Matrox

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Matrox Electronic Systems
Type Private
Founded 1976
Headquarters Montreal, Canada
Industry Computer
Products Graphic cards
Employees 900+
Website www.matrox.com

Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd is a Canadian company based in Dorval, Quebec, which produces video card components and equipment for personal computers. It was founded by Lorne Trottier and Branko Matić. The "ma" from Matić and "tro" from Trottier, combined with an "x" for excellence, forms the Matrox name.

Matrox specializes in professional multi-display graphics cards that enable more than one monitor to be driven by a single card. The targeted user-base for Matrox graphics cards largely consists of 2D, 3D, video, scientific, medical, military and financial workstation users.

During the 1990s, Matrox's Millennium line of video cards were noted for their exceptional 2D speed and visual quality. The company, having chosen to focus development on enterprise graphics requirements, gradually fell behind others in terms of 3D performance leaving competitors to absorb the mainstream graphics market share. In the 2000s, Matrox has continued to shift the focus of its card designs towards specialized, niche markets, moving more deeply into enterprise, industrial, and government applications. In recent years they have held no more than a 3–5% share of the total video card market.

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[edit] Three divisions

Matrox is now divided in three divisions: Matrox Graphics, Matrox Video, and Matrox Imaging. Matrox Graphics is the primary consumer and end-user brand, while Matrox Video markets digital video editing solutions, and Matrox Imaging sells high-end video capture systems and "smart cameras", video cameras with a built-in computer for machine vision applications.

[edit] Driver Support

To support Unix and Linux, Matrox has released binary only drivers for most of their product line and one partially open source driver for the G550 card which comes with a binary blob to enable some additional functionality. In addition to the proprietry drivers provided by Matrox the DRI community has provided fully GPL'd drivers for many more of the devices. [1][2]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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Matrox graphics cards