Matrox picks AMD GPUs for its next-gen cards

Matrox hardly rings a bell anymore among computer enthusiasts as the company hasn't really made any waves in the consumer graphics marketplace for well over a decade. There was a time when Matrox tried to compute with firms like 3dfx and NVIDIA but nowadays the enterprise and industrial market is Matrox Graphics' bread and butter, focusing heavily on the company's reputation for excellent 2D quality and multi-screen support.

A new line of multi-display graphics cards from Matrox is on the way and we at DV Hardware were quite surprised to hear that the company will be adopting AMD GPUs for these cards.

Matrox® Graphics Inc. today announced that its next line of multi-display graphics cards will be based on AMD™ (NYSE: AMD) GPUs and their corresponding professional grade display drivers. Leveraging over 35 years of experience in board design and manufacturing, Matrox will expand and complement its line of PCI Express®-compliant graphics cards for demanding commercial applications. The soon-to-be-launched product line will enable unique features that solve real-world problems in enterprise, industrial, pro A/V, digital signage, security, command and control, and other professional applications. Matrox customers will continue to benefit from the exceptional stability, usability and versatility enabled by Matrox PowerDesk™ desktop management software, which will be integrated to work seamlessly with AMD’s professional display drivers.

“AMD is excited to work with Matrox to deliver compelling industry leading GPUs for their professional users,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit, AMD. “AMD delivers solutions, backed by rock solid drivers, that allow users to realize the full potential of their workstations and produce outstanding results backed by high quality hardware and software application support.”

“The AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU we selected for our new product line allows Matrox to continue designing and manufacturing professional, reliable video cards. Matrox add-in boards strike the perfect balance between video output density, performance and power consumption,” said David Chiappini, vice president of research and development, Matrox Graphics. “Our enterprise and industrial customers will continue to benefit from Matrox multi-display board designs, easy-to-use PowerDesk software, direct customer support and long product life cycles.”

Key features of the selected AMD GPU include 28nm technology with 1.5 billion transistors; DirectX® 11.2, OpenGL® 4.4 and OpenCL™ 1.2 compatibility; shader model 5.0; PCI Express 3.0 and 128-bit memory interface.

Critical productivity-enhancing features available with Matrox PowerDesk software will continue to be supported on the next line of Matrox graphics cards designed with AMD GPUs. The robust, field-proven Matrox PowerDesk desktop management software for Windows® lets users easily configure and manage multi-display setups. It offers professional users a comprehensive set of tools to deploy and control a variety of display configurations including stretched or independent desktops, clone mode, pivot, bezel management and edge overlap.