The S3 Trio32 is a much more modern and advanced card than the TVGA8800CS (1995 vs 1988).
Also, Trio32 is a localbus-capable chip (VLB or PCI), so chances are that it is integrated on the board with a localbus connection, making it much faster than any ISA card.
So the Trio32 is hands-down the better card.

The Trio is much better in general, as Scali said. Especially for Windows 3.1 and games using VBE.
The good old Trident (well, old at least) could be useful for very old games on the other hand.
I don't know for sure, but I think it perhaps also has a mode utility like the 8900 had.
If that's the case, you could play CGA and Hercules (only half mode) games better.
You could also force EGA for games which feature auto-detection (keen,SkyRoads).
But that's just me. I'm looking at this trough the view of someone who enjoys adventure and puzzle games.
I don't play much action titles like Dooom or Hexen.

Thanks again! 😀 another 2 questions just sprang to mind

One of the switches on the card allows you to turn IRQ 9 on or off. Should I enable it?

if I do decide on the trident do I have to turn off the embedded trio32 with one of the motherboard jumpers, or just leave it on?

People say the IRQ 9 thing was a rarely used feature, which was useful for EGA at best.
Some VGA demos (from the demoscene) are also said have used it sometimes.
What it does was essentially telling to the software whenever the EGA performed a vertical retrace.
This was used for timing of all kinds, hence the use in the demoscene. But I'm no expert at this, that's just a very simplified explanation. ^^
I should also note that IRQ9 for VGA had a negative side effect - it got in the way with ACPI, MIDI (MPU-401) and ethernet cards a few times.
So it's better to let it stay disabled. If you can, better not use IRQ2 or IRQ9 at all. They're already busy handling the interrupt thing..
It's strange, though.. Why do BIOSes from the Pentium 4 era have kept such an supposedly unimportant feature,
but not the more important one like A20 Gate or typematic rate settings ? We may never know.. 😉

Bye the way, here's some advice which could be useful for 286/386/486 users :
Some modems and serial port cards allow IRQ2 to be used as an alternative for the two standard lines
used for modems and serial ports (IRQ3 and IRQ4) in order to avoid conflicts in those two heavily-contested areas.
This is generally a good configuration decision since unused IRQs from 3 to 7 are harder to find
than unused IRQs from 10 to 15. If you want to use IRQ2, move any device using IRQ9 to another line like 10 or 11.
Source: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/res/irq/numIRQ2-c.html

If you do decide to use the Trident, better disable the onboard Trio. It minimizes the chances of any issues.
Except of course you want better performance for Windows; maybe it's possible to hookup a switch to both pins and have them
both in the system (and by using a KVM switch). But this may involve some sort of BIOS support (settings for primary/secondary VGA).
I know that this is possible in later systems with PCI/AGP but I've never tried this in an ISA-based system. Could be possible, though,
as PCI cards can operate in an different address range as ISA (I also believe to vaguely remember S3 had special registers to set the
address ranges for the ViRGE). But I'm speaking under correction here. Could be possible, that this primary/secondary thing involved
the use of the GART in AGP equipped systems.

Thanks very much! I find irqs a little confusing but the page you linked to cleared it up a lot 😀

Good news is motherboard arrived today with amd 486DX2 installed and i set it up quite quickly but the bad news is when I formatted the 270Mb drive with fat 16 it came across a few bad sectors but only after 97 percent bit win 3.1 is working great as well as games. But does this mean I need to start worrying much about the drive or would it be OK for a good while yet?

c64z80 wrote:

But does this mean I need to start worrying much about the drive or would it be OK for a good while yet?

That is difficult to say. It could just be some physical damage from transit or such, in which case it will probably not get worse.
But it could also be that the platters or heads are wearing out, and it will get progressively worse.

In some cases it can be that the platters have demagnetized from years of being unused. I have one XT clone from 1988 with the original drive. Initially it didn't even want to spin up, I think the heads were stuck to the platters.
Eventually I managed to get it to spin up. When I initially formatted it, it wasn't doing much. But as I tried it a few more times, the drive started to work better and better. It's not entirely error-free, but it now boots up without problems, and it seems to be fine for regular use.

So I would suggest to format it a few times and see if the number of bad sectors get less or more.

Ok, i will just have to be watchful and see what happens 😒

Did 3dfx ever make any Isa video cards, or was Isa seen as very obsolete when the first voodoo came out?

There are many on other forums who say just pci and a few say they did make Isa cards but no conclusive answer. With many 3dfx games being dos games it does not make a lot of sense why they would have only produced only pci cards (even with Isa bottlenecks) because most dos systems were Isa, so they would be leaving a large part of the dos 5.0+ PC market out 😮

c64z80 wrote:

Ok, i will just have to be watchful and see what happens 😒

Did 3dfx ever make any Isa video cards, or was Isa seen as very obsolete when the first voodoo came out?

There are many on other forums who say just pci and a few say they did make Isa cards but no conclusive answer. With many 3dfx games being dos games it does not make a lot of sense why they would have only produced only pci cards (even with Isa bottlenecks) because most dos systems were Isa, so they would be leaving a large part of the dos 5.0+ PC market out 😮

3DFX cards were absolutely only available as PCI, and the later combo cards (Voodoo 3, etc) as AGP, too.

Any system slow enough to not have PCI slots would have been heavily CPU bottlenecked by any game advanced enough to use 3D acceleration. Not to mention that ISA is a very, very slow 16-bit bus. It just makes no sense.

A 486 system has little use for Voodoo graphics, really. Even if you get a 486 PCI motherboard, you'll find that even though some games technically function you're probably going to be very disappointed with the performance. Even with the hot-shit top-of-the-line 5x86 CPU's many games are going to be borderline unplayable. This is mostly due to the comparatively weak FPU in 486-class systems as compared to Pentiums. Voodoo cards in 486 boards are a because-I-can party trick, not really a realistic setup.

It's not really true either that most DOS systems were ISA only. In the 1993-1996 era, most games were still DOS but most modern computers had either VLB or PCI. By the time the Voodoo came out, DOS gaming was dying (but not dead yet) and ISA-only systems were dinosaurs.

There was one single 3D accelerated card for the VLB bus (that is, designed for 486) but it had a GLiNT chip, not Voodoo. There are like 5 games that support it and the card is enormously expensive these days.

einr wrote:

There was one single 3D accelerated card for the VLB bus (that is, designed for 486) but it had a GLiNT chip, not Voodoo. There are like 5 games that support it and the card is enormously expensive these days.

By using the onboard ViRGE you'll get at least 5 games more. Just kidding! 😁
At first I thought about the ELSA GLoria series, but I guess you mean the 3D Blaster VLB ?

http://vintage3d.org/3dlabs.php
How powerful is a Glint 500TX +Delta compared to cards from the 90's? (1996-2000)
http://www.techspot.com/article/650-history-of-the-gpu/

🤣 thanks for the replies again 😀

Does anybody know what the last Windows 3.1 released game was? Because I picked up a game today called Betrayal In Antara and it had the year of 1997 as it's release. I was a bit shocked because I thought many had moved to Win 95 by then 😮 Although it runs like poop on the ol 486DX2 66. It really screams for a Pentium 90 with a 486 100 being a minimum 😜