If you already decided for S3 despite your list I can tell you that the Virge 325 has the identical 2D core as the Trio64V+. This reduces your list to a single choice.
As for memory needed: 512 kB is enough. It does 640x480 at 256 colors then. Only if you have a very fast CPU like Pentium 233MMX+ 1 MB could be used to get 800x600 at 256 colors.
There are as always a few exceptions, like The Settlers 2 where higher resolution works also with lower CPUs nicely.
But on average 512 kB is sufficient.

Great, thanks for the answer, now about the cards, S3 is still the best for DOS games right?
What about 3D games like Doom?

Your 120 MHz DX4 and a S3 video card will run Doom perfectly. Doom actually dosnt scale very well with faster hardware so the difference between a fast 486 and a fast Pentium system is slim.

The Matrox IMO is one of the best cards already. Or an original Matrox Mistique (a bit older.)

Not because of the VRAM (although some DOS games did support 3D acceleration with Matrox, like Tomb Raider 1 and MechWarrior 2), but because of its lightning fast memory speed. The Matrox cards broke all memory bandwidth benchmarks when they first came out. Quake 1 actually ran faster simply because of the faster VGA memory transfer speed.

And at least with the original Mystique, its VGA BIOS could handle every undocumented VGA trick in the book. One of the most DOS-compatible cards ever made.

I'm not very familiar with the G200. But if it's an enhanced Mystique, then all these points should also apply to that one.

I recall reading a thread not too long ago where some other cards were also mentioned, but other popular cards from that era were the Tseng Labs ET4000AX ISA and Tseng Labs ET4000 w32/p VESA Local Bus.

PCI was only introduced to 486 motherboards at a later stage. There are a couple of options there, but from a DOS perspective, I don't think it will make much of a difference which one you choose, since you should see similar performance on these PCI cards (based on some benchmark test results I've seen).

Software 3D, so they don't use any acceleration in that sense (Like OpenGL, Glide, Direct3D) and the work is done by the CPU.

To cut a long story short, the S3 is still a real winner for games like Doom. On that system it should fly. The Matrox is still a good card too, very fast in DOS and you aren't likely to see a difference on a 486. Just use whichever one you want, the Matrox has better image quality on average where the S3 probably has the edge on compatibility - but the chances of you running anything that has issues with the Matrox in DOS are very, very slim and likely won't happen.

1MB is more than enough for DOS, but some cards do get a slight boost with more memory installed, especially at higher resolutions and in Windows.

I like the Matrox more, but to me it seems more like a Pentium card. The S3 is great too. You can't go wrong with either card here.

Yes, as far as PCI goes, Matrox were among the fastest for DOS. They're also excellent for Windows acceleration.
A potential downside, which is more for Pentium-era than for 486-era is that the VBE support for Matrox is limited. It only supports 640x480 and higher resolutions for truecolour/linear framebuffer modes, where many games/demos want to use 320x200, 320x240, 512x384 or similar resolutions.
For 486 you are generally limited to 320x200/320x240 256 colour modes anyway, since the CPU won't be fast enough for higher resolutions.

realnc wrote:

The Matrox IMO is one of the best cards already. Or an original Matrox Mistique (a bit older.)
[...]
And at least with the original Mystique, its VGA BIOS could handle every undocumented VGA trick in the book. One of the most DOS-compatible cards ever made.

Sorry for destroying your personal preferences:
http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
Also the VESA BIOS of the Mystique does not support the following: 24 bit modes, 15 bit modes, VBE low res modes.

Also nowadays there are a bunch of same speed/faster cards than the Matrox available (Riva128, ET6000, Voodoo Banshee/3 and so on).

Two not on your list but both very fast DOS PCI cards are ARK Logic ARK2000PV & Tseng Labs ET6000. These two were by far the fastest in the tests that I ran in a socket 7 430TX setup.

elianda wrote:

Sorry for destroying your personal preferences: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ Also the VESA BIOS of the Mystique does not sup […]
Show full quote

realnc wrote:

The Matrox IMO is one of the best cards already. Or an original Matrox Mistique (a bit older.)
[...]
And at least with the original Mystique, its VGA BIOS could handle every undocumented VGA trick in the book. One of the most DOS-compatible cards ever made.

Sorry for destroying your personal preferences:
http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
Also the VESA BIOS of the Mystique does not support the following: 24 bit modes, 15 bit modes, VBE low res modes.

Also nowadays there are a bunch of same speed/faster cards than the Matrox available (Riva128, ET6000, Voodoo Banshee/3 and so on).

The voodoo banshee and voodoo 3 are the fastest cars I've seen in dos, and have great compatibility with older titles. They are my favorite cards for running dos games on fast machiens.

On 486 machines I use S3 cards mostly. I have a quite a few matrox cards and at one point I'll want to test all of them in dos games said to act up with matrox cards (like jazz, keen and so on).

elianda wrote:

realnc wrote:

The Matrox IMO is one of the best cards already. Or an original Matrox Mistique (a bit older.)
[...]
And at least with the original Mystique, its VGA BIOS could handle every undocumented VGA trick in the book. One of the most DOS-compatible cards ever made.

Sorry for destroying your personal preferences:
http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

I'm not sure this table is accurate. I see for example that Jazz Jackrabbit is supposed to have scrolling problems, but I've played that game to death with the original Mystique and it was 100% smooth and glitch-free. Also, I was using uniVBE and I've never hit any SVGA issues. And I had a LOT of DOS games back then, the card never showed any compatibility problems.

Also, are EGA games on the list? I have no idea how good the EGA support is.

realnc wrote:

elianda wrote:

realnc wrote:

The Matrox IMO is one of the best cards already. Or an original Matrox Mistique (a bit older.)
[...]
And at least with the original Mystique, its VGA BIOS could handle every undocumented VGA trick in the book. One of the most DOS-compatible cards ever made.

Sorry for destroying your personal preferences:
http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

I'm not sure this table is accurate. I see for example that Jazz Jackrabbit is supposed to have scrolling problems, but I've played that game to death with the original Mystique and it was 100% smooth and glitch-free. Also, I was using uniVBE and I've never hit any SVGA issues. And I had a LOT of DOS games back then, the card never showed any compatibility problems.

Also, are EGA games on the list? I have no idea how good the EGA support is.

I can confirm the scrolling problem on a millennium II and a G200. I haven't yet tested my mystique or my millennium(1). If you have a card that doesn't exhibit the scrolling problem, could you make a video bios dump? I'm running out of S3 cards and would like to use some of my matrox gear.

kanecvr wrote:

I can confirm the scrolling problem on a millennium II and a G200. I haven't yet tested my mystique or my millennium(1). If you have a card that doesn't exhibit the scrolling problem, could you make a video bios dump? I'm running out of S3 cards and would like to use some of my matrox gear.

That's not possible anymore. The hardware lies in a box on the other side of the country (my hometown.)

All I can tell you is that it was the 2MB SGRAM version and that it was bought in Germany.

The scrolling problem is why i want to change cards. I experienced this issue with my G200.
I have to say if it wasn't for this issue i would never took it off my computer, it's very fast and i can have 800 x 600 with 16 million colors on windows and 1024 x 768 with 256 colors.
The performance is great and it's really a shame that has this scrolling issues.
I'll give it a try with other cards and see what happen

S3 cards have great DOS compatibility but unfortunately most have sub par VGA quality. Virge cards can be a bit better as far as image quality compared to Trio's, but S3 Visions are known to have good VGA output quality.

The best thing about the Matrox cards is that not only these are fast but have excellent VGA output. But these cards tend to ruin scrolling games.