I programmed games for these cards between the mid 90s and early 2000s and the S3 Virge was always the most hated card as it was so slow but we had to support it. The only cards that we didn’t support were the early NVidia cards as they used forward mapped quads rather than reversed mapped triangles which made them impossible to use unless you designed your game to use them. I still have a bunch of old hardware from that time. 4 or 5 Pentium and Pentium 2 machines and around 20 graphics cards from that era.
My first 3D card was a S3 ViRGE in a Pentium 133 system. They were called 'graphics decelerators' for a reason; sure, the filtering was nice, but playing in software mode was pretty much always faster, even on the modest lower-end Pentiums of the day.
If you're not concerned about 3D performance, the S3 cards have really good VGA, EGA and even CGA/MDA/Hercules compatibility. An S3 PCI card in a 486 or pre-AGP Pentium makes for a really solid DOS gaming machine.
I remember being foold, I had a mach64 and wanted to try to upgrade it so I bought a diamond stealth 3d 2000. By its name I thought it was a good card but i didnt noticed a single change.
Yes... I have always suspected that the Virge was originally targeted for a 320x240 resolution to match mainstream 3D game consoles like the PlayStation, as it provided nearly N64-level graphics. But out of nowhere, the release of the 3dfx Voodoo established 640x480 as the new gaming standard, which Virge cannot match. The original specs of the Virge don't really seem like they were made for 640x480 gaming; for 16-bit color depth, two framebuffers already took up 1.2MB of video memory, not to mention the Z-buffer. There was no memory left for texture cache; most textures had to be streamed from system memory. I think this is the reason there is a nice performance boost when upgrading to 4MB of VRAM - much less texture streaming is needed.
Thanks for giving the S3 Virge another shot. My results are similar to yours, but I still love the S3 cards. The Trio 64V+ was my first ever graphics card, and I played a lot of DOS games with that. I had a Virge later on and it got me into some early Windows games and served as my 2D card when I got a Voodoo 1.
Wow Virge DX, I forgot about that one, I have no idea if it was any different from regular Virge. Now I have to wait to see your video :)@@philscomputerlab
@@nikolakojic652 Come to think of it, seeing S3 Virge DX/GX in windows' device manager brings back a solid memory. I'll surely have to look at my stack of parts now.
I installed a LOT of S3 Virge cards back in the day. Not for gaming, just for display. In those days, almost no motherboard had on-board graphics. The S3 Virge was cheap and Windows 98 had a perfectly usable driver built in.
my first 3d card was a 4mb ATI rage pro, changed my gaming world forever. Got the card and Jedi Knight for a birthday and seeing that game run at 640x480 and looking amazing made me stick with PC gaming ever since.
I had that card (or one based on the same chip) and they bundled the ATI version of Mechwarrior 2, which ran at 512x384 and looked pretty good. I think it ran at a higher frame rate than the S3 could manage, as well.
Also after that in december 98 the card Starter to crash on every game and the store replaced the card with a Ati Rage IIc. Played all tomb taiders till the 3 with that at 640x480
Thank you very much for the flashbacks of my late 90´s gaming experience... Was Celeron 266 MHz (boosted to 333MHz) and had 4mb S3 Virge in it :) ... Played nicely Viper Racing on low res/details, GTA / GTA London.... But struggled with GTA 2... It had black boxes around gun flare and lights + overall performance was shite... Still have fond memories and i want that S3 Virge back :(
Wow, I remember discovering Terminal Velocity at a friend's house back in the day. Free flight in 3D was a completely new thing for me, and I was hooked.
It's kinda funny exploring the situations this DOES accelerate 3D, and while I currently don't have one, apparently on a 486 platform it's definitely faster at rendering 3D than the CPU in tests I've seen.
Or on an early Pentium, and even then it's minimal at best. On a faster Pentium software render starts to take the lead, maybe on a P133 or so it's even?
@@philscomputerlab With the DX version at least I found it to be even with a P133. You'd get more or less the same framerate as software but in a 16-bit dithered+bilinear filtered way.
May not have been the fastest card, but it was a durn sight faster than a Trident. Holy crap could those lag. I had an S3 Trio as my everyday workstation card for years, no idea on performance but when I got a Virge it had much better color. (Both came with 4MB, so didn't have to mess with that!) I still have them here somewhere... Next I got a Matrox G200 16mb and that was so much better. :D
I'd love to see a roundup with the ViRGE / DX / GX. I keep a DX in one of my Pentium setups, and an interesting card from Creative - 3D Blaster with Cirrus Logic Laguna 3D in another, but I migrated some others to a modified AliExpress special RageXL
Yhm, so many memories, when trying to squeeze anything from my Virge DX 4MB to see at least a slideshow gameplay from Need for Speed III Hot Pursuit back in 1998. Finally using 400x300 resolution I could at least complete one lap at HomeTown map :) Regardless from Direct3D experience, Virge was a real beast with DirectDraw and this is why you can enjoy the Athlon boost for Software Mode, as the bitblt operation and double buffering is not creating a bottleneck for the CPU. Same test with SIS PCI card from that era and you would not have 30fps on Software D3D Mode
Great review, as usual. But the Virge core had some revisions during its lifetime. You've been reviewing the "325" core. If possible, try to review the DX/GX upgraded core, from a decent maker like STB or Diamond ("Nitro 3D" comes with 4MB onboard) Looking forward to seeing a lot more great content from you in 2024. Best wishes!
another video that takes us back to the dawn of 3D Gaming The era of patches when developers optimized titles to adapt to the hardware. With the arrival of 3dfx and glide this world became even more fantastic. However, the Virge, like the Matrox Mystique and the first Renditions, have their own charm and each of these cards has something special to give us. Recently I finally tried a PowerVR PCX2 accelerator in its custom Matrox M3D it was a great experience that I want to further explore. Thanks for these videos, best wishes for 2024.
My first rig I ever built from scratch used this card, Cyrix 6x86 166, 16mb ram, and the brand of the card was BOCA, VLB version. I even purchased the extra 1mb of vram while I was at the computer fair. It boasted HW Mpeg1 I believe and came with a CD of ski videos. It wasnt totally horrible, then again I didnt know much better at the time.
It's not double scanning at 512x384. It's just that modern scalers get confused by this resolution. Try using a CRT and you'll see quite big gaps between lines.
@@kunka592 It doesn't have to run at 60Hz refresh rate. With 75Hz vertical you would get 30kHz horizontal. Which would be perfectly fine for modern displays.
Yeah. I bought Diamond Stealth 3D 2000, featuring S3 Virge. I've had very slow framerate in games i've been previously playing in software mode. But those filtered textures... i've been crying :)
Well Phil, you gave it a fighting chance and it still couldn’t live up to its 3D expectations. I definitely admire your dedication in this series. It astounds me that they put this out as a 3D card presumably knowing its deficiencies, but maybe the bar was still low for PC 3D graphics in the pre-3Dfx era?
I remember trying out the demo of Tomb raider III, and it ran about this well on a k6 board’s SiS video. Never tried it with our eventual Rage 128 Pro 16MB PCI.
G'day Phil, 🥳🎉 Happy New Year to Everyone, I am really liking the format of these retro videos, plus the positivity of the content & comments so can't wait for more next year. I got eXoDOS & so excited because when skimming through the included game I found it has 😲Street Rod.
In 1998 I use my mother's office pc with pentium II 233 and S3 trio3D agp. 3d gaming performance was bad. I managed to play through Half Life on barely playable graphical settings. Since then, when I started with build my own computer I never choosed S3 cards but I pick up GeForce 2 GTS and was super happy with it. It was combined with second hand eizo CRT monitor
I quite like using these cards as cheap display adapters when I don't need to play games, they're very cheap and with the ram upgrades and powerstrip, they do that job pretty well
Thanks for the video! Still have my Elsa Victory 3D with the pre-installed 4MB. I had the 2MB version on loan for a short while as the 4MB one wasn't available at launch. Yes, I or rather my parents bought me the 4MB version for 550 DM back then... Never bought something without reading a review again after that experience. I'll have to check if the card still works, only missing a board and case for the 200MMX I still have from that time.
The fact that 3dfx came just a couple of months later, is also exactly how I remember it. So people who had the money, went for a S3 or similar, for fast and good 2D graphics and used a 3Dfx for all the 3D stuff. I don't remember that anyone ever thought that the S3 was an amazing 3D card? Seems just an idea from recent years maybe?
I remember S3 cards needing a color remap TSR in the autoexec when combined with voodoo cards. I remember having issues with a friends PC not being able to load the TSR and have enough base memory for DOS games using 3Dfx.
I still have to cover the ATI 3D API at some point. These 3D accelerated cards, it's a rabbit hole. All have their unique drivers, patches and little quirks...😊
back when i was constantly tinkering with computers from 486 up to duron/athlon xp with various nvidia graphics cards i would occasionally have no video output or no boot instances and the very first thing i would do was slap in my S3, i legit dont even remember where i originally obtained it from but the damn card was indestructible, i must have cycled it in and out of systems close to a thousand times and every damn time it would just work. this was in the early 2000's when i would have been 15 or so, i never really tried to game on it as most of the cards at my disposal were nvidia fx and i'd be playing games like UT 2003 and DOOM 3 but just as a troubleshooting tool it was invaluable. i know for sure its still squirrelled away somewhere in one of my boxes of tech parts next to my cold cathode tubes and 5.25" bay fan controller.
I used S3 virge DX for a short time in1998. As i remember, there was one game run smoothly with my Pentium 100mhz setup. It is the Moto Racer. This game run without stutter in both hardware 3d and software render mode.
I see this as 320x240 graphics card. Anything beyond this resolution was really hard for any computer during that time because of low amount of VRAM and other resources. One suggestion of graphics card to test in the future: Trident Blade3D 9880 8MB AGP
I agree in making these categories for hardware. Both separating by resolution and OS support. I got some hardware that came out in the XP era but I categorize it as 98 hardware cause it's overkill enough to play any game for that OS at full HD or 1920x1200 maxed out if supported and said hardware has drivers for 98SE. Using that very hardware on XP would mean not maxing out some of the games I got in that era like Oblivion or Fallout 3, so I'd rather slap a 750ti or my old HD4890 onto an i3/5/7 up to the Haswell Refresh gen and use that for XP instead.
@@OfficialDJSoru A very interesting situation is my old 7300 GT. Yes, it can drive a 1080p screen. More than that. Back in the day I ran my CRT at 2048x1536 on it, but there was obviously no gaming at that resolution, so I usually went with good old 1024x768 My Geforce 3 Ti 200 on the other hand is overkill for 98 SE, but performs perfect in basically everything I throw at it. Runs Unreal in 1280x960 without a hitch, but I play in 640x480 because I prefer how it looks. Morrowind and Halo are more a limitation of the CPU than the graphics. And my GTX 660 Ti is a perfect XP card. Pretty much overkill as well. I have no game that doesn't run on 7 that needs that much power. But then the XP rig is pretty overkill in general and does double duty is multimedia system. On the other hand, the Geforce FX are pretty good DX8 cards, but will bog down in DX9 because of the way they implemented it. And good examples for "XP era but actually 98 cards" are the smaller Radeon 9000 cards. Like the 9600 or 9200 Pro
In the days this card was in my clone pc paired with a voodoo 2 and a 486dx4-100. Still have that setup but i'm using an Amd 5x86@133 Mhz and the voodoo 2 is long gone since I use it for dos gaming now. The windows stuff I play on my p2-333mhz (although it does all dos stuff too).
This "3D Deccelerator" was my very first upgrade on my first PC (Pentium 133). It replaced the non 3D Trio 64+ also from S3. It was kind of a "short filler" until the Voodoo1 became affordable for me at the end of the 90s. The 2D performance & compatibility of both S3 cards was outstanding but the 3D concept of S3 was outdated already the day it was released... but their chips are still very common on mainboards from that era. "Danke für die Zeit die ich Ihnen gestohlen habe." ❤
ha phil, so funny! i am watchin you while on toilet (yeaah, too much info but we got a laptop here) and right before I went here I was about to switch out a virge from my socket 7 system (266mmx oc) for my trusty banshee pci! I was thinking on my way upstairs if I should switch it, because I did not dive in enough in the virge lately. and now, just now you have a new video about the virge, I am so curious and what a nice coincident :D
Supposedly the variant of the ViRGE that is best for OC'ing is a ViRGE DX/GX with fast EDO ram., in my case a STB Nitro 3D I got for stupid cheap on ebay. The main issue with it is the bios has a habit of nullifying your OC in DOS, so I'll have to figure out how to hack the bios for more speed once I've figured out how much headroom the chip has using Powerstrip in W98. The DX and GX variants actually had some improvements to the silicon and have an IPC advantage compared to the original ViRGE. I'm planning to have my Nitro 3d (ViRGE GX based, yes some of those chips were mated to EDO ram) with 35ns ram stock that I'm planning to send off to get swapped out for 25ns ram (not comfortable with smd stuff) and see how far I can OC it. Basically maximized compatibility and power for S3D games without as much monkeying around with patches and hacks like you'd have to do with a GX2. Now if you were willing so pop off the stock SGRAM on a GX2 and solder on some faster chips you might get some more speed assuming the silicon had some headrroom, but the GX2's compatibility with some S3D games is somewhat iffy. May as well just go full hacker and get one of the Trio3D cards that still had S3D support in the silicon. It's supposedly more advanced than the GX2. I already have a Rage XL for ATICIF, next will ne hunting down a Rendition Verite and I'll have reasonably fast examples of 3 out of 4 early Voodoo alternatives with a decent sized libraries. I'd love a PowerSGL card but those are obnoxiously priced.
Love this retro stuff! Excellent video! I did the same with my Trident 9680 (upgraded VRAM) to get higher res and fps on Win and Duke3D. Then I bought a Trident Blade 3D which was really good for the price, I could even play Quake 3 at 640x480 at 15 fps!
I didn't have the S3 Virge, but had a similar experience with the Ati Rage IIc 4mb back in 1998. It made things prettier (even did 32bit) but was painfully slow... good thing I bought two used Voodoo 2 cards in SLI ;) back then.
Even though it's often times not thought of fondly due to it's anemic 3D capabilities I still have fond memories of the S3 ViRGE based Diamond Stealth 3D card I owned back in those days. I had the 4MB version in my AMD K5 and later K6 based PC back then. For 2D DOS and Windows gaming it was a fantastic card at the time. The card didn't seem to mind running the PCI bus way out of spec by utilizing the 83 MHz FSB on the Megatrends HX83 mainboard I had in that machine. The ViRGE served me well until I replaced it with a Voodoo Banshee in late 1998.
Ah, this was my first 3D graphics decelerator, paired with a Pentium MMX. I remember Motoracer and Jedi Knight running reasonably well frameratewise (might be thanks to the processor) but not being able to load all the textures. Probably ended up using software mode in most other games!
I had a 2 or 3Mb card of that some years ago in my youth. it was so cool and i liked it because driver support seemed most stable of all my various cards at the time.. sad to see that i gave myself worse gpu performance, but eh. tech was amazingly moving fastback then in my eyes :D
My first PC in the 90's was built by a guy in town and had this card. I was mad because I could not play any 3D game, they would not open stating that some DLL was missing, so I always assumed all I needed was a different / new card. I'm now thinking all it was missing were appropriate drivers, and we had no internet to check at th time.
I'm really enjoying your latest videos, the topics have been well thought and well researched. Also your videos have gained more personality since you started appearing on camera. Well done!
Virge/DX was my first 3D card. Mostly used maximum resolution 400x300, but usually even lower. Ive got later update to 4MB as well, only one noticeable usefull difference was to be able enable space textures in wing commander phophecy, so space looked much better.
I used to have a S3 ViRGE! card back in the day. Luckily for me for a very, very short period of time 😂. Oh, it was so long ago. Not really sure what memory capacity it had, but I clearly remember, I was not satisfied with the card's performance to say the least. I swapped it for a GeForce 2 as soon as I got the money. It was awesome 🤘🤘! Thanks for reviving my memories, Phil 😉👍!
I had a pci Virge in my very first 486DX4 pc which ran just fine for the components I had, second pc was a Pentium 100 that ran at 133 that also had a virge that ran my most played game of all time, Midtown Madness 2 in software rendering at low. Then got a Pentium III 450 with a agp S3 Trio that played Unreal very smoothly.
The first time I saw what accelerated graphics with filtered textures looked like was on S3Virge at my friend's house around 1997. He owned a P166MMX with S3 Virge. And it was in the Monster Truck Madness game. It was impossible to play because the S3 Virge was too slow, but it gave a foretaste of what you could see in real accelerators like Voodoo.
I didn't know about the double-scan, but 512x384 used to be my favourite resolution. I was writing software rendering code in the late 90s/early 2000s, and my code was nowhere fast enough for acceptable performance in 640x480, but it was usually good enough in 512x384, and it looked a lot better than 320x240. I also went down to 400x300 when I was desperate, but that wasn't universally supported, and it didn't look much better than 320x240 anyway...
I'm going to have to try out some software rendered gaming with my Athlon 64 x2. I didn't realize you could get that smooth of performance. The unfiltered textures have a bit of charm to them in this video, much like the look the PS1 versus the "muddy" N64 textures.
From what I remember in using this graphics card and and research I've done from other people using it what made these somewhat popular in Niche groups was the fact that they had some of the sharpest VGA output you could get at the time which especially once the price dropped made them pretty desirable companion cards for 3D FX cards
Your videos always bring great memories back. I remember skipping the S3 Virge (I have a couple now, gifts from friends cleaning attics), but I remember very well that Diamond Monster 3D shown in your magazine. I sold it as needed the money for the next one, and decades later is the one thing I regret more losing. That card just blew my mind when I was lucky enough to get one, it was a big leap in visual quality moving from 2D render. Funny thing, I also had the Matrox Mystique shown in the advert, and that one I kept as it lost value quite more than the Vodoo. I still have it in its original box whit the daughter card expansion to edit video. It was very very bad gaming card, totally dissapointing, but pretty decent in 2D, as a nice poor-man's Matrox Millenium and a fair companion for the Voodoo. I have nowadays a Creative Voodoo Banshee, also a gift, and it lacks the charm and memories of that monster 3D, with the funny VGA chain-connection, but is a way more poerful device and Tomb Raider looks awesome. It is an absolute joy to watch (too bad my muscle memory for that game is long time lost). Thanks for the video and the memories. Happy new year!
I never had an S3, but seen it other systems over the years when upgrading. I had the Diamond Monster 3D back in the day. I never realized how expensive it was. When I wanted to spend my chore money on a GPU my dad had stepped in and bought it for me. I knew it was pricey because of that, but wow...16MB version at that. Also, the pamphlet in the box was advertising something totally new and unique at the time. The Diamond RIO. A compact digital MP3 player, the first of it's kind. It probably won't catch on, right? ;)
Now I'm wondering if anyone is willing to try soldering faster RAM onto an S3 Virge and pushing the overclock, that was quite a significant improvement.
Finally, I can fully agree with the video :) This is how we used these cards back in the day. A typical resolution was 400x300 and 512x384. There were games with a very optimized software renderer but plenty of games used the internal Direct3D software renderer which was not very fast (and often limited to 320x240 only). In such cases, it could be better to use the Virge for acceleration. However, it is true that the original Virge core (325, and VX which is the same in terms of 3D) is not very good. DX/GX improved the texturing performance significantly (perspective correction done in parallel). Together with a fast CPU (which is any Pentium II), you could play a lot of games. Some of them in 640x480. I hope you will find a good Virge DX/GX. There are anemic 45MHz ones with slow RAM (no room for overclocking) and very fast 75MHz ones (lite STB Nitro 3D) which can be typically overclocked to at least 83MHz (RAM is always the limit). If equipped with EDO RAM, 83MHz is comparable to a 100MHz GX2 (SDRAM). SDRAM being slower on Virge does not seem intuitive but it is connected with the inefficient use of it by the Virge core (no internal cache).
I use a Trio64V2/DX in my DOS rig which is more or less a VIRGE without the 3D stuff. Has the 4MB upgrade too (same chips as what you found), it was just a few dollars for a bunch from china. The Trio does an excellent job with older standards like CGA/EGA and DOS software rendering, likely why many virtualization software uses it as base graphics adapter. Anything 3D is handled by a diamond monster 3d.
A curiosity i have about this card that i don't remember well is how well the card performs with the bilinear filter disabled. As far i know, unlike the 3Dfx voodoo, it has to perform 4 separate fetches to the video memory to do bilinear filtering, so it might be faster with it off.
Why would a card not at least cache the address and the four values of the fetches at the last pixel? How is memory interleaved? Maybe you can set one address and then just cycle ReadOut pins on 4 memory chips?
I'm planning on doing a Pentium MMX 233 build sometime in the future and already got myself a STB Nitro 3D 4MB PCI card with S3 Virge chipset (GX I think) for 2D and a Diamond Monster 3D 3DFX Voodoo 1 for 3D games. Now I just need to find the time 😅 The STB card is a new old stock Dell OEM card I found on eBay for not too much money. I already replacd all the electrolythic capacitors (as I do with all 90's hardware I get just to be sure/safe wether used or not used)
Very interresting card to me, I think it was my first gpu because I got a S3 CD-Rom laying around with TerminalVelocity and Descent II probably sold with it and the games can only run with S3 card installed (I tried just in case). I suspect these games version were highly optimised to give better performance. Cool video as always 😌!
its good that you are summing up the timeline and pricing. i had a bunch of ati cards, and some s3. had most of the riva variants. the first voodoo i bought...was surreal. nothing was close at the time. but that quickly was caught up quick. i have to give nvidia credit for the first transform/shading/lighting gpu, but i rocked early..... i forget the model. cost me 3 paychecks at the time. ati still i think, far cry ran like glass on it. water effects were unmatched by my geforce cards on my athlon at the time.
Awesome review. I'm really curious how the results of the later Virge cards will turn out. I believe the DX will reach playable levels at least on 512x384.
Yes, first thing I did when buying S3 ViRGE display card was to upgrade the onboard RAM to 4MB, but I soon discovered it made no difference, short of 3D gaming issue, I noticed that this chip couldn't handle MPEG-1 video playback well, it didn't smooth the image during playback. All these problems were finally solved by a simple Riva 128 3D display card. By the way, I'm surprised to see Athlon 64 CPU running those retro PC games in software render mode, turns out it runs much smoother than S3 ViRGE, so people didn't call it 3D decelerator for nothing.
I programmed games for these cards between the mid 90s and early 2000s and the S3 Virge was always the most hated card as it was so slow but we had to support it. The only cards that we didn’t support were the early NVidia cards as they used forward mapped quads rather than reversed mapped triangles which made them impossible to use unless you designed your game to use them. I still have a bunch of old hardware from that time. 4 or 5 Pentium and Pentium 2 machines and around 20 graphics cards from that era.
Hello! Have you ever tried to work on Nv1 or at least test the speed compared to a Virge?
nice. i am fortunate that my wife is gracious with me re my parts hoarding ways 🤣
the s3 really sucked i remember this card you couldnt play anything with it
a square is just two triangles tho 😛
@@SevenCompletedquads force you to align the textures along the edges. Also instead of backface culling, you have back line of texture culling.
My first 3D card was a S3 ViRGE in a Pentium 133 system. They were called 'graphics decelerators' for a reason; sure, the filtering was nice, but playing in software mode was pretty much always faster, even on the modest lower-end Pentiums of the day.
If you're not concerned about 3D performance, the S3 cards have really good VGA, EGA and even CGA/MDA/Hercules compatibility. An S3 PCI card in a 486 or pre-AGP Pentium makes for a really solid DOS gaming machine.
Good point! I admit haven't done much with EGA and other graphics standards...
Great card to pair with a Voodoo II XD
I'm using a DX 4MB purely as a 2D card paired with a Voodoo 1. Great combo!
Dunno about games but I used an S3 Trio for years, and later a Virge, and they never gave my work system a bit of trouble.
@@edsiefker1301Absolutely for a Voodoo 2 setup. A card with great 2D results basically screams for that.
I remember being foold, I had a mach64 and wanted to try to upgrade it so I bought a diamond stealth 3d 2000. By its name I thought it was a good card but i didnt noticed a single change.
Yes...
I have always suspected that the Virge was originally targeted for a 320x240 resolution to match mainstream 3D game consoles like the PlayStation, as it provided nearly N64-level graphics. But out of nowhere, the release of the 3dfx Voodoo established 640x480 as the new gaming standard, which Virge cannot match.
The original specs of the Virge don't really seem like they were made for 640x480 gaming; for 16-bit color depth, two framebuffers already took up 1.2MB of video memory, not to mention the Z-buffer. There was no memory left for texture cache; most textures had to be streamed from system memory. I think this is the reason there is a nice performance boost when upgrading to 4MB of VRAM - much less texture streaming is needed.
For 320x240 the performance actually was ok as far as I can remember.
Thanks for giving the S3 Virge another shot. My results are similar to yours, but I still love the S3 cards. The Trio 64V+ was my first ever graphics card, and I played a lot of DOS games with that. I had a Virge later on and it got me into some early Windows games and served as my 2D card when I got a Voodoo 1.
More to come! DX will be next and hunting down a GX2.
Same, I think I havea few S3 Virges in the old hardware cupboard.
Wow Virge DX, I forgot about that one, I have no idea if it was any different from regular Virge. Now I have to wait to see your video :)@@philscomputerlab
I had a s3 virge and it just smooshed the textures a bit....what a waste of money. I have it still around here somewhere I think.
@@nikolakojic652 Come to think of it, seeing S3 Virge DX/GX in windows' device manager brings back a solid memory. I'll surely have to look at my stack of parts now.
Danka Phil! Enjoyed the examination :)
Back then I was in highschool and happy to have any video card.
^.^
I installed a LOT of S3 Virge cards back in the day. Not for gaming, just for display. In those days, almost no motherboard had on-board graphics. The S3 Virge was cheap and Windows 98 had a perfectly usable driver built in.
S3 ViRGE, why this crab on TH-cam
why is he not able to understand it ?
This is how I ended up with mine ....for the roughly month or so before it was promptly replaced.
my first 3d card was a 4mb ATI rage pro, changed my gaming world forever. Got the card and Jedi Knight for a birthday and seeing that game run at 640x480 and looking amazing made me stick with PC gaming ever since.
Same!! That was also my first 3D card. Rock on brother. :)
I had that card (or one based on the same chip) and they bundled the ATI version of Mechwarrior 2, which ran at 512x384 and looked pretty good. I think it ran at a higher frame rate than the S3 could manage, as well.
I remember to run tomb raider on a Virge GX at 320x240. Good times when we were humble and played with what we had! Have a good new year!
Also after that in december 98 the card Starter to crash on every game and the store replaced the card with a Ati Rage IIc. Played all tomb taiders till the 3 with that at 640x480
400х300 is my go-to resolution for low power cards like this
Das ist diesen Artikel noch einmal lesen kann, ist echt erstaunlich!
1996, das ist Ewigkeiten her! Ich war derzeit erst 11 Jahre alt und.
Vielen Dank!
Thank you very much for the flashbacks of my late 90´s gaming experience...
Was Celeron 266 MHz (boosted to 333MHz) and had 4mb S3 Virge in it :) ... Played nicely Viper Racing on low res/details, GTA / GTA London....
But struggled with GTA 2... It had black boxes around gun flare and lights + overall performance was shite...
Still have fond memories and i want that S3 Virge back :(
This is pretty funny. I litterally found my s3 64 today and you post a video about it HAHA!
I bought it for 2D together with my Voodoo 2 😁
This was my exact config, diamond stealth 4mb and poverstrip @77hz, thank you for reminding me :)
Great video✌ and happy New year
Always wanted to upgrade RAM on an S3. I still have one. Might be worth a look :)
I had one of these in my first custom built pc, got it swapped out within days, true bilge!
Wow, I remember discovering Terminal Velocity at a friend's house back in the day. Free flight in 3D was a completely new thing for me, and I was hooked.
yes. and microsoft was pushing it so it was everywhere. ive always ment to check out the others in the series.
Omg it has been ages since I played terminal velocity 🥺
It's kinda funny exploring the situations this DOES accelerate 3D, and while I currently don't have one, apparently on a 486 platform it's definitely faster at rendering 3D than the CPU in tests I've seen.
Or on an early Pentium, and even then it's minimal at best. On a faster Pentium software render starts to take the lead, maybe on a P133 or so it's even?
Maybe because the first accelerators like the 3dblaster was meant to accelerate 486 machines but we know how that end up instead
@@philscomputerlab With the DX version at least I found it to be even with a P133. You'd get more or less the same framerate as software but in a 16-bit dithered+bilinear filtered way.
May not have been the fastest card, but it was a durn sight faster than a Trident. Holy crap could those lag. I had an S3 Trio as my everyday workstation card for years, no idea on performance but when I got a Virge it had much better color. (Both came with 4MB, so didn't have to mess with that!) I still have them here somewhere... Next I got a Matrox G200 16mb and that was so much better. :D
I'd love to see a roundup with the ViRGE / DX / GX. I keep a DX in one of my Pentium setups, and an interesting card from Creative - 3D Blaster with Cirrus Logic Laguna 3D in another, but I migrated some others to a modified AliExpress special RageXL
Yhm, so many memories, when trying to squeeze anything from my Virge DX 4MB to see at least a slideshow gameplay from Need for Speed III Hot Pursuit back in 1998. Finally using 400x300 resolution I could at least complete one lap at HomeTown map :) Regardless from Direct3D experience, Virge was a real beast with DirectDraw and this is why you can enjoy the Athlon boost for Software Mode, as the bitblt operation and double buffering is not creating a bottleneck for the CPU. Same test with SIS PCI card from that era and you would not have 30fps on Software D3D Mode
Great review, as usual. But the Virge core had some revisions during its lifetime. You've been reviewing the "325" core. If possible, try to review the DX/GX upgraded core, from a decent maker like STB or Diamond ("Nitro 3D" comes with 4MB onboard) Looking forward to seeing a lot more great content from you in 2024. Best wishes!
Mentioned at the end of the video 😊
another video that takes us back to the dawn of 3D Gaming The era of patches when developers optimized titles to adapt to the hardware. With the arrival of 3dfx and glide this world became even more fantastic. However, the Virge, like the Matrox Mystique and the first Renditions, have their own charm and each of these cards has something special to give us. Recently I finally tried a PowerVR PCX2 accelerator in its custom Matrox M3D it was a great experience that I want to further explore. Thanks for these videos, best wishes for 2024.
Thank you!
Our computer from January of 97 had one of these. Paried with 166mmx
My first rig I ever built from scratch used this card, Cyrix 6x86 166, 16mb ram, and the brand of the card was BOCA, VLB version. I even purchased the extra 1mb of vram while I was at the computer fair. It boasted HW Mpeg1 I believe and came with a CD of ski videos. It wasnt totally horrible, then again I didnt know much better at the time.
Descent 2 - Yay!!!!! This made my day. Great comparison video Phil!
Very interesting experiments, thanks! I think it's time I revisted the mighty ViRGE...
Spread the S3 love 😘
I always revisit Phil's Computer Lab to watch more videos!
It's not double scanning at 512x384. It's just that modern scalers get confused by this resolution. Try using a CRT and you'll see quite big gaps between lines.
Yea and some will not work with resolution, i have one that does not
So you're telling me the modern monitor he has supports 24KHz? I feel like that's fairly unlikely, though color me surprised if it is.
@@kunka592 my guess it’s the lowest it goes
@@kunka592 It doesn't have to run at 60Hz refresh rate. With 75Hz vertical you would get 30kHz horizontal. Which would be perfectly fine for modern displays.
@@pvc988 Just like the 720x400 70 Hz mode. Which is just 80x25 text mode, but as bitmap.
Yeah. I bought Diamond Stealth 3D 2000, featuring S3 Virge. I've had very slow framerate in games i've been previously playing in software mode.
But those filtered textures... i've been crying :)
Well Phil, you gave it a fighting chance and it still couldn’t live up to its 3D expectations. I definitely admire your dedication in this series. It astounds me that they put this out as a 3D card presumably knowing its deficiencies, but maybe the bar was still low for PC 3D graphics in the pre-3Dfx era?
Really cool to see Terminal Velocity featured. I really enjoyed playing that as a kid.
"Terminal Velocity"! Yes! 🙌😀
When I was a kid we had a Cyrix processor and an S3 Virge. It was a tough time
Nice review
Very interesting!
My first video card!
There were so many video manufacturers back then--it was easy to be confused. Then 3DFX ended all the confusion haha.
So it really was the S3 Decelerator :)
😅
And I thought that only SiS cards earned the 3D decelerator title.
My job money as kid were enough to by one magazine a mount and I am glad I always bought a gaming magazine instead of PC hardware magazine.
I remember trying out the demo of Tomb raider III, and it ran about this well on a k6 board’s SiS video. Never tried it with our eventual Rage 128 Pro 16MB PCI.
Very good video, thank you very much 👍
G'day Phil,
🥳🎉 Happy New Year to Everyone, I am really liking the format of these retro videos, plus the positivity of the content & comments so can't wait for more next year.
I got eXoDOS & so excited because when skimming through the included game I found it has 😲Street Rod.
I remember Street Rod!
In 1998 I use my mother's office pc with pentium II 233 and S3 trio3D agp. 3d gaming performance was bad. I managed to play through Half Life on barely playable graphical settings. Since then, when I started with build my own computer I never choosed S3 cards but I pick up GeForce 2 GTS and was super happy with it. It was combined with second hand eizo CRT monitor
Im looking forward to DX variant
Me too! Have to find a GX2 also 😊
my friend had it with k5 pr133
I quite like using these cards as cheap display adapters when I don't need to play games, they're very cheap and with the ram upgrades and powerstrip, they do that job pretty well
Thanks for the video! Still have my Elsa Victory 3D with the pre-installed 4MB. I had the 2MB version on loan for a short while as the 4MB one wasn't available at launch. Yes, I or rather my parents bought me the 4MB version for 550 DM back then... Never bought something without reading a review again after that experience. I'll have to check if the card still works, only missing a board and case for the 200MMX I still have from that time.
The fact that 3dfx came just a couple of months later, is also exactly how I remember it.
So people who had the money, went for a S3 or similar, for fast and good 2D graphics and used a 3Dfx for all the 3D stuff.
I don't remember that anyone ever thought that the S3 was an amazing 3D card?
Seems just an idea from recent years maybe?
Yea I had a S3 Trio 64 and Voodoo. Best of both worlds.
People who really had money bought a Matrox for 2d ...
@@federicocatelli8785 yeah, that was insane! :)
I remember S3 cards needing a color remap TSR in the autoexec when combined with voodoo cards. I remember having issues with a friends PC not being able to load the TSR and have enough base memory for DOS games using 3Dfx.
I always use 512x384 on 15" 1024x768 in order to get the best visuals on ultra lowend 3d cards (including voodoo1!)
I seem to remember certain games with S3 specific drivers did actually run OK. A racing game called Motorhead springs to mind.
Always wondered about that card.
I am very happy with my ATi 3D Charger Rage II + DVD - 4 MB. I bought this on eBay for ~30 EUR (already equipped with 4 MB)
I still have to cover the ATI 3D API at some point. These 3D accelerated cards, it's a rabbit hole. All have their unique drivers, patches and little quirks...😊
back when i was constantly tinkering with computers from 486 up to duron/athlon xp with various nvidia graphics cards i would occasionally have no video output or no boot instances and the very first thing i would do was slap in my S3, i legit dont even remember where i originally obtained it from but the damn card was indestructible, i must have cycled it in and out of systems close to a thousand times and every damn time it would just work. this was in the early 2000's when i would have been 15 or so, i never really tried to game on it as most of the cards at my disposal were nvidia fx and i'd be playing games like UT 2003 and DOOM 3 but just as a troubleshooting tool it was invaluable. i know for sure its still squirrelled away somewhere in one of my boxes of tech parts next to my cold cathode tubes and 5.25" bay fan controller.
I used S3 virge DX for a short time in1998. As i remember, there was one game run smoothly with my Pentium 100mhz setup. It is the Moto Racer. This game run without stutter in both hardware 3d and software render mode.
I see this as 320x240 graphics card. Anything beyond this resolution was really hard for any computer during that time because of low amount of VRAM and other resources.
One suggestion of graphics card to test in the future: Trident Blade3D 9880 8MB AGP
I agree in making these categories for hardware. Both separating by resolution and OS support. I got some hardware that came out in the XP era but I categorize it as 98 hardware cause it's overkill enough to play any game for that OS at full HD or 1920x1200 maxed out if supported and said hardware has drivers for 98SE.
Using that very hardware on XP would mean not maxing out some of the games I got in that era like Oblivion or Fallout 3, so I'd rather slap a 750ti or my old HD4890 onto an i3/5/7 up to the Haswell Refresh gen and use that for XP instead.
@@OfficialDJSoru A very interesting situation is my old 7300 GT. Yes, it can drive a 1080p screen. More than that. Back in the day I ran my CRT at 2048x1536 on it, but there was obviously no gaming at that resolution, so I usually went with good old 1024x768
My Geforce 3 Ti 200 on the other hand is overkill for 98 SE, but performs perfect in basically everything I throw at it. Runs Unreal in 1280x960 without a hitch, but I play in 640x480 because I prefer how it looks. Morrowind and Halo are more a limitation of the CPU than the graphics.
And my GTX 660 Ti is a perfect XP card. Pretty much overkill as well. I have no game that doesn't run on 7 that needs that much power. But then the XP rig is pretty overkill in general and does double duty is multimedia system.
On the other hand, the Geforce FX are pretty good DX8 cards, but will bog down in DX9 because of the way they implemented it.
And good examples for "XP era but actually 98 cards" are the smaller Radeon 9000 cards. Like the 9600 or 9200 Pro
In the days this card was in my clone pc paired with a voodoo 2 and a 486dx4-100. Still have that setup but i'm using an Amd 5x86@133 Mhz and the voodoo 2 is long gone since I use it for dos gaming now. The windows stuff I play on my p2-333mhz (although it does all dos stuff too).
that card does pretty well for what it is
This "3D Deccelerator" was my very first upgrade on my first PC (Pentium 133). It replaced the non 3D Trio 64+ also from S3.
It was kind of a "short filler" until the Voodoo1 became affordable for me at the end of the 90s. The 2D performance & compatibility of both S3 cards was outstanding but the 3D concept of S3 was outdated already the day it was released... but their chips are still very common on mainboards from that era.
"Danke für die Zeit die ich Ihnen gestohlen habe." ❤
ha phil, so funny! i am watchin you while on toilet (yeaah, too much info but we got a laptop here) and right before I went here I was about to switch out a virge from my socket 7 system (266mmx oc) for my trusty banshee pci! I was thinking on my way upstairs if I should switch it, because I did not dive in enough in the virge lately. and now, just now you have a new video about the virge, I am so curious and what a nice coincident :D
Banshee is so much better!
Supposedly the variant of the ViRGE that is best for OC'ing is a ViRGE DX/GX with fast EDO ram., in my case a STB Nitro 3D I got for stupid cheap on ebay. The main issue with it is the bios has a habit of nullifying your OC in DOS, so I'll have to figure out how to hack the bios for more speed once I've figured out how much headroom the chip has using Powerstrip in W98. The DX and GX variants actually had some improvements to the silicon and have an IPC advantage compared to the original ViRGE. I'm planning to have my Nitro 3d (ViRGE GX based, yes some of those chips were mated to EDO ram) with 35ns ram stock that I'm planning to send off to get swapped out for 25ns ram (not comfortable with smd stuff) and see how far I can OC it. Basically maximized compatibility and power for S3D games without as much monkeying around with patches and hacks like you'd have to do with a GX2. Now if you were willing so pop off the stock SGRAM on a GX2 and solder on some faster chips you might get some more speed assuming the silicon had some headrroom, but the GX2's compatibility with some S3D games is somewhat iffy. May as well just go full hacker and get one of the Trio3D cards that still had S3D support in the silicon. It's supposedly more advanced than the GX2. I already have a Rage XL for ATICIF, next will ne hunting down a Rendition Verite and I'll have reasonably fast examples of 3 out of 4 early Voodoo alternatives with a decent sized libraries. I'd love a PowerSGL card but those are obnoxiously priced.
Even the DX needs patched games sometimes. Only the OG ViRGE runs everything out of the box ...
@@philscomputerlab yeah, I know. Its a bit less of a pain and more overclockable than the GX2, though.
Love this retro stuff! Excellent video! I did the same with my Trident 9680 (upgraded VRAM) to get higher res and fps on Win and Duke3D. Then I bought a Trident Blade 3D which was really good for the price, I could even play Quake 3 at 640x480 at 15 fps!
Trident cards aren't that bad, sort of middle of the pack. Should be fairly compatible afaik.
I didn't have the S3 Virge, but had a similar experience with the Ati Rage IIc 4mb back in 1998. It made things prettier (even did 32bit) but was painfully slow... good thing I bought two used Voodoo 2 cards in SLI ;) back then.
Great video! Hope you had a good Christmas - have a Happy New Year!
Thank you! You too!
Even though it's often times not thought of fondly due to it's anemic 3D capabilities I still have fond memories of the S3 ViRGE based Diamond Stealth 3D card I owned back in those days. I had the 4MB version in my AMD K5 and later K6 based PC back then. For 2D DOS and Windows gaming it was a fantastic card at the time. The card didn't seem to mind running the PCI bus way out of spec by utilizing the 83 MHz FSB on the Megatrends HX83 mainboard I had in that machine. The ViRGE served me well until I replaced it with a Voodoo Banshee in late 1998.
Ah, this was my first 3D graphics decelerator, paired with a Pentium MMX. I remember Motoracer and Jedi Knight running reasonably well frameratewise (might be thanks to the processor) but not being able to load all the textures. Probably ended up using software mode in most other games!
I had a 2 or 3Mb card of that some years ago in my youth. it was so cool and i liked it because driver support seemed most stable of all my various cards at the time.. sad to see that i gave myself worse gpu performance, but eh. tech was amazingly moving fastback then in my eyes :D
My first PC in the 90's was built by a guy in town and had this card. I was mad because I could not play any 3D game, they would not open stating that some DLL was missing, so I always assumed all I needed was a different / new card.
I'm now thinking all it was missing were appropriate drivers, and we had no internet to check at th time.
this little chip did some amazing stuff in K6-2 laptops. s3 Verge 6mb version
I'm really enjoying your latest videos, the topics have been well thought and well researched. Also your videos have gained more personality since you started appearing on camera. Well done!
Thank you, I really appreciate it!
Virge/DX was my first 3D card. Mostly used maximum resolution 400x300, but usually even lower. Ive got later update to 4MB as well, only one noticeable usefull difference was to be able enable space textures in wing commander phophecy, so space looked much better.
I used to have a S3 ViRGE! card back in the day. Luckily for me for a very, very short period of time 😂. Oh, it was so long ago. Not really sure what memory capacity it had, but I clearly remember, I was not satisfied with the card's performance to say the least. I swapped it for a GeForce 2 as soon as I got the money. It was awesome 🤘🤘!
Thanks for reviving my memories, Phil 😉👍!
This is a great card for any retro collection, It has a place in history. cheers. Happy New Year.
I had a pci Virge in my very first 486DX4 pc which ran just fine for the components I had, second pc was a Pentium 100 that ran at 133 that also had a virge that ran my most played game of all time, Midtown Madness 2 in software rendering at low. Then got a Pentium III 450 with a agp S3 Trio that played Unreal very smoothly.
The first time I saw what accelerated graphics with filtered textures looked like was on S3Virge at my friend's house around 1997. He owned a P166MMX with S3 Virge. And it was in the Monster Truck Madness game. It was impossible to play because the S3 Virge was too slow, but it gave a foretaste of what you could see in real accelerators like Voodoo.
I didn't know about the double-scan, but 512x384 used to be my favourite resolution. I was writing software rendering code in the late 90s/early 2000s, and my code was nowhere fast enough for acceptable performance in 640x480, but it was usually good enough in 512x384, and it looked a lot better than 320x240. I also went down to 400x300 when I was desperate, but that wasn't universally supported, and it didn't look much better than 320x240 anyway...
It also seems to double scan 400x300 to 800x600. I'm not sure if this is specific to this chip ...
Daym I love Descent / Descent 2 I need to go play them now.
I'm going to have to try out some software rendered gaming with my Athlon 64 x2. I didn't realize you could get that smooth of performance. The unfiltered textures have a bit of charm to them in this video, much like the look the PS1 versus the "muddy" N64 textures.
Many games support it! Quake, Quake II, Half-life...
I don't like filtered textures, I always use openglnb on DOSBox so software rendering need to be tested I guess
From what I remember in using this graphics card and and research I've done from other people using it what made these somewhat popular in Niche groups was the fact that they had some of the sharpest VGA output you could get at the time which especially once the price dropped made them pretty desirable companion cards for 3D FX cards
Your videos always bring great memories back. I remember skipping the S3 Virge (I have a couple now, gifts from friends cleaning attics), but I remember very well that Diamond Monster 3D shown in your magazine. I sold it as needed the money for the next one, and decades later is the one thing I regret more losing. That card just blew my mind when I was lucky enough to get one, it was a big leap in visual quality moving from 2D render.
Funny thing, I also had the Matrox Mystique shown in the advert, and that one I kept as it lost value quite more than the Vodoo. I still have it in its original box whit the daughter card expansion to edit video. It was very very bad gaming card, totally dissapointing, but pretty decent in 2D, as a nice poor-man's Matrox Millenium and a fair companion for the Voodoo.
I have nowadays a Creative Voodoo Banshee, also a gift, and it lacks the charm and memories of that monster 3D, with the funny VGA chain-connection, but is a way more poerful device and Tomb Raider looks awesome. It is an absolute joy to watch (too bad my muscle memory for that game is long time lost).
Thanks for the video and the memories. Happy new year!
"This is borderline getting into the territory where you could say it's playable."
Glowing endorsement there. LOL.
😅
I never had an S3, but seen it other systems over the years when upgrading. I had the Diamond Monster 3D back in the day. I never realized how expensive it was. When I wanted to spend my chore money on a GPU my dad had stepped in and bought it for me. I knew it was pricey because of that, but wow...16MB version at that. Also, the pamphlet in the box was advertising something totally new and unique at the time. The Diamond RIO. A compact digital MP3 player, the first of it's kind. It probably won't catch on, right? ;)
Now I'm wondering if anyone is willing to try soldering faster RAM onto an S3 Virge and pushing the overclock, that was quite a significant improvement.
Doctor, are you sure you want to transplant this bionic heart into that dead horse?
Finally, I can fully agree with the video :) This is how we used these cards back in the day. A typical resolution was 400x300 and 512x384. There were games with a very optimized software renderer but plenty of games used the internal Direct3D software renderer which was not very fast (and often limited to 320x240 only). In such cases, it could be better to use the Virge for acceleration.
However, it is true that the original Virge core (325, and VX which is the same in terms of 3D) is not very good. DX/GX improved the texturing performance significantly (perspective correction done in parallel). Together with a fast CPU (which is any Pentium II), you could play a lot of games. Some of them in 640x480.
I hope you will find a good Virge DX/GX. There are anemic 45MHz ones with slow RAM (no room for overclocking) and very fast 75MHz ones (lite STB Nitro 3D) which can be typically overclocked to at least 83MHz (RAM is always the limit). If equipped with EDO RAM, 83MHz is comparable to a 100MHz GX2 (SDRAM). SDRAM being slower on Virge does not seem intuitive but it is connected with the inefficient use of it by the Virge core (no internal cache).
I use a Trio64V2/DX in my DOS rig which is more or less a VIRGE without the 3D stuff. Has the 4MB upgrade too (same chips as what you found), it was just a few dollars for a bunch from china. The Trio does an excellent job with older standards like CGA/EGA and DOS software rendering, likely why many virtualization software uses it as base graphics adapter.
Anything 3D is handled by a diamond monster 3d.
A curiosity i have about this card that i don't remember well is how well the card performs with the bilinear filter disabled.
As far i know, unlike the 3Dfx voodoo, it has to perform 4 separate fetches to the video memory to do bilinear filtering, so it might be faster with it off.
Why would a card not at least cache the address and the four values of the fetches at the last pixel? How is memory interleaved? Maybe you can set one address and then just cycle ReadOut pins on 4 memory chips?
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt it probably does all that, but the 3Dfx just read all 4 pixels in parallel like if the card is a hitrod thing
I'm planning on doing a Pentium MMX 233 build sometime in the future and already got myself a STB Nitro 3D 4MB PCI card with S3 Virge chipset (GX I think) for 2D and a Diamond Monster 3D 3DFX Voodoo 1 for 3D games. Now I just need to find the time 😅 The STB card is a new old stock Dell OEM card I found on eBay for not too much money. I already replacd all the electrolythic capacitors (as I do with all 90's hardware I get just to be sure/safe wether used or not used)
Sounds like an awesome project 😊
Very interresting card to me, I think it was my first gpu because I got a S3 CD-Rom laying around with TerminalVelocity and Descent II probably sold with it and the games can only run with S3 card installed (I tried just in case). I suspect these games version were highly optimised to give better performance. Cool video as always 😌!
its good that you are summing up the timeline and pricing. i had a bunch of ati cards, and some s3. had most of the riva variants. the first voodoo i bought...was surreal. nothing was close at the time. but that quickly was caught up quick. i have to give nvidia credit for the first transform/shading/lighting gpu, but i rocked early..... i forget the model. cost me 3 paychecks at the time. ati still i think, far cry ran like glass on it. water effects were unmatched by my geforce cards on my athlon at the time.
S3 Virge - the 3D decelerator. ^^
512x384 is the way to go. Used that resolution a ton of times with my voodoo1 back in the day.
Awesome review. I'm really curious how the results of the later Virge cards will turn out. I believe the DX will reach playable levels at least on 512x384.
By running Descent II with "-superhires" you can set resolutions up to 1280x1024.
Thanks for the 2MB Tomb Raider shadow tip, never knew that!
I have an S3 Virge. It made Virtua Fighter run smooth on my computer
Yes, first thing I did when buying S3 ViRGE display card was to upgrade the onboard RAM to 4MB, but I soon discovered it made no difference, short of 3D gaming issue, I noticed that this chip couldn't handle MPEG-1 video playback well, it didn't smooth the image during playback. All these problems were finally solved by a simple Riva 128 3D display card.
By the way, I'm surprised to see Athlon 64 CPU running those retro PC games in software render mode, turns out it runs much smoother than S3 ViRGE, so people didn't call it 3D decelerator for nothing.