when it comes to 2d cards, i only care about doom and quake scores(and quake2 for windows). 😁
rendition cards suck at doom! about 10 times slower than most others. 😳

noshutdown wrote:

rendition cards suck at doom! about 10 times slower than most others. 😳

But...atleast they look cool. Rendition 2100 looks somewhat similar to a GF2 GTS 😜

I decided to do a mini group test of 3 ISA VGA cards. I used the cards listed below, all inside the same system. This system uses a Pentium MMX 233. I got this idea from Mau1wurf1977's thread here.

1) Diamond speedstar, 1MB
2) ATI Graphics Ultra, 1MB VRAM
3) Orchid Kelvin 64, 1MB

Testing notes:
Doom is shareware 1.9, full screen, timedemo demo3
Quake is shareware 1.06, full screen 360x480, timedemo demo1

The Cirrus Logic powered Orchid Kelvin 64 has just won this DOS only mini test.

rendition are decent 3d cards and i like them, however they just suck in dos. 😒
i want v2200 with 8mb of ram... so far i only know two of them in existence, from hercules and lenovo, and i have never found one yet. 🙁

noshutdown wrote:

rendition are decent 3d cards and i like them, however they just suck in dos. 😒
i want v2200 with 8mb of ram... so far i only know two of them in existence, from hercules and lenovo, and i have never found one yet. 🙁

Same here. Only ones I ever found were the Diamond 4MB PCI cards, but I got like 5 of those so I'm covered 😀

Hi,

I have exact the same Diamond Speedstar VGA Card with the same "Music TR9C1710-80DCA" RamDac.
It is a very fine card, but limited to 256colors. http://html.alldatasheet.com/html-pdf/128503/ … C1710-80DC.html

Is it possible to change the RamDac for example to an AT&T "ATT20C491-80" in order to get 24Bit Colordepth ?
Or do I have to search for an other ET4000 Card that supports TrueColor ?

Thx!
Doc

Dang... unless I threw it away, I have the Speedstar 24X lying around, somewhere. I wonder what the difference is.

Logistics wrote:

Dang... unless I threw it away, I have the Speedstar 24X lying around, somewhere. I wonder what the difference is.

they are quite different, they uses different gpu chips.
speedstar - old model of tseng labs et4000ax, can't support true color.
speedstar24 - newer model of tseng labs et4000ax, supports true color.
speedstar24x - uses a western-digital chip for hard drives.

Very helpfull thx!

If I change the RamDac on the speedstar (old 4000ax) I do not get truecolor because there are other thing that need to be changed to in order to get truecolor ?

Thx!

Speedstar64 - Cirrus Logic 5434 64 bit windows accelerator - A much better card than any ET4000 IMO if only for the 2d acceleration, I saw no performance difference in dos.

Is doom and quake the best test for vlb cards in 2d performance also.

I like to test my vlb cards and isa cards also performance wise.
Is there a test util for win9x also for 2d performance wise, since i heard that et4000 sux at win drawings.
VLB Cirrus logics and S3 805's are better than ET4000W32P's VLB ??

It's not since the speed can be mode dependent.
As for the comparison what means "better" ?
You can't also judge the cards by it's chip series name, there are a lot of revisions for the ET4000AX, then the ET4000W32i and W32p as ISA, VLB and PCI versions and the CL cards can also be equipped with a lot of different chips. Also for VLB the chosen card influenced the maximum CPU memory timings possible.

You may try Vidspeed4 as benchmark tool for dos.

i forgot to mention that i need an et4000 with driver-support for a 286 and truecolor.

The Speedstar was one of the best ISA cards of its time, especially if it had a decent amount of ram and could run 1024x768x256+. As far as jumpers, most cards had a jumper to manually use IRQ9 or not, and maybe one to enable/disable the card bios. I never found the irq jumper to make much difference. Some jumpers however, were to use 16 or 32-bit memory transfers, which did make a difference.

We looked at this card for our $14k 486 build (yes, you read this right) back in 1994, but settled on another card because it could do 65k colors. Unfortunately, the driver support didn't exist for this card, so we never got above 256 colors.

We changed that card to an ATI, thinking we'd get more colors and speed, but we found that card was slower, so we switched back to the original one. The ATI ended up in a 486dx33 system that still runs today if booted.