When I was building a linux PC in the late 90's, I bought a Matrox Millenium with the memory expansion to 8MB which could do 1600x1200 with 24 bit color.

That was an awesome card for the time, and an incredibly stable analog signal, which Matrox was known for - other cards at the time would get fuzzy, shimmer, or have ringing / ghosting.

At the time, for good support you needed to *buy* an X11 server for accelerated graphics support. I forget which one I paid money for, but within a few years it wasn't necessary as open source had caught up.

Yeah, I wanted a Matrox so bad at that time because you could also do dual monitor on some of those cards. I had a sick NEC with a degauss button and trinitron style horizontal lines and a shit packard bell monitor. I wanted to do dual monitors so bad with both, despite the resolution asymmetry. Some matrox also had connection points for antennas and video capture. They were truly workhorse cards. But they sucked at 3D and were lapped in the Boot mag benchmarks for Quake 3D et al. I ended up with a 3D Labs Permidia 3D card anyway because I couldn't afford a Diamond or Voodoo and ended up turning textures off fully on Quake 3d in the end. Fun times, shout out Hard OCP.