For good compatibility with DOS games go with either an S3 card (AGP or PCI) or a 3dfx card. I find most 3dfx cards handle dos games very well - no screen corruption, tearing or jittering. Stay away from matrox cards if you plan to play DOS games on it. Jazz Jackrabbit, Supaplex, Gloden Axe, Commander Keen and others have issues on matrox cards - same for some nvidia cards. If you do chose to go the nvidia route, go as old as possible (riva tnt2) for best compatibility with older dos games.

Here are my setup recommendations:

- Voodoo 3 stand-alone - will give you good performance in most 9x titles, decent compatibility with older glide games and good compatibility with DOS games
- Brand name (Diamond, STB, Eagle, ELSA) S3 Virge with 4MB or Trio 3D AGP + 2x Voodoo 2 in SLI will give you most of the advantages of the V3 build above with the added bonus of excelent compatibility with DOS games and good compatibility with older Glide titles (Uprising is picky about what 3dfx card it will run on)
- Voodoo 3 AGP + Voodoo 1 PCI - this has all the advantages of the V3 build above + the added compatibility of a Voodoo 1 card witch will work with all older Glide games out of the box. This build is a little finiky since the two 3dfx cards sometimes bump heads. In DOS, the V1 will work by default, while in windows you will have to manually copy the voodoo 1 Glide2x.ovl to the game directory to get games to run on the V1 and not the V3. This is perhaps the most compatible setup for a wide range of later games, while the S3 + V2 would work better for older DOS games.

Personally I use my Super Socket 7 build (see my signature) for windows games, and since I like to play at 1600x1200 I went with a Geforce 2 GTS. It has issues with some dos games (golden axe, god of thunder, etc) but works fine in Supaplex and Jazz.

Some mentions:
* going with a matrox card and a voodoo will degrade output quality due to the pass-trought cable required for the voodoo card. There is no way around it
** Brand name S3 cards have remarkable output quality rivaling matrox. If you choose to go with an S3 card avoid cheap noname stuff. I personally recommend either Diamond or ELSA cards. My ELSA S3 Virge DX has exceptional output quality.
*** Voodoo 3 cards are also very sharp

I've had trouble running Duke3D in higher resolutions (e.g. 1024x768) on my Voodoo 3 cards. Geforce 2 MX runs it perfectly.

boxpressed wrote:

I've had trouble running Duke3D in higher resolutions (e.g. 1024x768) on my Voodoo 3 cards. Geforce 2 MX runs it perfectly.

I think you need to run univbe for the voodoo 3 to go higher then 800x600 under DOS. Haven't tried Duke3d on a V3, but it works fine on a Banshee at 1024x768.

Thanks for the tips.

Does anyone have any input on AGP vs PCI?

Is there any advantages or disadvantages of using AGP card?

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Thanks for the tips.

Does anyone have any input on AGP vs PCI?

Is there any reason to go with or to avoid an AGP card?

Generally AGP cards are slightly faster - but that depends on how fast the card is in the first place. There are several things to consider tough:

- some early FIC PA-2013 boards can't provide enough power to some AGP cards - Voodoo 3 and Geforce cards might not run correctly on those. TNT2 AGP cards should work fine regardless. Rev 2.0 pa-2013 boards should be fine tough.
- some versions of nvidia forceware don't do well with early VIA chipsets. If you do go with an nvidia AGP card use forceaware 41.09 or older. You should be fine with 3dfx or ATi cards tough (provided your PA-2013 doesn't have the AGP but mentioned above). For chipset drivers use 4.35 or older. 4.29 will also work well.
- using an AGP card frees up additional PCI slots allowing for SLi configurations, PCI lan, sound or IDE controllers.

I'd advise testing a Voodoo 3 or Geforce 256 / GF2 with your PA-2013 and see how well it behaves. If you don't encounter any stability issues, go ahead and use an AGP card to free up additional PCI slots.
DOS doesn't really show an advantage for AGP, but there's no dissadvantage either. As far as I can gather, AGP cards under DOS behave like a PCI card running at 66MHz.

kanecvr wrote:

Generally AGP cards are slightly faster - but that depends on how fast the card is in the first place. There are several things […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Thanks for the tips.

Does anyone have any input on AGP vs PCI?

Is there any reason to go with or to avoid an AGP card?

Generally AGP cards are slightly faster - but that depends on how fast the card is in the first place. There are several things to consider tough:

- some early FIC PA-2013 boards can't provide enough power to some AGP cards - Voodoo 3 and Geforce cards might not run correctly on those. TNT2 AGP cards should work fine regardless. Rev 2.0 pa-2013 boards should be fine tough.
- some versions of nvidia forceware don't do well with early VIA chipsets. If you do go with an nvidia AGP card use forceaware 41.09 or older. You should be fine with 3dfx or ATi cards tough (provided your PA-2013 doesn't have the AGP but mentioned above). For chipset drivers use 4.35 or older. 4.29 will also work well.
- using an AGP card frees up additional PCI slots allowing for SLi configurations, PCI lan, sound or IDE controllers.

I'd advise testing a Voodoo 3 or Geforce 256 / GF2 with your PA-2013 and see how well it behaves. If you don't encounter any stability issues, go ahead and use an AGP card to free up additional PCI slots.
DOS doesn't really show an advantage for AGP, but there's no dissadvantage either. As far as I can gather, AGP cards under DOS behave like a PCI card running at 66MHz.

Thanks, that's very helpful. I had read yesterday about the possible AGP power issues with the PA2013, but thankfully mine seems to be the latest and best version of the board. Its funny, I've had this thing for YEARS and never realized just how good it was for a flexible DOS\9x computer. Having the full 2MB cache is pretty sweet too, though obviously not that important for my uses.

Also, I bolded part of your quote because that is a surprisingly difficult thing to find stated anywhere online. The perceived value of PCI cards over AGP cards from this era always lead me to believe that AGP was somehow a bad idea for old games... even though I couldn't find any information explicitly stating this.

I'm still not totally sure what I'll go with. I wish it was somehow practical to have more than one 2D card that could be toggled between via the BIOS, but I have yet to find a system that handled this gracefully. It'd be nice to have my STB Velocity 3D PCI (Virge VX) and either a 3dfx AGP card or Nvidia AGP card, just in case one didn't like a given game.

Now I'm contemplating the power supply. I picked up an old PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 300W ATX unit several months ago and it works great but the fan is insanely loud... totally impractical for a gaming system, especially with how much we obsess over audio quality. I don't think I'm likely to use any devices that require -5v (like my old CT1350B) in this system, so using a much newer and quieter Seasonic 80Plus Bronze unit is probably my best bet. It only has 20A on the +5v rail, but I doubt this system will use that much.

S3 cards have great compatibility but some are made cheaper than others as I've found out, both my PCI and AGP S3 cards have issues using LCD monitors (they'd probably be fine via CRT) one is overly bright and the other is overly bright with weird wavy lines. I'd go with a 3dfx Voodoo card, or a nvidia card for the era in question, the nvidia cards will probably be a bit cheaper / more of them around, could also pair one with a voodoo pci card or go full voodoo with AGP and PCI, Downside of 3dfx is lack of 32bit colour if you do want to run some windows games.

ATI cards have really nice VGA output nice clear crisp and clean for the most part, but may have issues with early 2D DOS games. They also tend to be relatively cheap compared to the Voodoo cards.

Go AGP where possible over PCI, Provided your board can

edit: didn't read that you already had a good selection of cards available 😁

one vote for V3+V1 😀

If Wing Commander 3 is part of your gaming arsenal, it has some issues with both S3 and Voodoo3 cards.
The S3 issue from wc3help.txt:

Reboots normally occur when going after Flint, during Behemoth mission, planet ascension, switching CDs, or (R)eplaying a missio […]
Show full quote

Reboots normally occur when going after Flint, during Behemoth mission,
planet ascension, switching CDs, or (R)eplaying a mission after you have
died or ejected.

The most common cause of a reboot is a video card with the S3 chipset.
There is a problem reinitializing the video mode when going from mission
to mission or from mission to movie to mission (as opposed to from
mission to gameflow to mission).

The video cards reboot if in SVGA when this occurs. We are currently
researching this, but a solution at this time is to go into installation
program with WC3 -I and set the Spaceflight Video Mode to VGA. If you
want to play in SVGA that is fine, but you must manually switch to SVGA
with ALT-3 or ALT-4. The mission MUST LOAD UP in VGA.

For the Voodoo3, you will have to choose the alternate video mode during initial setup for the movies to display properly.

Personally, I've had the fewest problems with TNT2 M64 in DOS. It so happens to also be one of the fastest in DOS as well.

Are there some standard game benchmarks or compatibility tests that are easy to run in a Windows 98 DOS environment? I'm thinking that a super easy way to test some cards would be to simply put the card in, start at the command prompt or even from a DOS partition (to avoid Windows driver issues), run a benchmark, record the results, shut down and try another card. I'd gladly do this if someone can supply me with some easy to run benchmarks or graphics tests for DOS that would be helpful for others looking to do the same thing.

Like I said, I have a pretty huge selection of video cards... Even some obscure ones, some later ones and some ISA cards.

After lot's of testing I would recommend only cards which have a centered (textmode/vga/ega lowres) and sharp image.
therefore I recommend v3 and matrox cards, beside that r7000 is also excellent, but no win3x drivers for that one.
If you would use win3x matrox is the way to go. use univbe for the extra-modes.

For pci I'd go with an 8meg S3Virge/DX It's compatible with everything.

is it centered?

Caluser2000 wrote:

For pci I'd go with an 8meg S3Virge/DX It's compatible with everything.

Is there 8MB Virge DX? In any case, I have 2 Virge DX cards, both expanded to 4MB and have problem with UFO: Terror from the Deep. Geoscape works, but every time I enter mission, game hangs. I tried it with CL 5436, Trio V2 and Millennium and it works. Can anyone else test it?

If your not aware check out the PCI and AGP DOS compatibility graph. It well show you right away how suitable a card is for dos gaming, or more importantly your dos game requirements as some titles are pretty obscure
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

The biggest hurdle it the balance between Win9x speed vs dos compatibility.
Alot of the recommendations is focusing on the Dos side of things, but I'd find it hard to recommend something like a Virge for a Win9x gaming rig.
It's why the PCI Voodoo's are more desirable, pair them with a Nvidia card and you get DirectX, Glide, and DOS all out of 1 PC.

Wolfus wrote:

Is there 8MB Virge DX?

No. Only the VX and the Trio3D/2X have support for 8 MB. All other cards are limited to 4 MB (or even 2 MB in case of the MX).

Not sure which cards you have exactly, but you mention S3 Trio. If you own one, go for a Trio64V+ with 2 MB. That's probably the best card you can have for 2D. It's identical to the later Virge 325 chip but without the useless 3D stuff and without the brightness bug. Combine that with a Voodoo2. You can use a Voodoo1 as well, but for a K6-2 500AFX, the Voodoo2 would be the better choice.

GeForce 2 MX400 PCI (or failing that Matrox G450 PCI) + Voodoo 2