Doom5 wrote:

How do Matrox, Trident, Nvidia, Ati, S3, Tseng, WDC, Ali, Cirrus Logic, and maybe some more obscure brands stackup?

There is certainly 2D benchmark software available, but as to published results, they would be mainly in print media from the mid 90s and would also vary greatly depending on BUS, BIOS and host CPU. Of the most consistently high scoring it was generally accepted that the Matrox Mystique, Number 9 and CL cards were faster in DOS, whereas ET4000 and Trident were fast in some cases where their VESA 1.x 'soft' BIOS modes were in use. Of the fastest though, UNIVBE (a DOS TSR that supported almost all VESA 2D modes) was the speediest of the lot, depending of course on your CPU/system's speed.

There are many benchmark results published on the web, but they are hardly comparable because of the different systems used, and the focus of the tests varied as well.

dh4rm4 wrote:

There is certainly 2D benchmark software available, but as to published results, they would be mainly in print media from the mid 90s and would also vary greatly depending on BUS, BIOS and host CPU. Of the most consistently high scoring it was generally accepted that the Matrox Mystique, Number 9 and CL cards were faster in DOS, whereas ET4000 and Trident were fast in some cases where their VESA 1.x 'soft' BIOS modes were in use.

I don't take printed results from computer (gaming) magazines very seriously.
For example, in the mid-nineties, the Matrox line of cards was highly praised in almost every article, however the reviewers somehow failed to notice that these cards don't work with several EGA and VGA ModeX games, their VESA BIOS only supports a few of the modes possible and the throughput of their framebuffers is not that impressive at all.
And I'm amused reading the words "Trident" and "fast" in the same sentence... 🤣

Doom5 wrote:

It seems as if a lot of people recommend S3 for PCI, Tseng for ISA, and possibly VLB as well?

These cards get recommended not only because of their speed, but because of their compatibility. Both chipsets were widely popular back in the days, so most games just work with them, these were the cards people had installed in their computers.

NVIDIA's chips from TNT onward usually run DOS games pretty well from both the speed and compatibility angles. They are actually very fast DOS cards. Maybe the fastest. I ran a whole slew of different cards in a P3-600 months ago and found the these NV cards to work almost as well as the S3 cards and excellent for speed. I compared 3dfx V3, NV (TNT, GFFX), Matrox (Mystique, Mil2, G200), Verite V2x00, ATI Radeon, S3 Virge, and Cirrus Logic Laguna.

Radeon may have the worst VESA support. It locks up and corrupts TIE Fighter CD SVGA and is the only card I've seen do that. Laguna is just slow and I stopped after I saw that. Verite is pretty quick as long as you stay far away from plain non-VESA VGA and Mode X (omg!) Matrox is decently compatible and pretty fast. Voodoo cards are uber fast (Banshee-V5) but have some problems with some games. There is a very small TSR out there that fixes the worst Voodoo problems.

But yeah, S3 is the most compatible option. I think it's best to stick to stuff older than Savage though. It was the only card that could play everything I tried without issues.