Sunday, June 10, 2012

Matrox Millennium - The Non-3D Graphics Card?

While rummaging through some paperwork, I came across a packing slip dated March of 1996 from ComputAbility (now PCMall) for a Matrox Millennium 3D 4MB WRAM PCI card. The unit price was $439 plus $20 postage and handling which is about $673 in today's dollars.

Why pay so much for a graphics card?

Well, it was because I purchased Caligari's trueSpace 2 several months earlier. One of the highlighted features of trueSpace was "real-time manipulation of texture-mapped, Gouraud-shaded objects". You'd have to remember that at the time, working with solid objects in 3D modeling applications was more common in ultra-expensive SGI workstations than ordinary desktop PCs. In fact, working with wireframes that didn't degrade to bounding boxes in real-time was considered amazing.

Comparison of solid render and wireframe modes in trueSpace3.
Here's a clip from Caligari's marketing materials:

New Solids and 3D Accelerated Graphics 
Offering workstation-class modeling performance for the first time under Windows, trueSpace 2.0 enables the real-time rendering of 3D objects as solids. Wireframe views are still invaluable for point-editing, but real-time rendering permits users to display objects as realistic solids, rather than as meshes, in either true perspective space or for reference in sub-windows. trueSpace's real-time solid rendering capabilities are further designed to take advantage of the new breed of 3D acceleration chips and graphics boards.

To make real-time solid rendering possible, Caligari chose to implement Intel's 3DR programming interface over the nascent OpenGL and Direct3D APIs. In order to take advantage of this render mode, a user had to purchase a graphics card that supported 3DR and the recently released Matrox Millennium was considered the best on the market for this.

Shipped in June of 1995, the Millennium boasted 16.7 million color 2D graphics, digital video and 3D acceleration, all on a single 64-bit chip for a suggested retail price of $379 for 2MB of WRAM and $549 for 4MB of WRAM.

Great. So what was the problem?

Well, the Millennium worked as advertised for real-time rendering while working in trueSpace. I just remember that working in solid mode wasn't as useful as I thought. I would still switch to wireframe mode for precise editing and just do a software render when I needed to see my progress. Later, after the next generation of 3D cards were released, claims were brought up that the Millennium wasn't a "true 3D" card after all. In a sense this was true, the Millennium was terrible for 3D games because it didn't have any texture or transparency support. But for solid rendering in 3D applications, it did the job.

Interesting to note that Caligari had implied support of the Millennium in 1995 with the following system requirement specification for trueSpace 2:
A graphics card that supports at least 256 colors (Super-VGA) is required for Solid Rendered mode. A fast local-bus or PCI graphics accelerator will increase the performance of trueSpace2, while a 3D accelerator that supports Intel 3DR will offer the best performance possible. 
But reversed their stance by 1998 with the release of trueSpace 4:
MATROX Millennium
This popular older card claims to have 3D acceleration but in reality it is mostly a 2D card. Consequently, trueSpace4 will run very slowly on this card, both in D3D and in OpenGL mode. Do not confuse this one with the newer MilleniumG200. 
The lesson learned? Technology moves on and you just gotta roll with the punches. ;)

1 Comments:

Blogger Marcos said...

I remember buying this card at the computer show! Great memories...

12:50 PM  

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