What do you think about the S3 Vision928 based cards?

We'll see, because I have an AMD 5x86 who needs VGA.

It will perform better if I put 256kb of cache on the 386? Now it has 128kb.

In my Am386DX-40 the 256Kbyte helped a bit the general performance but I thought better. I would like to put a Mach64 ISA on it but they costs too much.

weldum wrote:

We'll see, because I have an AMD 5x86 who needs VGA.

It will perform better if I put 256kb of cache on the 386? Now it has 128kb.

You'll get around 3-5% performance increase with 256KB cache. Also take a look at BIOS optimizations - cache read/write wait states, dram refresh, ISA dividers...

kixs wrote:

- S3 801, 924...

I have the 924, slow as a dog in dos, got 11fps for 3Dbench with a DX40.

The 928 is supposed to be a hell of a lot better.

dirkmirk wrote:

kixs wrote:

- S3 801, 924...

I have the 924, slow as a dog in dos, got 11fps for 3Dbench with a DX40.

All vision S3 cards 8xx, 9xx are GUI accelerators and DOS speed wasnt priority. These might be good for Win+higher resolutions, but not for DOS. They all sucks in DOS. Trio chips got DOS speed improvements, but i think theres only VL-Bus versions of Trio.

S3 801 is just fine in DOS. Pretty sure it's somewhere around the ET4000. I agree on 9XX.

vlask wrote:

All vision S3 cards 8xx, 9xx are GUI accelerators and DOS speed wasnt priority. These might be good for Win+higher resolutions, but not for DOS. They all sucks in DOS. Trio chips got DOS speed improvements, but i think theres only VL-Bus versions of Trio.

What are you talking about? The ISA versions? The VL-bus versions of Vision864 and 868 (DRAM) are just as quick as ET4000/W32p in DOS. It's one of the best allround cards you can get in a 486.

how do I know when a cache chip is real or fake?

the chips that I want to put in the 386 come from a pcchips 486 motherboard. they were in sockets and looks like real ones.

Fake were soldered on the motherboard. If you have socketed ones, they should be OK.

and what is TagRAM chip? how do I know if I have to change it? The 486 mb has 9 chips, and the 386 has 4 + tagram (8 cache sockets).
it'll be a problem if I use one of the standard cache chip as tagram?

The tagram is 8x64, the cache chips are 8x256

On 386 it should be the same as on 486. Tag chip should be 8x256 too.

vetz wrote:

vlask wrote:

All vision S3 cards 8xx, 9xx are GUI accelerators and DOS speed wasnt priority. These might be good for Win+higher resolutions, but not for DOS. They all sucks in DOS. Trio chips got DOS speed improvements, but i think theres only VL-Bus versions of Trio.

What are you talking about? The ISA versions? The VL-bus versions of Vision864 and 868 (DRAM) are just as quick as ET4000/W32p in DOS. It's one of the best allround cards you can get in a 486.

Good luck finding 386 motheboard with VL-Bus. Early ISA S3 cards are slow in DOS compared to Cirrus or WD.....He needs ISA card, not VLB.

How does the trident 9680 pci comes against the trident 8900d and the cirrus logic 5420? Is better? Is for a 586

For PCI use some S3, Matrox or Tseng.

Trident 9680 PCI is of course much better than 8900D or CL-5420.

weldum wrote:

How does the trident 9680 pci comes against the trident 8900d and the cirrus logic 5420? Is better? Is for a 586

Why im doin that benchmarks, when noone watching them? 😒

Try this - http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmarks/quake-320 All 3 cards are there...

8900D - 13,7
5420 - 36,2
9680 - 67,2

PCI is always better except few very early cards....(Matrox Impression, Ultima, Weitek...)

kixs wrote:

Fake were soldered on the motherboard. If you have socketed ones, they should be OK.

Not always... I've come across some fake socket cache.

Best way to check is run CACHECHK with the socket cache installed. This program will help to determine, if the cache can be seen it is real... if it can't be seen and the system seems not to have cache when it is plugged in... it's likely to be fake.

well, the 586 has fake cache with slot for asynchronous sram. the mb is a pcchips m919.

now, I'll be testing every card I have with the BENCH.zip from Phil's Ultimate VGA Benchmark Database Project.

maybe later I post the results here,

kixs wrote:

soviet conscript wrote:

kixs wrote:

. Usually 8900D are slow.

I seem to recall a member here performing benchmarks and the 8900D coming out very near the top which is surprising from a card from Trident. the D revision has something to do with the memory where its quite a fast DOS card.

Like I said... some are slow, some are fast. I have both. Fast are almost as fast as ET4000.

But you can get the 8900D-R with 32bit RAM, it's fast like a ET4000.
A 386 is CPU limited. You will see no difference, even if you run a DRx2 33/66Mhz