Manufacturer: Matrox Tech: AGP based G200 board with 16Mb SDRAM and TV-out Bundle: Tonic Trouble, Incoming and Motorhead Price: $149 w/ 8Mb $198 w/ 16Mb

The Matrox Mystique G200 represents the re-entry of a powerful video accelerator company into the mainstream of entertainment hardware.

Fresh off the past few years' strong sales of high performance video related hardware, Matrox set their sights on capturing the growing entertainment segment of the PC marketplace for 1998. Both industry execs and readers alike can attest to the competitiveness of this segment of the market, as seen by the daily shots fired between competing stronghold companies already entrenched in battle.

3Dfx, nVidia, Videologic, Intel, Rendition, and ATi all do battle within the "mainstream entertainment software enthusiast" hardware sector, and each has already developed, marketed, and sold at lease two generations of dedicated 3D or 2D/3D accelerators. Matrox is a little late to the party, but they also have marketed and learned from their previous, and now obsolete, 3D accelerator products.

Enter the Matrox MGA-G200 chipset.

Announced five months ago, the G200 on paper seemed to meet the requirements that anyone should refer to when developing a current integrated 2D/3D solution:

• 128 bit DualBus Graphics Chip
• 32-bpp "True Color" support for both 2D and 3D applications
• Options for up to 16MB of SDRAM or SGRAM depending upon the implementation of the chip
• 100 million pixels per second fill rate
• .35 micron die-size enabling high core speed and low cost
• Single clock cycle rendering of Bi-linear Filtering
• Full hardware accelerated DVD and MPEG 1 and 2 playback

• Estimated street price $150 for 8MB versions and $200 for 16MB versions.