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Press Release

Matrox G400 Flat Panel add-on card ships with DVI support All Matrox G400 Series graphics cards can now be upgraded for digital Flat Panel output

For Immediate Release

INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM, Palm Springs, Calif., Aug. 31, 1999 - Matrox Graphics Inc. today announced that the Matrox G400 Flat Panel add-on card will begin shipping in September 1999. With this easily installed snap-on card, any off-the-shelf or OEM-installed Matrox G400 Series graphics card can now be upgraded for digital Flat Panel output.

The Matrox G400 Flat Panel add-on card features the industry-leading Digital Display Working Group’s (DDWG) Digital Visual Interface (DVI) specification. This allows the upgrade card to provide premium image quality, speed and color fidelity by bypassing the graphics card’s digital-to-analog converter and outputting data directly to the digital Flat Panel display. In addition, the Matrox G400 Flat Panel add-on card’s Silicon Image SiI 154 transmitter supports resolutions as high as 1280 x 1024.

“Matrox’s new add-on card is an example of the premium digital image quality that is now available based on the DVI specification,” said Steve Spina, strategic initiatives manager for Intel Corporation and secretary of the DDWG. “The DVI specification delivers lower cost, higher quality form factor solutions. The new Matrox G400 Flat Panel upgrade card based on this industry specification will make digital displays widely accessible to Matrox customers.”

“As industry leaders in the rapidly expanding digital display market, we are proud to offer our clients the highest quality digital output signal,” said Mitchel Furman, Senior Product Manager, Display Technologies, Matrox Graphics Inc. “With the DVI standard propelling the digital display industry forward, our clients can rest assured that we will continue to support this standard in future products.”

Priced at $59 ESP, this snap-on card connects easily to the Matrox Feature Connector Port on any Matrox G400 Series graphics card. This add-on does not require a special driver, or BIOS. Its unified drivers incorporate DVI support, meaning that once the DVI monitor is detected, digital output is automatic.

The Matrox G400 Flat Panel add-on card will be sold exclusively at Matrox’s online store (http://shop.matrox.com) as of September 1999.

DualHead Display The Matrox Millennium G400 Series cards feature a revolutionary new technology called DualHead Display, allowing financial traders, digital designers and other users to expand their desktop real estate with support for up to eight dual-display configurations, including an RGB monitor and digital Flat Panel.

Unique to Matrox, DualHead Display solves the desktop overcrowding that commonly occurs in single monitor mode when multitasking between email applications, Web browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, TV-on-the-PC and more. Dramatically different from traditional “multi-monitor” solutions that limit users to extending applications across two monitors, DualHead Display features a wide range of operational modes, utilities and display configurations. With a single Matrox Millennium G400 Series graphics card, users can now extend their applications across two monitors, run different applications on each display screen, output DVD video to TV without losing the use of their desktop, zoom any region of the desktop to the second display and even clone their desktop to a larger screen.

About the Matrox Millennium G400 Series A dramatically different high-performance graphics solution, the Matrox Millennium G400 Series converges industry-leading performance, unparalleled image quality and a cutting-edge feature set. Designed to satisfy the most demanding business and home users, these 2D, 3D, video, TV-output and dual-display graphics cards feature Matrox’s revolutionary DualHead Display technology, built-in support for Microsoft’s DirectX 6 Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping and Matrox’s trademark Vibrant Color Quality2 (VCQ2) rendering. The Matrox Millennium G400 Series is equipped with a 3D rendering engine that achieves amazingly fast single-pass multi-texturing with 32-bit rendering, 32-bit textures, 32-bit Z-buffer with 8-bit stencil, and full AGP texturing. Offering added value, each graphics card in this series bundles the Matrox Software DVD Player, MicroGrafx Simply 3D 3 and Picture Publisher 8, PointCast Network and a hot 3D game, Expendable from Rage Software, which showcases Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping. Based on the Matrox G400 chip, the Matrox Millennium G400 is fitted with a fixed 16 or 32 MB of high-bandwidth SGRAM, as well as a 300 MHz UltraSharp DAC for crisp, photorealistic displays. Based on the Matrox G400 MAX chip, the Matrox Millennium G400 MAX is fitted with a fixed 32 MB of SGRAM, features a 360 MHz UltraSharp DAC and benefits from a 30 per cent increase in raw speed over the Matrox Millennium G400.

About Matrox A Montreal-based graphics chip designer and board manufacturer with international offices in the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Hong Kong, Matrox Graphics Inc. is a leader in the graphics industry. In 1993, Matrox was the first to introduce a 64-bit graphics engine for the PC market with its MGA series and the first to introduce high-quality video editing to the consumer market with its breakthrough Rainbow Runner series in 1997. Over the past five years, Matrox’s innovative graphics and video technology has been recognised with an unprecedented 600 international awards. With 23 years of experience, Matrox continues to deliver leading-edge solutions to the graphics and video industry at the best price and performance level.

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