Im no expert when it comes to VLB cards but the first two (Tseng and S3) should both be good, if they are cheap buy both, test them and use the one you find the best.

When it comes to DOS S3 cards are among the best choices but later during the Windows 9x era they fell behind.

I second that. Tseng ET4000 is a great card from that era. S3 cards were also really good. Another great contender is Cirrus Logic, the CL542x series of chips.

It's hard to see what chip is on that Tseng card. ET4000/AX or W32? If you want windows acceleration then search for ET4000/w32 or take S3 805. ET4000/AX doesn't have windows acceleration but in DOS it's the same as w32.

kixs wrote:

It's hard to see what chip is on that Tseng card. ET4000/AX or W32? If you want windows acceleration then search for ET4000/w32 or take S3 805. ET4000/AX doesn't have windows acceleration but in DOS it's the same as w32.

In my experience the ET4000AX looks nicer than the W32 at DOS resolutions.

I have both on VLB and can't see any difference. DOS benchmarks are the same to the point.

No no looks nicer, as in image quality.

ATi Mach 64 was one of the last VLB cards, but they can be hard to find and expensive now. Mach32 is easier to find and a little less pricey, but still more money than many alternatives like Cirrus Logic, Trident or S3. The advantage of a Mach 32 or 64 is that they came with more memory than most ISA or VL bus cards. 2 and 4mb cards are out there that support greater resolutions and/or color depths than a 512k or 1mb card, but they aren't as compatible as some other cards. An S3 is probably a good choice for broader compatibility with more games.

moved to Marvin

I noticed that the ones selling for 24.50ZL are all garbage. So I'm limited to basically two here: The S3 and the Cirrus Logic. I'm going to try for the S3 as I can populate it with 44256 DIP RAM. Thanks for the help!

badmojo wrote:

No no looks nicer, as in image quality.

That depends on the manufacutrer of the card not the chipset and even some components going bad over time. None the less all my Tseng ET4000, ET4000AX, ET4000/w32i, ET4000/w32p and ET6000 (ISA, VLB, PCI) have good image quality 😁

sliderider wrote:

ATi Mach 64 was one of the last VLB cards, but they can be hard to find and expensive now. Mach32 is easier to find and a little less pricey, but still more money than many alternatives like Cirrus Logic, Trident or S3. The advantage of a Mach 32 or 64 is that they came with more memory than most ISA or VL bus cards. 2 and 4mb cards are out there that support greater resolutions and/or color depths than a 512k or 1mb card, but they aren't as compatible as some other cards. An S3 is probably a good choice for broader compatibility with more games.

I got a mach64 at a thriftstore for two dollars. A cap is missing though, hopefully it works after replacing it.

I'm kind of curious what the advantage is of having 2mb vs 1mb video ram and why you want that. The reason I ask is because I recently purchased a DEC 466 and according to the manual the vram is upgradable from 1mb to 2.

800x600 with 32/24-bit colors, 1024x768 with 16-bit colors and 1280x1024 with 256 colors. I'd guess a VLB card would use 24-bit colors for TrueColor mode instead of 32-bit colors in Windows, so 640*480 in TrueColor is needs only 1MB anyway. For DOS gaming, though, I'm not sure there is any performance increase.

Supposedly interleaving only works with full 2 megs of memory installed in the case of the ET4000/W32i and W32p, which would show as a general performance increase.

alexanrs wrote:

800x600 with 32/24-bit colors, 1024x768 with 16-bit colors and 1280x1024 with 256 colors. I'd guess a VLB card would use 24-bit colors for TrueColor mode instead of 32-bit colors in Windows, so 640*480 in TrueColor is needs only 1MB anyway. For DOS gaming, though, I'm not sure there is any performance increase.

Mach64 with 4mb does 16.7 million colors at 1280x1024. Mine is an ISA card, but they made them in VLB, too. Finding Mach64 cards in VLB is a lot harder than finding them in ISA or finding Mach32 VLB, though.

Holy Grail found!

firage wrote:

Supposedly interleaving only works with full 2 megs of memory installed in the case of the ET4000/W32i and W32p, which would show as a general performance increase.

With 2MB it would show only in Windows performance increase (almost double). But DOS doesn't care.

Even with the interleaving in Windows it was average at best compared to 64-bit accelerators.

Alright I think I get what you guys are sayin. Say my DEC has a S3 Trio64 and I decide to upgrade the dram to 2mb. What OS is capable of taking advantage of that? 3.11 or maybe 95 or maybe none of those....

Trio64 is a card that benefits greatly from 2mb, because with only 1mb you are cutting bandwidth in half. Not sure if DOS is affected or not. Basically with any 64-bit card you want to make sure you don't have less than 2mb.