Video Cards in 2001: Preview

Matrox leaves the gaming industry…for now

Since the release of the G400 chip well over a year ago, Matrox has been extremely quiet.  Their most recent product release, the G450, was nothing much in terms of an improvement over the old G400 as it couldn’t even outperform the G400 in many cases. 

The only real benefit it offered was that the G450 was a cheaper solution that was much more integrated, and as we discovered in our Millennium G450 under Linux article, it makes a great card for Linux users.  The DualHead support of the G450 is still quite strong, however it is severely lacking in performance; citing 2D image quality and performance just won’t cut it anymore.

So what are Matrox’s plans for the future?  Unfortunately for you gamers out there, you can expect them to pull back considerably from the gaming market.  In fact, their roadmap for the majority of 2001 features products based on the G450, G400 and even the G200 cores, all of which are targeted at home/office, corporate, and professional users, not gamers. 

Over the next few months Matrox will be promoting the G450 quite a bit as it will rise to become their flagship product, thus putting Matrox in a position to compete in the corporate market once again.  Unfortunately, with ATI and NVIDIA both releasing solutions that rival the G450’s DualHead support while trampling it in 3D performance, you’ll begin to wonder if Matrox can even stay in the market for much longer.

While there’s definitely a desire to know about Matrox’s G800 that you’ve all definitely heard rumors about, there’s very little that we’re allowed to tell you.  But when looking at the release of DX8 parts next year, you can expect the most heated competition to be between 3dfx, ATI and NVIDIA.  It doesn’t seem like we can expect to see much in terms of gaming performance from Matrox for quite a while. 

According to Matrox, they don’t plan on leaving the gaming market behind, but for now they will be focusing on the G450, only to later come back with a more gaming oriented product.  By that time, it may be too late for Matrox, as the market is becoming increasingly more competitive and it will be very hard for Matrox to bounce back.  It doesn’t seem as if Matrox has much of a choice right now, so don’t expect to see a lot from them that will be focused on the gaming market.