I'm really confused about NASCAR Racing on Matrox Millennium.

Most sources I have seen in the past claimed that the Millennium only does Gouraud shading, no texture mapping. The Mystique and the Millennium II had texture mapping.

In your video the Matrox version of Nascar Racing definitely uses textures.

Relevant parts from the August 1996 CGW article:

Matrox also added support for texture mapping, though it's not fully accelerated. [...] Basically, texture bitmaps are now stored in video memory on the Millennium itself.

[...]

What about game support? As a demonstration vehicle, Matrox will be sipping to Millennium buyers an optimized version of the Nascar Racing CD-ROM. This release won't support the full 3D features, but will tae advantage of Matrox's superior 2D acceleration, which should still enhance performance.

Relevant part from the October 1996 CGW article:

Capable of Gouraud-shared 3-D acceleration, Matrox added the capability to manage and store texture maps directly in video memory.

I don't really understand what they are trying to say. Maybe this is just marketing speak?

Post from December 2000 in another forum

http://www.forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?t=13 … t_message_88386

I don't think the NASCAR bundled with Millenium I did make use of any Millenium I 3D capabilities. Millenium I only supports hardware accelerated Gourand shading and Z-buffer. At that time, NASCAR is a DOS game. Matrox didn't even have any propriety 3D API for Millenium. Matrox MSI only officially supported Mystique and Millenium II, and it needs texture mapping which is lacking in Millenium. Millenium 3D capabilities can only be accessible with WinNT MCD and CAD drivers supplied by Matrox. It's a professional display card. Never targetted for gaming market, but Matrox did make it very fast for DOS games such DOOM/2, Duke Nukem3D etc. which can make use of VESA graphics modes. Probably, NASCAR did take advantage of Millenium high-speed DOS VESA 2.0 graphics modes with 32-bit protected-mode and linear framebuffer, which is a niche at that time.

I really have my doubts that NASCAR Racing uses 3D acceleration on the Millennium, but still you see better performance. The only explanation I could come up with in addition to the above quotes is that not all triangles are textured so they can be drawn by the Matrox chip while the textured ones can be drawn by the CPU. (It is hard to see in the video but it looks to me as if the road and the sky might not be textured, or at least not everywhere. The road looks somewhat grainier in the NV1 version but that might be an artifact.)