was resly great. Ok Alpha + bilinear missing but there were patches fixing problems. And You forgot to mention about special games for this card, still I have them at my home. All in all great card, perfect for 2D + 3Dfx 3D compatibility.

[@davidv776]

Sadly, this card only performed decently using the MSI rendering system.

[@adg1355]

Could it work with AutoCAD, MathCAD, and other applications displaying 3D in viewports? I remember Savage 4, which had more or less decent gaming rendering, had the apps mentioned either garbled or crashing.

[@armorgeddon]

Those programs use OpenGL not Direct3D.

[@enilenis]

I believe the first Millenium could, because I remember my brother buying the card specifically for AutoCad and MathCad. I ran 3D Studio Max on Mystique G200 with no issues. Loved that card. Could make 3D graphics and record straight to VHS. Back in the simpler days.