Matrox Teams up With Nvidia for Video Wall Graphics Cards

By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

Long-time hardware fans will remember Matrox from its gaming GPU days.

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

If the name Matrox means anything to you, then you've likely been into computer hardware for a long time. The company used to be a big name in the gaming GPU (opens in new tab)world, but since the early 2000s the company's been catering pretty much exclusively to professionals and enterprises. Matrox's latest announcement is that it's building a new graphics card with Nvidia.

But don't get too excited if you're hoping to see another competitor in the gaming graphics card market. We're already lucky enough to have  a company outside of Nvidia and AMD come out with a gaming-capable graphics card this year (read: Intel (opens in new tab)). However, the graphics card Matrox is working on with Nvidia will target multi-display video walls that David Chiappini, EVP of R&D at Matrox, described as "high-density." 

(Image credit: 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," Chiappini said in a statement accompanying this week's annnouncement. 

The graphics card will be based on an Nvidia Quadro GPU and feature a single-slot PCIe (opens in new tab) design. This cooling choice is unusual for today's powerful gaming cards, but not unusual when it comes to professional products and certainly not out of the oridinary for a video wall application.

What makes this stand out is that Matrox said that the card will be able to drive up to four 4K (opens in new tab)displays, which combined with the single-slot design means you can use a single system with four of these cards to drive up to 16 4K displays (opens in new tab)from a single PC. Do the math and that's a total of 15,360 x 8,640 pixels when arranged in a four by four matrix, aka 16K resolution. 

The vendors haven't announced a product name, pricing, exact specs, or release date yet.

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    Hasn't Matrox had been in the Video Wall business for quite a while? Whose GPU chips have they been using until now? I clicked the article, hoping to find out.
    Reply
  • Gavin Greenwalt
    I remember the Matrox G400 Dual Head. Awesome to have dual monitors and accelerated bump mapping but the second buggiest, most inconsistent, worst GPU purchase I've ever made. (Worst GPU award goes to the voodoo Rush card)
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    bit_user said:
    Hasn't Matrox had been in the Video Wall business for quite a while? Whose GPU chips have they been using until now? I clicked the article, hoping to find out.

    Matrox has never really invested or reinvented their architecture since the G400. They just kept updating it with minor updates for process nodes.

    However if you ever run a DXCaps on their products, you will see they are WOEFULLY outdated in terms of HW Support. As windows the OS has advanced, there's a certain minimum of HW support that their products just won't do well. Selling windows 7 (DX11) is no longer an option (DX11 was just a superset of DX10) DX11 is now 12 years old believe it or not. (Gamescon 08 is when it came out.)

    As advanced features are often a requirement for modern platforms, I can see where this became cost prohibitive for Matrox because of the niche market. DX12 has some hefty requirements. Thus it's cheaper to tweak existing platforms and resell them. But make no mistake, I'm betting this is just same girl in a new dress.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    digitalgriffin said:
    Matrox has never really invested or reinvented their architecture since the G400. They just kept updating it with minor updates for process nodes.
    You mean they've continued using their own chips? I thought they'd already been using somebody else's, for a while now.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    bit_user said:
    You mean they've continued using their own chips? I thought they'd already been using somebody else's, for a while now.

    Far as I knew. Last time I got one of their cards (4 years ago) it appeared technically the same as what they did with the G400 and G450 in terms of caps. They had one in a presentation room they asked me to look at because it was acting wonky with the software they wanted to use on it.

    But they have multiple product lines. It is possible some of their MH chips are outsourced.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    bit_user said:
    Hasn't Matrox had been in the Video Wall business for quite a while? Whose GPU chips have they been using until now? I clicked the article, hoping to find out.
    They've used AMD CPU's since 2014 with their own in house software.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    spongiemaster said:
    They've used AMD CPU's since 2014 with their own in house software.
    You mean GPUs?
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    bit_user said:
    You mean GPUs?
    Correct. I meant GPU's.
    Reply