I'm sorry, but... so what? THIS IS NOT ABOUT THE PROFESSIONAL DIVISIONS OF MATROX. THIS IS ABOUT THE CARDS MOST PEOPLE CAN AFFORD.
Thanks for paying attention, eh. Matrox WAS a well-respected company in the PC market, too, well-renowned for their image quality. Now, however, that reputation has taken a severe beating.
The mumblings that I have heards is that Matrox's other divisions, while traditionally being rather strong, are weakening as of late.
As for the financial info, well, MURC used to have some posts and articles written by laid-off employees that the MURC news poster (VigilAnt) flew to Canadia to personally interview. They had talk about how the G800 project was a total boondoggle, how the fabrication technology at Matrox was ancient due to lack of understanding by the owners in investing in process equipment, how more and more Matrox employees were being laid off, how morale was low, how all types of projects were cancelled, etc.
Somehow I don't think that is the sign of a healthy company, financially-wise. Now this appears to only be the PC video division, I do not have any info on the other divisions.
The owners also were removed from Canadia's "top 100 richest people" where they used to be around the 80th position or so. That would imply that their fortunes are tied into their company and those fortunes are greatly reduced. While the IT industry as a whole is in pain, with the diversification (right, Animagic?) of their products you'd think they would be able to better weather any PC product problems. If most of their revenue, though, comes from the PC division (doesn't seem likely?) then that would explain why they are laying off people and being removed from "richest in Canadia" lists.
I honestly don't think the PC division is THAT important overall, but who knows. I suspect that the other divisions are also hurting.
The insiders also blame marketing for pushing out the Parhelia when they KNEW it had defects. And for idiotic focus of, say, HeadCasting. To sell a product. While other companies were adding T&L and anti-aliasing and a bevy of other features.
The Parhelia's defects apparently do not show up under DVI-based monitors nor do they show up in all cards. They are, however, extremely noticable if you have them--read the MURC forums to see the complaints.
Matrox's support group is unto gods, apparently, and they are the sole reason many people still stick around to buy and support Matrox. But the support people are of course hamstrung by the owners, the lack of information from the company, the driver team, etc. etc. etc.
The main thing that people are pissed about is that the Parhelia has problems--confirmed, real problems, and Matrox is denying that these problems even exist (the banding is what I am referring to).
Now you get a card with a 256 bit memory interface and as many texture units as the Parhelia has and you'd THINK it would perform well for complex shader programs. Well, in many tests the damn thing is slower than a GeForce3. I've seen some tests where it has been beaten by a Kyro2 or a GeForce2. The chipset clockspeed is 200 MHz, I think (I believe they clocked it at both 225 and 200 but don't tell you the difference), and it just isn't pushing out the performance needed to compete--this card was slower than the competition the second it was released.
I'm not complaining about the Parhelia only doing AGP 4x, it's just that the rumored "fixed" Parhelia was to be marketed as the "AGP 8x" version. AGP 4x has little to no performance benefit over AGP 2x--and by the time applications will NEED the extra bandwidth anyway, the system you're trying to run the application in will be the bottleneck more than the AGP speed.
I wish I had more solid info for you, but the most solid info was from former (and current) employees of Matrox and those comments were lawyered away from MURC. So... you only have second-hand recollections from me and I didn't follow things too closely.
The only Matrox cards I have ever had were a Mystique for a short while--it didn't work in my system for reasons unrelated to Matrox, a G200 which I currently have and don't really use, and some Millennium II cards that I don't really use. All of my information has been gleaned from online sources, not first-hand.
