sunaiac wrote:

It certainly will not.

I am talking from personal experience here.
Back in the day, the ET4000 already had this sort of 'mythical' status... I wasn't really convinced of it, until a friend of me got one for an early 486 system he had, which didn't have VLB yet.
Once I saw Doom running on that, so smoothly, I was convinced.
I had run with a WDC ISA card on my 486 earlier, and it was good, but not perfect. Then I upgraded to a CL5426 VLB card, at 0 wait states, which was.
The ET4000 was pretty much the same, which made quite an impact on me.

And I'm talking from benchmarks I did a few month ago, opposing around 10 cards, ISA and VLB, on a 486.
I'll republish the numbers this evening.

The ET4000 might feel smooth in most of Doom, but it's still very bottlenecked by the ISA bus.

But any of them had features other had not? Like the gui acceleration or anything else but just the speed (that I assume at that point could not be improved further considering the isa bus).

sunaiac wrote:

The ET4000 might feel smooth in most of Doom, but it's still very bottlenecked by the ISA bus.

Of course it is bottlenecked. Obviously a VLB bus is much faster than an ISA bus, that's the whole point of VLB.
However, the ET4000 has a very efficient memory controller, which makes the most of the limited bandwidth than an ISA bus has, which can give you a very smooth Doom experience (pretty much the same as with a VLB card).
You will mainly notice a difference in higher resolutions, but 320x200 is not that bottlenecked by the ISA bus.

386SX wrote:

But any of them had features other had not? Like the gui acceleration or anything else but just the speed (that I assume at that point could not be improved further considering the isa bus).

The latest ISA cards had Windows GUI acceleration. To name a few chipsets: Tseng ET4000/w32, Cirrus Logic CL-5424 to 5434, WD90C31, ATI MACH32/64, S3 911/928/805. For 8-bit (256 colors) they were good. But in 15/16/24-bit they were struggling as ISA bus is too slow.

One of the ISA line is a bad copy/paste, but should give the general idea.
However good is a chip, ISA will be to slow for it to be "about as good" as mid range VLB in doom.

kixs wrote:

The latest ISA cards had Windows GUI acceleration. To name a few chipsets: Tseng ET4000/w32, Cirrus Logic CL-5424 to 5434, WD90C31, ATI MACH32/64, S3 911/928/805. For 8-bit (256 colors) they were good. But in 15/16/24-bit they were struggling as ISA bus is too slow.

If they have enough acceleration, they don't need the bus much. Eg, many of these chips have a blitter, which allows Windows to move data around on screen without having to copy it with the CPU over the ISA bus.

Games don't use any acceleration though.

sunaiac wrote:

One of the ISA line is a bad copy/paste, but should give the general idea.
However good is a chip, ISA will be to slow for it to be "about as good" as mid range VLB in doom.

I don't see an ISA ET4000 though, so this proves nothing.
Besides, this is a DX4 and you get those framerates? Makes me wonder what you tested and how.
If I recall, my 486DX2-66 rarely dipped below 35 fps.
And if you do the math, it certainly is possible to reach 35+ fps over an ISA bus in 320x240 in 256 colours.

Edit: here are some results including ET4000 ISA cards on a Pentium 100:
http://thandor.net/benchmark/32
The fastest ISA card is an ET4000AX 1MB ISA(P100), getting 32 fps average. Which is certainly in the ballpark of VLB cards. And 32 fps is also in the reach of a 486.

Those ET4000/w32 results are amazing....

Scali wrote:

I don't see an ISA ET4000 though, so this proves nothing. Besides, this is a DX4 and you get those framerates? Makes me wonder w […]
Show full quote

sunaiac wrote:

One of the ISA line is a bad copy/paste, but should give the general idea.
However good is a chip, ISA will be to slow for it to be "about as good" as mid range VLB in doom.

I don't see an ISA ET4000 though, so this proves nothing.
Besides, this is a DX4 and you get those framerates? Makes me wonder what you tested and how.
If I recall, my 486DX2-66 rarely dipped below 35 fps.
And if you do the math, it certainly is possible to reach 35+ fps over an ISA bus in 320x240 in 256 colours.

Edit: here are some results including ET4000 ISA cards on a Pentium 100:
http://thandor.net/benchmark/32
The fastest ISA card is an ET4000AX 1MB ISA(P100), getting 32 fps average. Which is certainly in the ballpark of VLB cards. And 32 fps is also in the reach of a 486.

I'm a strange guy, I don't compare numbers from tests that are not using the same protocol. Double standard thing, remember ?
And I'm also not interested in theories. I give hard numbers I obtained myself.

How I tested is not a secret. I used phil's benchmark suite.
Main difference between phil's configuration and that P100 guy is that doom is fullscreen in the first case, fullscreen -2 in the second.

Hardware is a HOT419/256kb + 64MB FPM + Tekram DC680-T/4mb + intel DX4-100, dos started with "F5".

The 5434 is in the top list of ISA cards, as proved by another thread here on VOGONS.
I'll put in that Western Digital that came first in aformentionned thread, since I don't own a ET4000 on ISA bus, only VLB and PCI.

sunaiac wrote:

I'm a strange guy, I don't compare numbers from tests that are not using the same protocol. Double standard thing, remember ?
And I'm also not interested in theories. I give hard numbers I obtained myself.

I'm not comparing, just saying that a good ISA card can indeed get 35+ fps in Doom, which debunks your claim that ISA is too slow for even mid-range VLB.
A lot probably also depends on how you configured the system... As I say, tweaking the ISA speed and waitstates may make quite a difference. The chipset you used can also make a difference. I know there was a benchmark where my 486 got 21 fps on average, where a friend with the same video card and CPU, but a different motherboard, never got further than 14 fps, because his board could not run with 0 waitstates.

3dbench2 with my configuration gives me: 14.6 fps!

Good or not?

Good 386DX-40 board with good VGA card and ISA bus speed set in BIOS to 1:3 and optimized BIOS settings, should give you around 17-18 fps.

i dont know what to optimize to get there. Dram states are 2-2, processor is running well 9.2 on speedsys, i can try disabling emm but maybe the video card is not the best either.

Wait states should be 0-0 if they work good. 😀

GeorgeMan wrote:

Wait states should be 0-0 if they work good. 😀

I think he's talking about RAS/CAS delays though, where lower is better. I think 2-2 would be the best settings for such systems. They don't go down to 0 😀

GeorgeMan wrote:

Wait states should be 0-0 if they work good. 😀

i think it hang at boot with 0 but i try again. 😀

386SX wrote:

And what about the WDC alternative to the ET4000? Anyone tried the BitBLT accelerated version WD90C31 if existed on ISA?

We had a Paradise WD90C31 card in a 386DX40. The card was very fast in DOS and had decent GUI acceleration for Windows 3.x.
I overclocked the ISA bus, too. I think the default was CLK2IN/10 which would mean 8MHz, everything worked fine at CLK2IN/6 = 13.3MHz.

386SX wrote:

GeorgeMan wrote:

Wait states should be 0-0 if they work good. 😀

i think it hang at boot with 0 but i try again. 😀

The lower, the better. 😀
This setting does make a difference.

idspispopd wrote:

386SX wrote:

And what about the WDC alternative to the ET4000? Anyone tried the BitBLT accelerated version WD90C31 if existed on ISA?

We had a Paradise WD90C31 card in a 386DX40. The card was very fast in DOS and had decent GUI acceleration for Windows 3.x.
I overclocked the ISA bus, too. I think the default was CLK2IN/10 which would mean 8MHz, everything worked fine at CLK2IN/6 = 13.3MHz.

Well the only option I've seen with that name is with CLK/5.. but I've to read better the bios option..

But at the end, not talking only about the speed that I understand were already similar and at the top of the isa possibilities, which was the "most recent" and "most featured" both DOS and Win capable highend chipset mounted on an ISA board? Talking about the chip model itself. I've seen that there're WD90Cxx higher than 31. And I've read somewhere of also some Virge rare ISA board...