I remember having 2 486s. The first one was an intel 486DX 33 MHz, with 4MB 30pin RAM, and a Triden 8900CL 1MB VGA ISA card. Afterwards I upgraded the motherboard to one of those that were called "VIP", that supported VLB, ISA and PCI bus, with an IntelDX4 100 MHz, 8MB of 72pin RAM, and a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434 1MB PCI card, which I later upgraded to 2MB. That machine was very capable of playing most MSDOS games except the latest from 1996 or later. It was so much better to play DOOM with the IntelDX4 rather than the 486DX, and besides I could overclock the bus to 50 MHz (so it ran 50x2 instead of 33x3), or to 40 MHz so I had 120MHz. Pretty amazing performance from that chip I must say.
Fun fact about Trident ISA cards (and some VLB cards): you can use them in an 8-bit slot. The rest of the connectors are just data bandwidth that it can live without. While the card is too laggy for 486 or faster machines, it does absolute wonders for an XT or 286's performance; you don't realise what a bottleneck Herc monochrome is until you replace it with VGA. The fastest ISA VGA I've seen was a very old full-length card with the faster type of VRAM. Ran so hot it warped itself, but lordy could it fly. Trident's ISA and PCI cards were so slow compared to the competition, I always wondered why their VLB card was so much better. When I got mine it was top of the market.
Something that we forgot now with digital video connections, is the video signal quality! There were night & day differences when using a quality monitor with different video cards, in terms of blurring, ghosting, etc. For example, Cirrus Logic cards of that era had a quite infamous subpar RAMDAC, while the output of a WD90c31/3 was just about perfect. Similarly, years later, the output from a Diamond Monster 3D was terrible compared to an Orchid Righteous 3D (with its clicky relays). Could be an idea for a comparision, if you haven't already done something similar (I discovered your awesome channel quite recently).
Great video. I have several ISA And VESA Local Bus cards in storage that i have not used in years. I had a headache getting some cards to work. I am pretty sure some of the jumper settings were giving me trouble before i gave up on them. The cards without any jumpers worked a treat. This will be an interesting series to watch.
Fun fact, Paradise is actually Western Digital. That Diamond Viper P9000 is slow because of that OTI (Oak Technology) VGA display chip just like its older ISA brethren. In most DOS benchmarks, the Weitek chip was never used. The Weitek chip is primarily a 2D accelerator because the OTI chip does not have those functions. The Weitek chip can only be utilized under Windows thru drivers. I still have a Weitek 5286-080-PFP ISA graphics card lying somewhere which is all-in-one (without any accompanying VGA display chip). Its also quite speedy for an ISA display card.
I played Doom on my 386SX /w Adlib audio and ATI Basic 16 VGA video card; it was choppy, sure, but I fully enjoyed completing the game and playing multiplayer with friends. When it comes to a 486, playing it on a Dell 486SX was even better -- it felt perfect, in my memory at least, and I would sneak into my dad's office to play it on his Dell 486 SX when he wasn't around. I didn't sneak in to play it for the higher frame rates mind you -- I snuck in because he had a sound blaster and I just had Adlib audio. Not disagreeing that today, 15fps is considered unplayable, but from a historical context, it was quite playable.
Why would the IRQ2 jumper be closed? Isn't IRQ2 used internally by PC AT to wire second PIC to first PIC? On some motherboards IRQ2, might be actually routed from ISA IRQ2 to IRQ9 (on second PIC). On PC, VGA cards actually doesn't use interrupt or DMA afaik. I think it was only a feature on PCjr, and was used to notify the vertical blank, similar how the C64 or NES used vertical blank interrupts. I am pretty sure no software ever used this feature on PC, so the IRQ2 thing on VGA card can be safely disabled, without loosing anything. In fact it should improve performance slightly, because the interrupt will no longer be generated, and not pause CPU every frame. But that is just total of few ms per second, so maybe 0.1% difference. However, because IRQ9 is also often used by MPU-401, and some programs might not expect IRQ9 out of the blue, it might be actually better to disable it on the card. In fact many cards doesn't even have any traces leading to ISA IRQ2 on the edge connector, so it is also a good indicator it is never used. As for the VLB, I have no idea.
Back in the day - roughly around 1994 or so, I built a beast of a 486 tower computer, and one of my big bragging points was the graphics card - an Orchid Fahrenheit VA VLB card with a megabyte of ram. Great card. Shame you don't have any Orchid cards in your lineup
Reporting in with Cirrus Logic CL-GD5420 1 MB in my 386DX40. Works fine. Maybe not the best output video quality, but good enough. Haven't bothered to benchmark it.
VESA and Screw the DX2's get the 486 DX-50 for 50 Mhz thru the Vesa buss.. if your CPU is 33Mhz core then the Motherboard will run slower..Get a DX-50 or AMD DX-40 And if you ever in the New Jersey area, I have a old work room that need to be cleaned out with 40 Years of PC parts..
Absolutely correct. With an AMD 386 DX at 40 MHz and a VLB card it was totally plausible to play Doom on a 386. I would like Phil to make a new version of the video of whether it is possible to play Doom on a 386 using an AMD CPU and a Cirrus Logic VLB card
Hi Phil, a suggestion for future videos if you do the stacked bar graph of benchmarks, if you normalise the values of each benchmark so they all give the same rating for say the fastest card it can be a better comparison just by looking at the total length of a card's bar, without scaling, benchmarks that give higher numbers for their score make a larger difference.
Also, 44256 chips usually work - Match that with the speed of the RAM on board. You can go faster, but the slower on board RAM will slow it down. I have a SUPER OLD ATI Mach8 (I think) that uses 4x64k chips - I got them off eBay for I think $10.
Seeing the benchmark results, it makes me think that the old DX2 66 with 8mb ram was doing quite well to run Doom and Quake. In fact we kept using that machine through the Windows 95-98 era although it did struggle with later titles of the era.
What i noticed is, that the DOOM Benchmark runs much slower, as the real game ! I benchmarked my IBM PS/1 486 SX2 50 (Yes SX2, it use a Intel Overdrive SX2ODP50 CPU) with 128 KB Cache, 32 MB FPM Ram, and a 512KB Cirrus Logic 5426 VLB Card, and when i played doom i recognized the Map Part that was used in the Benchmark, and i got the feeling that it was running much smoother as in the Benchmark. So i checked it out, and my feeling was not wrong !
Looking at a few i got in storage - Et4000-isa16,1Mb, Oak, Trident, S3Virge , WD/Paradise88, and a few CGA or older cards and a stack of VLB video cards..and multi-io .. but.. now find a board with VLB
Thinking about reviving an old DOS system - has a CL GD5428 VLB (glad to see they do quite well), also bagged a Diamond Stealth 64 Video VRAM (S3 86C964). Unsurprising that the Weitek VLB card did poorly, as in DOS it's using the OAK chipset instead - slow even on VLB, as the Weitek is for Windows acceleration. The WD90C30 would probably perform equally to the 90C31 in DOS, as the 90C31 primarily adds Windows acceleration (2D draw and bitblt)
I had a 486DX 25MHZ. Doom definitely was not playable for me. Very choppy to say the least. At the time I was stumped because a friend I knew was able to play fine. I don't remember how much ram I had but by that time I had many systems to test with. I think my end conclusion was that the CPU memory cache made a HUGE difference in playability.
The mobo also made a difference. CPU Galaxy tested a 16 MHz 486SX and got 50% better than 386DX-40 performance on an industrial board and 386DX-40 performance on some other board.
There are ISA ET4000s with VESA 1.x compatible BIOS. The Diamond Viper VLB is actually a Dual chipset card with focus on the Weitek P9000 as Windows Accelerator and the Oak chip for VGA (which is a ISA chipset). So the Viper VLB is in the ISA region because you do not use any VLB feature in DOS. It is more or less identical to an ISA OTI-087 card in this mode. You only get benefits from VLB when changing to the P9000. Also notable is that the performance gap opens as soon as 32 bit access is used, like in PCPBench, for 16 bit accesses the like in 3dbench the VLB cards are only a tiny bit faster than the ISA cards.
Is it possible to upgrade the ROM chips on the ET4000? Or replace them with a flashable one? I will test the cards on something faster soon, that should spread the results out a bit. The Diamond Speedstar 24x also has a newer BIOS available. Mine is 1.02 and I saw 1.04 in photos.
If you have the right firmware you can likely upgrade the ROMs. However it is much easier to load the VESA TSR for the ET4000 on demand. It is also interesting to see that on a 486DX-40 an ET4000 on ISA at 20 MHz reaches nearly the performance of a Matrox Millenium at 20 MHz PCI in the same system. The gain advantage of the 32 bit wide PCI bus in DOS the CPU needs to be faster. (20 MHz on ISA is not recommended for permanent operation)
Do you know the years each of these cards were releasedÉ It would be helpful to build systems with correct specs for certain years. Just curious, awsome video like usual! I really enjoy your older hardware reviews Phil, keep it up!
Nice to see the TSENG performs well - I have a VESA one in my 486 and an ISA one in my 386. I've read that the one with the Wietek processor is not good in a PC World article from 1994, so that matches your findings well. BTW are you a German Australian?
I once owned two Oak(64?) ISA cards, I've long forgotten the models. But tried to play Tomb Raider on them at 320x200 and it was still slow on my 486 DX-66 :p
Yea they are pretty fast. I have a very nice and fast PCI 486 motherboard, so I will look into that at some stage. Though I only have a handful of PCI cards, mostly S3 Trio 64 cards, they work great :)
Speaking of which.. I actually have an old S3 Trio 64 just lying around here, It has all 4 of the 256k memory chips It's a Trio 64V2/DX graphics processor, and on the large chip in the right corner it says: CP765LV2
ah, the endless debate on the fastest video card for DOS. For years it was always said that it was the ET4000 cards. Fast indeed but I've had compatibility issues with the ISA variety. some games such as Ultima VII and Quake display an odd distortion that best I can describe as looking like old VCR tracking error lines near the top of the screen. very distracting. Interestingly The problem seems to be resolved with the VLB versions as I've never run across any issues with my VLB ET4000. ATI cards get thrown out there a lot as well as being top dogs though I've never come across a VLB mach32/64 card. One of the ISA ATI VGA Wonder cards or the multiple versions of the Trident 8900 series would be interesting to bench. Look forward to the new DOS benchmarking compilation, your old one is basically my standard for DOS benching.
Yeah decent VLB video cards like S3 made a massive difference to performance in the 486... Quake ran great on my DX4/100 due to having a good VLB S3 graphics accelerator
The WD-based Diamond Speedstar 24X was a truly fast ISA-card. Slightly edging out the ET4000 by my experience back then. Like the other commenter wrote it practically was operating at the limit of the ISA bus. It's main advantage in Windows was the 24-bit color mode (60 Hz, I believe, which was slightly flickery back in the CRT days) that was slightly quicker than the ET4000 that supported 24-bit color mode (Diamond also had such a card but I think they tricked the ET4000 into believing that it can support 24 bit color ;-)). But of course the WD chip wasn't a full blown Windows accelerator card like the later ones. Disadvantages: The run-o-the-mill ET4000 were nearly as fast but much cheaper, at least when the SS24X was new. The earlier firmwares also had a few compatibility problems with some games. Diamond supplied a fix for this, though. A very nice card and I would prefer it in an ISA-bus PC. In fact I still keep mine somewhere deep in the cellar... As for VLB cards the ET4000W32 and the ET6000 usually were the quickest cards (up to twice as fast as the ISA ET4000 or SS24X) but I had a DX2 66 at the time so what I remember may be a bit different. Shame that they are expensive right now as there was a time where they were practically worthless. I also remember that I had a VLB multi-I/O-controller with IDE and parallel & serial ports - it was astonishingly expensive. HD access was fast and didn't reduce the frame rate but I later switched to a SCSI system which felt nicer (same CPU). That was some crazy expensive sh*t back then. Ha ha! Thank God that, too, went the way of the dodo!
I have an ET4000/W32 VLB, and it is in fact a bit faster than the GD5428. I'd test it against my two GD5429s but they just flat-out refuse to work in the one VLB board I have. I'd be curious how it stacks up to the S3 928, 968 and Trio32, though.
Ooh, a DX. With a math coprocessor... such power in a single chip! I remember upgrading from a 486SX to a DX4 or something. I remember that angled floors in Duke Nukem 3D were broken on the SX but appeared correctly on the DX. Angled geometry requires matrix multiplication, I suppose.
The reason why Phil is saying Doom is unplayable on a 486/33 is that he benchmarks it at full resolution and full size window. It is absolutely playable with a reduced window, low detail (= half the horizontal resolution) mode, one or both. This is also the mistake in the 386DX vs 486SX video, NOBODY would ever play Doom on a 386 or a 486SX with full screen and detail, everyone would play in a reduced window and low detail on such a config.
tohopes Duke 3D uses a couple of floating point instructions for angled floors, which the SX cannot execute because of the lack of an FPU. So it has to fall back to software floating point emulation, which is crazy slow.
Hi Great comparison of vintage cards. I have a old P3 motherboard with only PCI, ISA and extended ISA slots. Can you please suggest a graphic card for output on modern LED for windows 98?? Thanks in advance...
If the monitor has VGA input, then heaps of options! But PC cards command a premium, so look at how much a AGP replacement board costs + AGP graphics card.
And again a great video from Phil. And a question for you, are you also trying/testing Windows 3.11 of Windows 95 on youre 486's? Or more RAM like 16 megabytes instead of 8 megabyte?
Phil, thanks for all your helpful retor PC hardware guides, they are greatly appreciated! You dont have an S3 805 to or Tseng E4000/W32 card to reference? Thanks
I don't think so. Not sure about the S3, I did get a S3 VLB card since then, I think it's a Diamond and it did end up being faster than all these cards. But I don't have a Tseng I'm afraid.
I had a 486 DX 33 that seemed to run doom better than 14 fps...at least to my 9 year old self. I knew it wasn't as smooth as my friend's DX/2 66, but I could still put up a good fight in deathmatch. Not sure what video card I had but it might have been a VLB trident. It also had 8 megs of ram.
Strange that Tseng ET4000 is often mentioned as a good performer and so is in your test but any ISA Tseng4k I tried fell definitely in the slow group. The WDC card I found was fast (I don't have it anymore), Cirrus Logic cards are nice too, the Oaks are slow, older Tridents on the slower end too, it was all as in your test. But at least I found one exception of the slow Trident trope: 8900D is a solid fast chip and IIRC it was quite popular in its time. At least a friend had it in his 386 and I remember speeds I could only dream of back then :) Now I have two of these cards just to be sure. They're also 286 friendly while some newer ISA cards aren't (for example my S3 805 ISA needs a 386 to POST).
Cirrus Logic are my favourite because they are still regarded as "budget or cheap brand", yet perform well, are compatible and quite available and affordable on eBay.
PhilsComputerLab My first real computer that wasn't an old 286/AT was a Packard Bell my dad handed down to me. It had a 486SX 25 with a Cirrus Logic VLB card. 5428 with 2MB. Decent card really. When I got the PC in 1995 it was becoming outdated but ran well for my needs. I used it until my dad gave me his Pentium 100 when he bought an IBM Aptiva. The 5428 was capable for lots of games honestly. SVGA resolution wasn't viable but otherwise it did well. Ran so much on that card from Doom to Police Quest 4.
Great video as always, Phil! I'd love to see how a variety of more modern PCI cards run on a suitable 486 chipset supporting PCI 2.1, such as Intel's own 420ZX Saturn II. Any chance of something like that happening?
The memory chips are pretty generic. You can put different models, or even mix and match them, there and they will work fine, as long as they have correct pinout and speed. It shouldn't be hard to even buy brand new ones that are compatible.
Yet another subject that I've been interested in! Thank you for doing the footwork on this! I don't have a 486 system at the moment, but I'm casually on the lookout for one. I'd like a 66 MHz chip though. So many incomplete projects at the moment, so little time. Another aspect of these cards that I would be interested in, is image quality. Finally, are there any games from this time that might benefit from faster graphics? I could imagine a lot of Apogee titles that may benefit, like Wolf3d.
My problem is more on the board choice. Memory amount and the actual chip too use is easy to decide. (486DX2/66 and 16 MB in my case) But finding the right board...
I have an old Trident ISA card that has jumpers for wait states too. Were your Trident cards configured for 0WS as well? Not that they will be that fast either way...
In my experience these Trident cards are mostly based on generic designs... The chips were not really considered high end/premium and I doubt many manufacturers would go through the trouble of custom designing a card around them. So if you really want to test you can do what I did with mine, google something like "TVGA8900C jumpers" and sort through the not so many options until you find one that looks like your card.
Yea, good tip, I just didn't have the time to search around that much. The tvga9000 has jumpers and it was easy enough to find information. You can set it between 8 and 16 bit more. That might be something for the next video, show the difference and to check the jumpers :)
So there's very litte difference between the fastest ISA and VLB cards. Was VLB just a big waste of time and money or did the cards not utilise it in the right way?
seems to me, in this era, supporting a high enough resolution is probably enough for the majority of games. aside from DOOM, I don't think there was much else besides flight sims.
Looking at the data in "Phil's Ultimate VGA Benchmark Database Project" spreadsheet it seems that the fastest ISA card for a 386DX/40 is Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429, followed closely by ATI VGA WonderXL 28800-5, Western Digital WD90C31-LR (eg the Diamond Speedstar 24X in this video) and Tseng ET4000AX.
OMG! my WD90C31A VLB (Paradise) is about 30% better in almost every bench excluding PCP VGA (slightly better) than GD5429. Quake is working on 5.2 FPS.
At 320 x 200, it doesn't matter than much to be honest. But some cards play nicer with some monitors, so it's hard to make a definite statement and also it might vary between different cards that use the same chip.
I have an S3 Trio32 VLB card if you want me to bench it. I do not have access to a DX-33, rather I have a DX-100 OC'd to 120Mhz, and my board is significantly faster than yours, but if you want me to slow the DX4 down or do something else, I would be happy to contribute.
I wish I could try it to see if it works but I don't have a 486. If someone else needs it more than me I could swap it for Super Socket 7 AGP board with AMD K6-3+ support.
I was going to guess the WD chip would be on par with the ET4000. Looks like both of these cards are pretty much maxing out the ISA bus, but a faster cpu would prove this or not. I have found the WD chips are very fast, and I suspect the VLB version might just be the fastest VLB card, outpacing even the ET4000W/32P to some extent. Disappointed to see the Viper with the Power 9000 suck pretty badly here, 9001 might be better. I honestly thought that card would have beaten the Trident 9400. I have found that the Trident 9440 VLB card does very well, lagging behind the ET4000W/32P VLB cards though but not by a horrible amount.
Yea that Power 9000, the chip was likely strong in other areas, Windows or CAD or something like that? I'll be sticking to DOS though :)There is a newer BIOS available for the WD90C31, I got to look into upgrading it. A great card no doubt, I still love the CL cards the most because they are such good value. Some of the other cards are difficult to find and expensive.
Back in the days I had a "Western Digital Paradise" VLB graphics card and it was so fast that this benchmark in Wing Commander 3 setup claimed it was a PCI card :)
"Back in the days I had a "Western Digital Paradise" VLB graphics card and it was so fast that this benchmark in Wing Commander 3 setup claimed it was a PCI card :)" VLB cards are faster than PCI v.1 cards.
486 DX33 seems like an odd choice. I know it keeps the VLB at a "happy" 33MHz, but it is underpowered and a DX4 100MHz would have been a better choice to squeeze more out of those VLB cards. Back in those days I had a Cirrus Logic 5429 on a 40MHz VLB using a DX4-120MHz and that thing was FAST.
Yea I have other videos covering the faster chips. Haven't done one on the 133 MHz AMD yet, but it will happen :D I wanted to give some love to the DX 33, like your comments shows, it gets overlooked a bit.
Oak technology was never at the top of performance. Crappy sound with Oak sound cards, low performance with Oak video cards, a brand to avoid even for old PC collectors.
My first VGA card was a 256kb Oak card. It was fine in my 8088 and 286 but when I upgraded to a 486 I noticed the bottleneck, especially with games like Doom. However, in defense of the Oak card, that one at least, I had gotten that around 1988 and was still trying to use it in a 486 come 1994.
SD versus CF is a wash here, they both work well. Because CF cards actually use an IDE interface, and so the adapters are just pin converters, you're a bit more subject to the vagaries of various cards, while the translation on the SD cards introduces a wee bit of latency, but the latency will still be very low compared to even a modern magnetic disk. Pretty much a horse apiece, really.
Man, I wish I could accidentally get ISA video cards, I've got plenty of them, but they're EGA or CGA (and one is MDA, even), and I don't have a compatible monitor or adapter...
I don't think a GT 610 would work on a 5v PCI slot. (3.3v on PCI became used staring with PCI 2.1 in 1994) But in general I'm also interested into using PCI hards on it since I have quite a few lying around. (Including a Mach 64, Cirrus GD5430, and one with a ET600 on it)
i have a .....ah maybe quite special isa vga card it does have a vga out, av and s video out.......and a audio out...the main chip is winbond w9920a-1 does anybody know what brand of vga card it is?
So, a couple of notes: 1. The VLB P9000 performed like crap because you were only using the Oak chip, and as we all know Oak graphics cards suck. The Weitek chip is only used in Windows for GUI acceleration, so if you're only going to use DOS this card is next to useless. That's a limitation of the Weitek chips, they aren't compatible with DOS, that's why cards that use them need a secondary (usually cheap and crappy) chip for DOS. 2. The CL-GD5424 main advantage over the 5422 is support for VLB, so having it in a ISA card probably explains why it performs so badly, i.e. it was probably a late cheap card. 3. Nice to see that the ET4000AX isn't the only ISA card to perform that well, contrary to popular belief.
There is some hacked version floating around. But I removed that test from my suite. If you download my latest DOS benchmark pack, there is a Doom low resolution benchmark :D
Could you test ATI Mach 64 card with pentium 1? I have a pc with pentium mmx 166mhz,32 mb ram and ati mach 64 ct 1mb and i'm curious how it will handle Quake 3d, Doom and other goodies :D
Vlb is flawed from the start. Most of the chipsets are absolutely terrible. The format was ditched as soon as pci was ratified…. The biggest problem was the cost. Full size cards cost a lot of money. This is why most vlb cards were 2 layers only. Half the profit was dissolved in the etching process in the form of copper. And then there was a mechanical problem. The two sockets would expand and contract causing heaving… ie the card would walk it self out of the slots with every heat and cool cycle. I had so much problems with it.. as soon as atx and pci came out I bought a new board.
The one ATI card I know that was popular on VLB was the ATI Mach 32. I wonder how it would stack against the other cards on your list. I can benchmark it but my computer it's in a loaded 66mhz 486, it would skew the results heavily.
I got a ATi Mach64 VLB card. I feel very lucky.
I remember having 2 486s. The first one was an intel 486DX 33 MHz, with 4MB 30pin RAM, and a Triden 8900CL 1MB VGA ISA card.
Afterwards I upgraded the motherboard to one of those that were called "VIP", that supported VLB, ISA and PCI bus, with an IntelDX4 100 MHz, 8MB of 72pin RAM, and a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434 1MB PCI card, which I later upgraded to 2MB.
That machine was very capable of playing most MSDOS games except the latest from 1996 or later. It was so much better to play DOOM with the IntelDX4 rather than the 486DX, and besides I could overclock the bus to 50 MHz (so it ran 50x2 instead of 33x3), or to 40 MHz so I had 120MHz. Pretty amazing performance from that chip I must say.
One thing that would be nice is to see how a PCI video card compares to these when using a PCI 486
Fun fact about Trident ISA cards (and some VLB cards): you can use them in an 8-bit slot. The rest of the connectors are just data bandwidth that it can live without. While the card is too laggy for 486 or faster machines, it does absolute wonders for an XT or 286's performance; you don't realise what a bottleneck Herc monochrome is until you replace it with VGA.
The fastest ISA VGA I've seen was a very old full-length card with the faster type of VRAM. Ran so hot it warped itself, but lordy could it fly.
Trident's ISA and PCI cards were so slow compared to the competition, I always wondered why their VLB card was so much better. When I got mine it was top of the market.
Something that we forgot now with digital video connections, is the video signal quality! There were night & day differences when using a quality monitor with different video cards, in terms of blurring, ghosting, etc. For example, Cirrus Logic cards of that era had a quite infamous subpar RAMDAC, while the output of a WD90c31/3 was just about perfect.
Similarly, years later, the output from a Diamond Monster 3D was terrible compared to an Orchid Righteous 3D (with its clicky relays).
Could be an idea for a comparision, if you haven't already done something similar (I discovered your awesome channel quite recently).
Great video. I have several ISA And VESA Local Bus cards in storage that i have not used in years. I had a headache getting some cards to work. I am pretty sure some of the jumper settings were giving me trouble before i gave up on them. The cards without any jumpers worked a treat. This will be an interesting series to watch.
Fun fact, Paradise is actually Western Digital. That Diamond Viper P9000 is slow because of that OTI (Oak Technology) VGA display chip just like its older ISA brethren. In most DOS benchmarks, the Weitek chip was never used. The Weitek chip is primarily a 2D accelerator because the OTI chip does not have those functions. The Weitek chip can only be utilized under Windows thru drivers. I still have a Weitek 5286-080-PFP ISA graphics card lying somewhere which is all-in-one (without any accompanying VGA display chip). Its also quite speedy for an ISA display card.
I played Doom on my 386SX /w Adlib audio and ATI Basic 16 VGA video card; it was choppy, sure, but I fully enjoyed completing the game and playing multiplayer with friends. When it comes to a 486, playing it on a Dell 486SX was even better -- it felt perfect, in my memory at least, and I would sneak into my dad's office to play it on his Dell 486 SX when he wasn't around. I didn't sneak in to play it for the higher frame rates mind you -- I snuck in because he had a sound blaster and I just had Adlib audio.
Not disagreeing that today, 15fps is considered unplayable, but from a historical context, it was quite playable.
Why would the IRQ2 jumper be closed? Isn't IRQ2 used internally by PC AT to wire second PIC to first PIC? On some motherboards IRQ2, might be actually routed from ISA IRQ2 to IRQ9 (on second PIC). On PC, VGA cards actually doesn't use interrupt or DMA afaik. I think it was only a feature on PCjr, and was used to notify the vertical blank, similar how the C64 or NES used vertical blank interrupts. I am pretty sure no software ever used this feature on PC, so the IRQ2 thing on VGA card can be safely disabled, without loosing anything. In fact it should improve performance slightly, because the interrupt will no longer be generated, and not pause CPU every frame. But that is just total of few ms per second, so maybe 0.1% difference. However, because IRQ9 is also often used by MPU-401, and some programs might not expect IRQ9 out of the blue, it might be actually better to disable it on the card. In fact many cards doesn't even have any traces leading to ISA IRQ2 on the edge connector, so it is also a good indicator it is never used.
As for the VLB, I have no idea.
Genoa M5 Veloce 8600 VLIO. It won all the tests back then and also came with a VLB controller on the back. With it, Doom was flying on my DX-33.
Probably your best video. Excellent work.
Good job! ...but its a pity, that you didn't use S3 chip based graphic cards for the test.
Really, I'd like to see testing one of the first accelerated chip S3 911.
I agree.. Quake ran very well on my DX4/100 with a s3 VLB graphics accelerator
Back in the day - roughly around 1994 or so, I built a beast of a 486 tower computer, and one of my big bragging points was the graphics card - an Orchid Fahrenheit VA VLB card with a megabyte of ram. Great card. Shame you don't have any Orchid cards in your lineup
I still have my Diamond SpeedStar Pro (VLB) with the 5428. And a VLB controller.
How do you clean your PC components? They look brand new.
Congrats on over 10K subs mate! (I would have congratulated you sooner but I've been away) :)
Cheers :D
Reporting in with Cirrus Logic CL-GD5420 1 MB in my 386DX40. Works fine. Maybe not the best output video quality, but good enough. Haven't bothered to benchmark it.
I still have a OAK ISA video card
The Tseng ET4000 cards were always the heroes of the software rendering stack.
Go any throughput benchmarks for them?
Best RetroComputer reviews😄. Go on;)
as always ^^
Dude,
I really like your videos! Makes me go back in time! :)
Keep it up!
Thanks!
VESA and Screw the DX2's get the 486 DX-50 for 50 Mhz thru the Vesa buss..
if your CPU is 33Mhz core then the Motherboard will run slower..Get a DX-50 or AMD DX-40
And if you ever in the New Jersey area, I have a old work room that need to be cleaned out with 40
Years of PC parts..
Absolutely correct. With an AMD 386 DX at 40 MHz and a VLB card it was totally plausible to play Doom on a 386.
I would like Phil to make a new version of the video of whether it is possible to play Doom on a 386 using an AMD CPU and a Cirrus Logic VLB card
Hi Phils! I believe that the P9000 needs an existing mode on some motherboards allowing its use to 100%. Nice Benchmarks!
Hi Phil, a suggestion for future videos if you do the stacked bar graph of benchmarks, if you normalise the values of each benchmark so they all give the same rating for say the fastest card it can be a better comparison just by looking at the total length of a card's bar, without scaling, benchmarks that give higher numbers for their score make a larger difference.
All your card are so shiny :D
freshly washed I'd bet :)
all your card are belong to us!!!
all your card are belong to us!!!
Really great video !! Looking forward to the this series !!!!!! :-)
Thank you so very much! Valuable information.
Thanks!
Also, 44256 chips usually work - Match that with the speed of the RAM on board. You can go faster, but the slower on board RAM will slow it down.
I have a SUPER OLD ATI Mach8 (I think) that uses 4x64k chips - I got them off eBay for I think $10.
Seeing the benchmark results, it makes me think that the old DX2 66 with 8mb ram was doing quite well to run Doom and Quake. In fact we kept using that machine through the Windows 95-98 era although it did struggle with later titles of the era.
Quake only ran well maybe if you played in the smallest window size.
What i noticed is, that the DOOM Benchmark runs much slower, as the real game !
I benchmarked my IBM PS/1 486 SX2 50 (Yes SX2, it use a Intel Overdrive SX2ODP50 CPU)
with 128 KB Cache, 32 MB FPM Ram, and a 512KB Cirrus Logic 5426 VLB Card, and when i played doom i recognized the Map Part that was used in the Benchmark, and i got the feeling that it was running much smoother as in the Benchmark. So i checked it out, and my feeling was not wrong !
Looking at a few i got in storage -
Et4000-isa16,1Mb, Oak, Trident, S3Virge , WD/Paradise88, and a few CGA or older cards
and a stack of VLB video cards..and multi-io .. but.. now find a board with VLB
and Headland, Chips&tech, OKI, Realtec, 3DFX by Creative Labs CT6670
Thinking about reviving an old DOS system - has a CL GD5428 VLB (glad to see they do quite well), also bagged a Diamond Stealth 64 Video VRAM (S3 86C964).
Unsurprising that the Weitek VLB card did poorly, as in DOS it's using the OAK chipset instead - slow even on VLB, as the Weitek is for Windows acceleration.
The WD90C30 would probably perform equally to the 90C31 in DOS, as the 90C31 primarily adds Windows acceleration (2D draw and bitblt)
I had a 486DX 25MHZ. Doom definitely was not playable for me. Very choppy to say the least. At the time I was stumped because a friend I knew was able to play fine. I don't remember how much ram I had but by that time I had many systems to test with. I think my end conclusion was that the CPU memory cache made a HUGE difference in playability.
The mobo also made a difference. CPU Galaxy tested a 16 MHz 486SX and got 50% better than 386DX-40 performance on an industrial board and 386DX-40 performance on some other board.
There are ISA ET4000s with VESA 1.x compatible BIOS.
The Diamond Viper VLB is actually a Dual chipset card with focus on the Weitek P9000 as Windows Accelerator and the Oak chip for VGA (which is a ISA chipset). So the Viper VLB is in the ISA region because you do not use any VLB feature in DOS. It is more or less identical to an ISA OTI-087 card in this mode. You only get benefits from VLB when changing to the P9000.
Also notable is that the performance gap opens as soon as 32 bit access is used, like in PCPBench, for 16 bit accesses the like in 3dbench the VLB cards are only a tiny bit faster than the ISA cards.
Is it possible to upgrade the ROM chips on the ET4000? Or replace them with a flashable one? I will test the cards on something faster soon, that should spread the results out a bit.
The Diamond Speedstar 24x also has a newer BIOS available. Mine is 1.02 and I saw 1.04 in photos.
If you have the right firmware you can likely upgrade the ROMs. However it is much easier to load the VESA TSR for the ET4000 on demand.
It is also interesting to see that on a 486DX-40 an ET4000 on ISA at 20 MHz reaches nearly the performance of a Matrox Millenium at 20 MHz PCI in the same system. The gain advantage of the 32 bit wide PCI bus in DOS the CPU needs to be faster. (20 MHz on ISA is not recommended for permanent operation)
True, I will leave the card alone and just use the TSR if needed at all.
Do you know the years each of these cards were releasedÉ It would be helpful to build systems with correct specs for certain years. Just curious, awsome video like usual! I really enjoy your older hardware reviews Phil, keep it up!
I still love my Number 9 GXE 64 in my old computers. :D
Trident TVGA9000B ISA was my first graphics card. Very slow in higher resolution f.e. in Windows 3.1.
Nice to see the TSENG performs well - I have a VESA one in my 486 and an ISA one in my 386.
I've read that the one with the Wietek processor is not good in a PC World article from 1994, so that matches your findings well.
BTW are you a German Australian?
I once owned two Oak(64?) ISA cards, I've long forgotten the models. But tried to play Tomb Raider on them at 320x200 and it was still slow on my 486 DX-66 :p
Haha, yes the graphics decelerator strikes again :D
I still have a Hercules Dynamite 128/Video, using a Tseng ET6000 chip for PCI lying around.
That should have quite the punch for DOS gaming.
Yea they are pretty fast. I have a very nice and fast PCI 486 motherboard, so I will look into that at some stage. Though I only have a handful of PCI cards, mostly S3 Trio 64 cards, they work great :)
Speaking of which.. I actually have an old S3 Trio 64 just lying around here, It has all 4 of the 256k memory chips
It's a Trio 64V2/DX graphics processor, and on the large chip in the right corner it says: CP765LV2
Yea these S3 cards are top notch for DOS.
Trident TVGA 9000B. My first PC in 1994 includes it.
ah, the endless debate on the fastest video card for DOS. For years it was always said that it was the ET4000 cards. Fast indeed but I've had compatibility issues with the ISA variety. some games such as Ultima VII and Quake display an odd distortion that best I can describe as looking like old VCR tracking error lines near the top of the screen. very distracting. Interestingly The problem seems to be resolved with the VLB versions as I've never run across any issues with my VLB ET4000. ATI cards get thrown out there a lot as well as being top dogs though I've never come across a VLB mach32/64 card. One of the ISA ATI VGA Wonder cards or the multiple versions of the Trident 8900 series would be interesting to bench. Look forward to the new DOS benchmarking compilation, your old one is basically my standard for DOS benching.
I played doom on my 486 dx33 25 years ago and in my mind it was buttery smooth. It must have had a VLB card I guess although I will never know.
Yeah decent VLB video cards like S3 made a massive difference to performance in the 486... Quake ran great on my DX4/100 due to having a good VLB S3 graphics accelerator
The WD-based Diamond Speedstar 24X was a truly fast ISA-card. Slightly edging out the ET4000 by my experience back then. Like the other commenter wrote it practically was operating at the limit of the ISA bus.
It's main advantage in Windows was the 24-bit color mode (60 Hz, I believe, which was slightly flickery back in the CRT days) that was slightly quicker than the ET4000 that supported 24-bit color mode (Diamond also had such a card but I think they tricked the ET4000 into believing that it can support 24 bit color ;-)).
But of course the WD chip wasn't a full blown Windows accelerator card like the later ones.
Disadvantages: The run-o-the-mill ET4000 were nearly as fast but much cheaper, at least when the SS24X was new. The earlier firmwares also had a few compatibility problems with some games. Diamond supplied a fix for this, though.
A very nice card and I would prefer it in an ISA-bus PC. In fact I still keep mine somewhere deep in the cellar...
As for VLB cards the ET4000W32 and the ET6000 usually were the quickest cards (up to twice as fast as the ISA ET4000 or SS24X) but I had a DX2 66 at the time so what I remember may be a bit different.
Shame that they are expensive right now as there was a time where they were practically worthless.
I also remember that I had a VLB multi-I/O-controller with IDE and parallel & serial ports - it was astonishingly expensive. HD access was fast and didn't reduce the frame rate but I later switched to a SCSI system which felt nicer (same CPU). That was some crazy expensive sh*t back then. Ha ha! Thank God that, too, went the way of the dodo!
Great comment, thank you!
I have an ET4000/W32 VLB, and it is in fact a bit faster than the GD5428. I'd test it against my two GD5429s but they just flat-out refuse to work in the one VLB board I have. I'd be curious how it stacks up to the S3 928, 968 and Trio32, though.
Ooh, a DX. With a math coprocessor... such power in a single chip!
I remember upgrading from a 486SX to a DX4 or something. I remember that angled floors in Duke Nukem 3D were broken on the SX but appeared correctly on the DX. Angled geometry requires matrix multiplication, I suppose.
And I definitely played Doom on a 486 @ 25Mhz with on-board graphics.
The reason why Phil is saying Doom is unplayable on a 486/33 is that he benchmarks it at full resolution and full size window. It is absolutely playable with a reduced window, low detail (= half the horizontal resolution) mode, one or both. This is also the mistake in the 386DX vs 486SX video, NOBODY would ever play Doom on a 386 or a 486SX with full screen and detail, everyone would play in a reduced window and low detail on such a config.
tohopes Duke 3D uses a couple of floating point instructions for angled floors, which the SX cannot execute because of the lack of an FPU. So it has to fall back to software floating point emulation, which is crazy slow.
Very nice channel, my new favorite... Are you planning in future bring some 80260 or even older?
Thanks! Sorry, 386 is as far back as I'm going :)
Hi Great comparison of vintage cards.
I have a old P3 motherboard with only PCI, ISA and extended ISA slots. Can you please suggest a graphic card for output on modern LED for windows 98??
Thanks in advance...
If the monitor has VGA input, then heaps of options! But PC cards command a premium, so look at how much a AGP replacement board costs + AGP graphics card.
And again a great video from Phil. And a question for you, are you also trying/testing Windows 3.11 of Windows 95 on youre 486's? Or more RAM like 16 megabytes instead of 8 megabyte?
I will be sticking to DOS I'm afraid.
Phil, thanks for all your helpful retor PC hardware guides, they are greatly appreciated! You dont have an S3 805 to or Tseng E4000/W32 card to reference? Thanks
I don't think so. Not sure about the S3, I did get a S3 VLB card since then, I think it's a Diamond and it did end up being faster than all these cards. But I don't have a Tseng I'm afraid.
I had a 486 DX 33 that seemed to run doom better than 14 fps...at least to my 9 year old self. I knew it wasn't as smooth as my friend's DX/2 66, but I could still put up a good fight in deathmatch. Not sure what video card I had but it might have been a VLB trident. It also had 8 megs of ram.
Can I buy one of our motherboard mounts? It would be awesome to have a Phils branded one.. :)
Strange that Tseng ET4000 is often mentioned as a good performer and so is in your test but any ISA Tseng4k I tried fell definitely in the slow group. The WDC card I found was fast (I don't have it anymore), Cirrus Logic cards are nice too, the Oaks are slow, older Tridents on the slower end too, it was all as in your test. But at least I found one exception of the slow Trident trope: 8900D is a solid fast chip and IIRC it was quite popular in its time. At least a friend had it in his 386 and I remember speeds I could only dream of back then :) Now I have two of these cards just to be sure. They're also 286 friendly while some newer ISA cards aren't (for example my S3 805 ISA needs a 386 to POST).
Cirrus Logic are my favourite because they are still regarded as "budget or cheap brand", yet perform well, are compatible and quite available and affordable on eBay.
PhilsComputerLab My first real computer that wasn't an old 286/AT was a Packard Bell my dad handed down to me. It had a 486SX 25 with a Cirrus Logic VLB card. 5428 with 2MB. Decent card really. When I got the PC in 1995 it was becoming outdated but ran well for my needs. I used it until my dad gave me his Pentium 100 when he bought an IBM Aptiva.
The 5428 was capable for lots of games honestly. SVGA resolution wasn't viable but otherwise it did well. Ran so much on that card from Doom to Police Quest 4.
I can second the trident 8900D. Set to 0ws and it out performs my et4000ax.
Great video as always, Phil! I'd love to see how a variety of more modern PCI cards run on a suitable 486 chipset supporting PCI 2.1, such as Intel's own 420ZX Saturn II. Any chance of something like that happening?
I got a few PCI cards, mostly S3 Trio 64 types.
Hey Phil you should try the SIS 530 and SIS 620 integrated video chips btw if you do that the stable driver version for the 530 is ver. 1.05
The memory chips are pretty generic. You can put different models, or even mix and match them, there and they will work fine, as long as they have correct pinout and speed. It shouldn't be hard to even buy brand new ones that are compatible.
Yet another subject that I've been interested in! Thank you for doing the footwork on this!
I don't have a 486 system at the moment, but I'm casually on the lookout for one. I'd like a 66 MHz chip though. So many incomplete projects at the moment, so little time.
Another aspect of these cards that I would be interested in, is image quality.
Finally, are there any games from this time that might benefit from faster graphics? I could imagine a lot of Apogee titles that may benefit, like Wolf3d.
Another one interested in a 486DX2/66?
Those are sold used quite often.
Yeah, they are generally cheap. Finding a vintage chassis that I like, can be more of a challenge.
My problem is more on the board choice.
Memory amount and the actual chip too use is easy to decide. (486DX2/66 and 16 MB in my case)
But finding the right board...
What are you looking for in a board?
Well, honestly I have no idea of 486 boards.
My knowledge basically starts with socket 370, focusing alot around 775.
All of the ISA video cards that I have....and I've got no idea if they work as its been over 20 years since any of them saw use.
NEC with the Paradise chip is very beautiful
Yes, it looks very lovely.
I have an old Trident ISA card that has jumpers for wait states too. Were your Trident cards configured for 0WS as well? Not that they will be that fast either way...
Some cards did have jumpers, but I was lacking documentation and they weren't labelled.
In my experience these Trident cards are mostly based on generic designs... The chips were not really considered high end/premium and I doubt many manufacturers would go through the trouble of custom designing a card around them. So if you really want to test you can do what I did with mine, google something like "TVGA8900C jumpers" and sort through the not so many options until you find one that looks like your card.
Yea, good tip, I just didn't have the time to search around that much. The tvga9000 has jumpers and it was easy enough to find information. You can set it between 8 and 16 bit more. That might be something for the next video, show the difference and to check the jumpers :)
So there's very litte difference between the fastest ISA and VLB cards. Was VLB just a big waste of time and money or did the cards not utilise it in the right way?
@@WinrichNaujoks On a 486-33, keep that in mind. On a 66 MHs machine the outcome is quite different...
seems to me, in this era, supporting a high enough resolution is probably enough for the majority of games. aside from DOOM, I don't think there was much else besides flight sims.
My DX2 66 had a Mach64 2M VRAM VLB. Should have kept that machine.
Hey Phil sometime could you do a Isa graphics card for 386 roundup? Trying to figure out if I should get the cirrus logic or the tseng…
These are both great cards. Likely the CL is a bit cheaper?
Looking at the data in "Phil's Ultimate VGA Benchmark Database Project" spreadsheet it seems that the fastest ISA card for a 386DX/40 is Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429, followed closely by ATI VGA WonderXL 28800-5, Western Digital WD90C31-LR (eg the Diamond Speedstar 24X in this video) and Tseng ET4000AX.
Cirrus Logic VLB rulez :)
OMG! my WD90C31A VLB (Paradise) is about 30% better in almost every bench excluding PCP VGA (slightly better) than GD5429. Quake is working on 5.2 FPS.
i have a spare 486 dx 33 so i should get it running
Phil I have my eye on a Gateway 2000 P-60 @ 75Mhz should I buy it ?
Your call :D
was the different graphics cards made for gamers back then?
yeah, they were not 2 gpu vendors. they were about 50!
What about the video quality for DOS? Do some cards look better or are they all about the same?
At 320 x 200, it doesn't matter than much to be honest. But some cards play nicer with some monitors, so it's hard to make a definite statement and also it might vary between different cards that use the same chip.
OK, thanks Phil.
I have an S3 Trio32 VLB card if you want me to bench it. I do not have access to a DX-33, rather I have a DX-100 OC'd to 120Mhz, and my board is significantly faster than yours, but if you want me to slow the DX4 down or do something else, I would be happy to contribute.
I've managed to source a S3 VLB card now, thank you for offering to help though!
Great. I am loving your content so far, currently on your Voodoo 3 video.
Communist Ralph Thank you :D
What is your score ? I will buy a s3 trio 32 . Thank you !
I found a Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM VLB from trash yesterday, I wonder if it's worth anything?
Nice! A great card, wish I had one.
I wish I could try it to see if it works but I don't have a 486. If someone else needs it more than me I could swap it for Super Socket 7 AGP board with AMD K6-3+ support.
I was going to guess the WD chip would be on par with the ET4000. Looks like both of these cards are pretty much maxing out the ISA bus, but a faster cpu would prove this or not. I have found the WD chips are very fast, and I suspect the VLB version might just be the fastest VLB card, outpacing even the ET4000W/32P to some extent. Disappointed to see the Viper with the Power 9000 suck pretty badly here, 9001 might be better. I honestly thought that card would have beaten the Trident 9400. I have found that the Trident 9440 VLB card does very well, lagging behind the ET4000W/32P VLB cards though but not by a horrible amount.
Yea that Power 9000, the chip was likely strong in other areas, Windows or CAD or something like that? I'll be sticking to DOS though :)There is a newer BIOS available for the WD90C31, I got to look into upgrading it. A great card no doubt, I still love the CL cards the most because they are such good value. Some of the other cards are difficult to find and expensive.
Back in the days I had a "Western Digital Paradise" VLB graphics card and it was so fast that this benchmark in Wing Commander 3 setup claimed it was a PCI card :)
buraxta Nice!
ET4000W/32P isn't top tier VLB chip, so it being slightly outpaced doesn't tell much.
"Back in the days I had a "Western Digital Paradise" VLB graphics card and it was so fast that this benchmark in Wing Commander 3 setup claimed it was a PCI card :)"
VLB cards are faster than PCI v.1 cards.
486 DX33 seems like an odd choice. I know it keeps the VLB at a "happy" 33MHz, but it is underpowered and a DX4 100MHz would have been a better choice to squeeze more out of those VLB cards.
Back in those days I had a Cirrus Logic 5429 on a 40MHz VLB using a DX4-120MHz and that thing was FAST.
Yea I have other videos covering the faster chips. Haven't done one on the 133 MHz AMD yet, but it will happen :D I wanted to give some love to the DX 33, like your comments shows, it gets overlooked a bit.
I found the DX2-66MHz benchmarks. Thank you.
Oak technology was never at the top of performance. Crappy sound with Oak sound cards, low performance with Oak video cards, a brand to avoid even for old PC collectors.
My first VGA card was a 256kb Oak card. It was fine in my 8088 and 286 but when I upgraded to a 486 I noticed the bottleneck, especially with games like Doom. However, in defense of the Oak card, that one at least, I had gotten that around 1988 and was still trying to use it in a 486 come 1994.
I just bought a SD card to IDE adapter. is it good/fast enough? or do I need a CF to IDE?
SD versus CF is a wash here, they both work well. Because CF cards actually use an IDE interface, and so the adapters are just pin converters, you're a bit more subject to the vagaries of various cards, while the translation on the SD cards introduces a wee bit of latency, but the latency will still be very low compared to even a modern magnetic disk.
Pretty much a horse apiece, really.
The ATi Mach series were nice.
Man, I wish I could accidentally get ISA video cards, I've got plenty of them, but they're EGA or CGA (and one is MDA, even), and I don't have a compatible monitor or adapter...
Why didn't you include PCI cards? There were Socket 3 boards with PCI slots. Imagine putting a GT 610 in a 486 machine haha
I don't think a GT 610 would work on a 5v PCI slot.
(3.3v on PCI became used staring with PCI 2.1 in 1994)
But in general I'm also interested into using PCI hards on it since I have quite a few lying around. (Including a Mach 64, Cirrus GD5430, and one with a ET600 on it)
The motherboard doesn't have PCI!
A good 99% of 486 computers don't have PCI.
+HappyBeezerStudios GT 610 is not a PCI card it's PCI-E.
∆∆∆∆∆∆
i have a .....ah maybe quite special isa vga card
it does have a vga out, av and s video out.......and a audio out...the main chip is winbond w9920a-1
does anybody know what brand of vga card it is?
So, a couple of notes:
1. The VLB P9000 performed like crap because you were only using the Oak chip, and as we all know Oak graphics cards suck. The Weitek chip is only used in Windows for GUI acceleration, so if you're only going to use DOS this card is next to useless. That's a limitation of the Weitek chips, they aren't compatible with DOS, that's why cards that use them need a secondary (usually cheap and crappy) chip for DOS.
2. The CL-GD5424 main advantage over the 5422 is support for VLB, so having it in a ISA card probably explains why it performs so badly, i.e. it was probably a late cheap card.
3. Nice to see that the ET4000AX isn't the only ISA card to perform that well, contrary to popular belief.
Where did you find the et 4000 drivers?
It's been a while since I produced this video, what drivers are you referring to?
PhilsComputerLab do you need seperate drivers for seperate games?
How do you benchmark using Wolf 3D?
There is some hacked version floating around. But I removed that test from my suite. If you download my latest DOS benchmark pack, there is a Doom low resolution benchmark :D
Yeah, I found it on some abandonware website. My P2 400 running DOS 6.22 does 170 fps with no sound lol.
Nice :D
WDC = Western Design Center, not western digital
Could you test ATI Mach 64 card with pentium 1? I have a pc with pentium mmx 166mhz,32 mb ram and ati mach 64 ct 1mb and i'm curious how it will handle Quake 3d, Doom and other goodies :D
You could just install and test yourself?
I seond this! Have also one of them.
But my card is a Mach 64 VT2
Sure, please gift me such an awesome graphics card :D
What about EISA cards?
Would be cool, but I have no such parts. Also, I doubt for DOS gaming that there would be a benefit.
Vlb is flawed from the start. Most of the chipsets are absolutely terrible. The format was ditched as soon as pci was ratified…. The biggest problem was the cost. Full size cards cost a lot of money. This is why most vlb cards were 2 layers only. Half the profit was dissolved in the etching process in the form of copper. And then there was a mechanical problem. The two sockets would expand and contract causing heaving… ie the card would walk it self out of the slots with every heat and cool cycle. I had so much problems with it.. as soon as atx and pci came out I bought a new board.
What about ATI VLB cards?
Anything special about them?
The one ATI card I know that was popular on VLB was the ATI Mach 32. I wonder how it would stack against the other cards on your list. I can benchmark it but my computer it's in a loaded 66mhz 486, it would skew the results heavily.
My understanding is that ATI cards are not that good for DOS gaming. Seeing how expensive VLB cards are, I won't be getting one any time soon :)
Wow, 2-3 fps in quake... how can someone claim that's playable.
I need to go find a video of that.
Quake was designed for Pentiums, even high end 486s run it sluggish because they have no pipelined FPU like the Pentium does.
In 30 years a 4090 might be worth $30
man I wish I had your brain
very rare cards!!.i have a ati ega wonder 800 !!