Champagne Graphics at Beer Prices

Mark Schlack

PC graphics are entering a new era. For the price of almost any of yesterday's vanilla PCI graphics boards, today you can get swift 2-D graphics, impressive 3-D effects, and smooth video.

Engineers, stay calm. The Mystique won't fit the bill for a lot of CAD-type work, since it stops at a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels. Similarly, if you're a graphic artis t who needs 3-D graphics with 32-bit color at the highest resolutions, look elsewhere.

However, more mainstream computer users will benefit from this 64-bit board's MGA-1064SG processor and fast memory. MPEG software decoding performance is very smooth. I ran the Mystique, with late beta drivers, through NSTL's Imark video suite, and it dropped no frames in any of the video tests. As for 3-D, whether the application is a game, training, or a simulation, results will be impressive. A peek at upcoming games based on Microsoft's Direct3D reveals that features such as perspective-correct texture mapping and shading add a great deal of realism to animated scenes.

While beta drivers prevented me from making accurate comparisons with Matrox's older MGA Millennium line, I expect the Mystique to outperform it and most other midpriced graphics boards (including some 128-bit ones) with previous-generation chips.

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Product Information

Mystique..............................$199 with 2 MB of SGRAM 
......................................$279 with 4 MB

Matrox Graphics, Inc.
Dorval, Quebec, Canada
Phone:    (800) 810-2550 or (514) 969-6300
Fax:      (514) 969-6363
Internet: 
http://www.matrox.com/mga

Circle 1030 on Inquiry Card.

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Graphics Mystique

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