No, not all cards with integrated ramdacs support true/high colour. It was a feature that initially appeared on cheap low end cards.

I think support for 15/16/24-bit started appearing on VGA cards in the early 90s. Perhaps 1991 or so. I know the VGAWonder XL was the first card from ATi to do it.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

No, not all cards with integrated ramdacs support true/high colour. It was a feature that initially appeared on cheap low end cards.

I think support for 15/16/24-bit started appearing on VGA cards in the early 90s. Perhaps 1991 or so. I know the VGAWonder XL was the first card from ATi to do it.

Earliest I have ever personally owned was a Diamond Speedstar 24X, which was released around '93.

Logistics wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Earliest I have ever personally owned was a Diamond Speedstar 24X, which was released around '93.

yeah i know about this card, it used tseng et4000 gpu and is a rather fast isa card by then. although cirrus, WD and s3 caught up with it later, et4000 is the earliest to achieve such speed.
and are there any exceptionally cheap and slow cards like trident8900/9000 and realtek3105 supporting 16bit colors or higher?

Logistics wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

No, not all cards with integrated ramdacs support true/high colour. It was a feature that initially appeared on cheap low end cards.
I think support for 15/16/24-bit started appearing on VGA cards in the early 90s. Perhaps 1991 or so. I know the VGAWonder XL was the first card from ATi to do it.

Earliest I have ever personally owned was a Diamond Speedstar 24X, which was released around '93.

But SS24x has TrueColor only in Windows 640x480.
Mostly ISA-Cards which support Vesa 1.2 have High/TrueColor. I always use quickview 1.3 which is fantastic and ultra-fast.

dr.zeissler wrote:

But SS24x has TrueColor only in Windows 640x480.
Mostly ISA-Cards which support Vesa 1.2 have High/TrueColor. I always use quickview 1.3 which is fantastic and ultra-fast.

I was not aware of this. But it was a long time, ago. My card was a 1MB unit, which I thought was AMAZING at the time. 640x480 seemed so spacious in Windows 3.11W.

But it truly wouldn't run true-color in DOS mode?

I did not find a viewer that supports truecolor in dos with the ss24x.

noshutdown wrote:

first , we know some isa video chips had integrated ramdac, while others used external ramdac.
do all video chips with integrated ramdac support 16bit/24bit color modes? and when did 16bit/24bit external ramdacs show up?
so, what are the earliest isa video cards to support 16bit/24bit color?

AFAIK the TIGA cards that appeared in early 1992 were the first to support TrueColor.
Like this card: http://retronn.de/hwpics/graphics_card_number … gxitc_front.jpg

If you want to include stuff like TIGA, then you can probably find expensive proprietary true colour ISA cards dating back to the mid 80s.

The VGA Wonder XL came out in May 1991, so I would guess that all their competitors would have had similar products on the market at that time too. I wonder if there are any Diamond cards from that time that do high colour.

*edit*
The answer is yes. It was called the Diamond Speedstar HiColor, and it came out in June 1991 for the low low price of only $695. 32k colour in resolutions up to 800x600.

No idea who was the first. This is for S3:

1991:
S3 911, 911A (June 10, 1991) - S3's first Windows accelerators (16/256-color, high-color acceleration)
S3 924 - 24-bit true-color acceleration

1992:
S3 801, 805, 805i - mainstream DRAM VESA Windows accelerators (16/256-color, high-color acceleration)
S3 928 - 24/32-bit true-color acceleration, DRAM or VRAM

I'd guess more or less every competitive manufacturer had similar specs in similar time frame.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If you want to include stuff like TIGA, then you can probably find expensive proprietary true colour ISA cards dating back to the mid 80s.

Well, wasn't this exactly the question in OPs posting?
If not maybe it should be clarified when he asks for SVGA only.

I had a trident 8900d 1mb ISA card at that time. It was capable to work in 640x480@24bit mode under win 3.1. It was terribly slow, so I used it in high color mode.

I think winner will be Number Nine Revolution 512x32 from year 1984 - world's first "true-color - 16.7 million colors" graphics card (Revolution 512x32) for the PC. Based on Nec 7220 chip. Good luck finding card.....

Company history - http://web.archive.org/web/19981202114542/htt … .com/about.html
Card manual - http://www.vgamuseum.info/images/doc/no9/revo … ersion_2.00.pdf

List of highres cards from Infoworld (1986) - not all can do more than 256 colors - https://books.google.cz/books?id=mzwEAAAAMBAJ … 0512x32&f=false

@vlask: An interesting read. Actually the table from Infoworld is a bit misleading. The manual states more precisely the lookup tables are able to translate to 16.77 Mio. colors with 245760 colors shown at the same time (at a 512x480 pixel resolution == 245760 pixels).
Also a good price tag. I guess only a few were sold because most professionals preferred higher resolutions instead of more colors.

elianda wrote:

Also a good price tag. I guess only a few were sold because most professionals preferred higher resolutions instead of more colors.

Well any profi graphic card from 80's is ultra rare. Seen only few (under 5) pictures of Matrox cards - thats not many if you consider that they do them since 1979. Havent seen any number nine card from 80's and same can be apllied to all cards in that infoworld table. Profi PC and workstations are already lost part of computer history. Almost noone have them and noone write articles about them.