# Matrox cards with Hardware acceleration?



## foster (Oct 10, 2015)

Hi,

I'm searching for alternatives to NVIDIA/AMD PCIe graphics cards.
I'd like to know if Matrox cards are supported by FreeBSD, that is if FreeBSD drivers are available for Matrox cards that make full use of hardware acceleration on the desktop, font rendering, in Firefox/Chromium and other software. And if the drivers are actively maintained. I don't like outdated drivers like "nv" that work but are incredibly slow.
I only know of Matrox as an alternative graphics cards manufacturer.
Can you recommend an affordable card for FreeBSD? I would not use it for heavy 3D rendering but just to speed up my old 2 GHz CPU, which has no in-Chip GPU and is too slow for software rendering.


----------



## shepper (Oct 10, 2015)

foster said:


> I'm searching for alternatives to NVIDIA/AMD PCIe graphics cards.



If I recall correctly, Matrox cards were known for good 2D acceleration in the days of AGP slots.  If you need PCIe or 3D acceleration, I would look for either an older ATI/Radeon card or in FreeBSD an Older Nvidia card.  This FreeBSD Graphics web pages has tables of supported cards.


----------



## wblock@ (Oct 11, 2015)

I used Matrox cards for years.  At this point, I'd say "Let it go, man, 'cause it's gone."  I use Radeon cards with success.


----------



## multix (Oct 28, 2015)

I don't know  about Matrox Cards. Being fed up with nVidia broken "nv" driver and disliking the binary driver, I got myself an old Radeon and it works quite well!


----------

