There's not a lot of BIOS updates for alot of cards. It's only popular nowadays so people flash for extra performance by 'zomg unlockin teh pieplines so i benchmark 5 points hier'. In this case, of a crappy 3d card that's Stealth 3D 2000, it's not even worth it.

At one point, I bought a PCI Voodoo5 5500 from a bargain bin, but it turned out to be have a Mac bios. I was able to flash it with the PC bios to make it work for me. I think that's the only time I've ever noticed a firmware change for a video card that I owned. Does the Matrox get some benefit from updating the BIOS? I have G200's in two of my systems.

Cheers!

The text below has been copied-and-pasted from a thread I did earlier about Voodoo 2 cards in SLI mode:

One other thing I noticed with the Matrox g2+ (g200) card was this -

I flashed its BIOS (from version 1.1 to the final version, 3.3), and I noticed that when I ran a DOS utility to detect the presence of VBE3, it said that this card had this VESA 3 standard. That is interesting, because there is a DOS utility called "gx00vbe" which is used to add VBE3 functionality to the Matrox g100/200/400 cards, but it seems this utility may not be necessary if you flash the Matrox card's BIOS to the latest final version, 3.3

Best regards, Robert.

leileilol wrote:

There's not a lot of BIOS updates for alot of cards. It's only popular nowadays so people flash for extra performance by 'zomg unlockin teh pieplines so i benchmark 5 points hier'. In this case, of a crappy 3d card that's Stealth 3D 2000, it's not even worth it.

Actually, now you've mentioned it, I'd quite like to get my "zomg unlockin teh pieplines so i benchmark 5 points hier"!

And that's just for my soundcard! 😉 🤣

Also, I don't think the Stealth 3D 2000 was a crappy card. It has the S3 chipset, and was very popular in its day. When playing DOS games for instance, they seem fast and smooth.

For older (find out what kind of BIOS memory chip your card has) garphics cards it's just impossible because they have no flash memory.