Does anyone remember Matrox? If you were a PC gamer or GPU enthusiast during the eighties and/or nineties, that’s a most definite yes. The video card producer was a leading force in the latter half of the last century, standing firm against NVIDIA, ATI, and 3dfx Interactive (RIP). Sadly, Matrox was completely overwhelmed by the combined might of green and red, whose advances prompted it to shift into less competitive pastures.
The company is still alive and well, however. In fact, it’s still in the graphics and video business. Just last week, Matrox revealed that it would be teaming up with its old nemesis, NVIDIA, on a novel project for the commercial sector. The team will be working together on “multi-display embedded graphics cards purpose-built for high-density video walls,” and we have a first look at those today.
Matrox’s D-Series family of GPUs are single-slot graphics cards that can “drive up to four 4Kp60 displays and can be easily combined to output up to 16 x 4K monitors for high-density video walls” in professional environments. Fueling them is a custom-built NVIDIA Quadro embedded GPU, which allows for four HDMI or DisplayPort displays to be connected. Four D-Series cards can be combined using board-to-board framelock cables to create a gigantic 4K video wall comprising sixteen displays.
“Matrox is thrilled to work alongside NVIDIA, the leader in GPU computing, to bring to market a new standard of high-density video walls,” said David Chiappini, executive vice president of research and development at Matrox. “This collaboration is yet another example of our commitment to expanding our video wall portfolio while customers continue to benefit from our graphics expertise, world-class engineering, dedicated technical support, and long product life cycles.”
“Matrox is a leader in creating graphics-rich video walls that make an instant real-world impact with customers,” said Scott Fitzpatrick, vice president of Quadro Product Marketing at NVIDIA. “The exceptional video playback performance, reliability, and longevity of the NVIDIA architecture makes it an ideal platform for the GPUs Matrox is developing for next-generation video walls.”
Matrox’s D-Series graphics cards will be present at ISE 2020, an AV and systems integration show held in Amsterdam.