Matrox had those super-fast RAMDACs, which made them amazing for driving high resolution CRTs at extremely high refresh rates, like 1600x1200@90Hz (note to sed: that was beastly in 1999). They also had their house in absolute order with regard to driver quality.
I did a little bit of research, and the GPU that sits on those G420 cards is an AMD part, but all the software is provided by Matrox rather than using any of AMD's drivers. I'm not quite curious enough to go buy one but I'm definitely intrigued.
I'm well aware of Matrox, heck, for a while I ran a G450 DualHead in my K6. My PPro, after I got the Voodoo2 to replace the Banshee with, used a Millennium II PCI for its 2D card. Both had absolutely superb image quality compared to what they replaced, and the Banshee and Voodoo3 aren't notably bad on that front to begin with -- I'd say they easily hang with the likes of the GeForce and Radeon in that regard. Matrox just cleans house, and embarrassed everyone in 2D acceleration speed to boot. My Millennium II got 94 MB/s in the DOS Screamer 2 benchmark. It would take a 5-year-newer AGP card to beat it. The Millennium II is the first card where I ever noticed that the background of Windows 98 setup is dithered blue/black rather than just dark blue.
The only reason I went back to the Voodoo3 on the K6 is because Matrox always lagged behind in terms of 3D speed -- The G450 was never meant to be the highest-end part anyway, but even the G400 Max only "competed" against the TNT2 and Rage 128 range. A good Voodoo3 spanked all but the TNT2 and Rage 128 Ultra, and even then it was more of an even fight than you'd expect. The TNT2 could render a 32-bit image and was sometimes a hair faster in Direct3D, but the Voodoo3 supported Glide for even better performance and had that 22-bit box filter on the output so the final image was mostly comparable anyway.
I'm also well aware that desktop resolutions higher than 800x600 were rare heading into 2000. 1024x768 was available if you spent a bit more on your monitor, but 1600x1200 was CAD-tier, especially at higher refresh rates. 1024x768 didn't really become "standard" until the cheapo tubes heading into 2003/4 could do that at 85Hz.
