Matrox Mystique

The Matrox Mystique was a 2D/3D acceleration video graphics cards available for DOS and Windows PCs released in 1995.

Technical Details

The Matrox Mystique was one of the first integrated acceleration cards supported by a wider range of games, including the original Tomb Raider from 1996. It does however not deliver as much performance as the Voodoo based cards. Like many cards of this era it featured its own API called "Matrox Simple Interface". Besides 3D acceleration it also featured a 64-bit 2D GUI and video accelerator. There were boards with 2, 4, or 8 MB of SGRAM. Add-on cards like an MPEG decoder could be plugged into the card.

The Matrox Mystique was soon overshadowed by the better performing ATI, Nvidia, and Voodoo cards of that era.

Performance

On an old Socket 5 Pentium (90Mhz) a 4MB Matrox Mystque is sufficient to play Tomb Raider in "high resolution", even though it's not perfect - especially when big rooms need to be rendered. This is mostly due to the slow CPU and should be better on newer Socket 7 systems.