First post, by kanecvr
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi guys. Today I finally found some time do test all the PCI video cards I own in DOS using the regular battery of tests and games, to see how different brands / models behave in games and how fast they are.
Initially I started testing the cards in one of my 586 machines, but after seeing lots of cards producing identical results in several tests, I decided to move to a faster machine to avoid a CPU bottleneck. Here's the test setup:
233MHz Pentium MMX
Tekram Impression 533TX (Intel 430TX Chipset, 512KB L2 cache)
64MB EDO DRAM
Creative AWE64 Value
MS-DOS 7.1 (Win95osr2)
The tests were performed under pure DOS, with all drivers loaded, including sound. Games were tested and benchmarked with sound to simulate real world gaming conditions. Here are the results:
In 3DBench2 slowest of the bunch was the Alliance AT15, followed by the Cirrus Logic card. These two are 50% slower then most of the other cards tested. A big surprise here is the low score the SiS 6326 got - I was expecting better since it's a newer card and uses 8MB of SDRAM. The Virge DX is smack in the middle, being outpaced by the Trio64, but not by much. Looking over the numbers, it seems the benchmark is rather picky about how well it will run on certain chipsets - since some of the slower cards (particularly the Cirrus) perform very well in other tests. The fastest card was the Voodoo Banshee PCI, trailed by the 3D Labs Parmedia 2.
PC-Player benchmark at 320x200 shuffles things up a bit. At this resolution the slowest cards are the Trident 9440 and again the SiS 6326. 3D Labs Parmedia 2 takes the lead, trailed by the two Matrox cards. The S3 Virge is right in the middle of the lot. The Alliance AT15 refused to run the benchmark either at 320x200 or 640x400. The Trio64 and Virge DX are very close in performance at this resolution, but things change at 640x400
Here the Virge distances itself from the Trio64, witch is near the bottom of the charts - second to last, right next the the Cirrus Logic card. The Virge however is number 4, right behind the Millennium. The fastest card here is again the Banshee, this time trailed by the MX based Rush witch comes second - a bit of a surprise. The SiS card performed better, as we will see it tends to do at higher resolutions.
C3D Bench is a simple geometry and lighting benchmark. Here it seems memory speed matters little - as we see from the SiS card's results. The Banshee is again in the lead, trailed by the Parmedia 2. The Trio64 and Virge DX are right in the middle, as is the AT25.
Increasing the resolution moves the Millenium 2 right next to the Banshee, both scoring 47.9 FPS. The Parmedia 2 and MX based Rush are neck and neck on second place, while in 3rd we see the Virge DX and Millennium 1. Again the Virge DX shows it's superiority to the Trio64, the latter being in the middle, this time scoring a little lower then the Trident 9440. The trident card consistently scores well in geometry and high-res benchmarks - witch leads me to conclude that my sample is crippled by the slow 1MB of FPM ram installed. Cards with fast FPM or EDO only - like the 9440-3 (fast FPM) or 9680 (EDO vram) would perform quite a bit better. The Matrox Mystique refused to run C3D bench SVGA - the program would display "benchmark starting in 5 seconds", then black screen, then "benchmark starting in 5 seconds" again, and it would loop like that until I rebooted the machine.
Frankly I was expecting the Matrox cards to be faster then the Virge DX in most benchmarks, but only the Millennium 2 manages to truly overtake it. At 320x200 the matrox cards are faster, but at 640x400 The Millennium 1 and Mystique are either on par, or slightly slower then the DX witch I find surprising. In 3DBench the Trio64 equals or overtakes all 3 matrox cards, but in PCP and C3D it falls quite a bit behind, witch leads me to think 3DBench employs older rendering techniques witch favor the older Trio64 - then again, the Parmedia 2 and Voodoo Banshee - a much newer cards - come out on top by quite a margin... curious.
Now for the games! I only tested Quake 1.06 (timedemo demo1) and Doom (custom timedemo I recorded while playing trough E1M1). I would have loved to include Descent, but the DOS version does not have a FPS counter like the 3dfx version does.
In doom, the fastest card is the Voodoo Banshee - witch is shaping up to be the fastest 2D card of the bunch - followed by all 3 matrox cards, the Virge DX, Trio64 and Parmedia 2. While there is quite a bit of a difference between the Banshee and the rest of the pack, there is little difference between places 2 trought 7. The DX performs very close to the Millennium - only 1.2 fps difference - while the Millennium II and Mystique pull ahead 1 more FPS. The AT15 is by far the slowest of the bunch, managing to be over two times slower then the Banshee. The AT25 follows suit.
In Quake we have the 3D Labs Parmedia 2 and Voodoo Banshee right at the top with over 48 fps, closely fallowed by the matrox cards. The S3 cards are both in the middle, with the SiS 6326 and Cirrus Logic cards at the bottom. There is a ~19% difference in performance between the slowest and fastest cards in this test, so the margin is not as big as it was in doom. Still the game is perfectly playable on all cards tested. The SiS card only redeems itself at 640x400, where it scores close to the Millennium II - unfortunately not all cards (about half) would run quake at 640x400 so I did not include it in the bechmarks.
Now for game compatibility:
I tested all cars with some of the more troublesome DOS games, witch worked perfectly on all but the Matrox cards, the AT25 on the Voodoo Rush and the 3D Labs Parmedia 2. The rest ran all games flawlessly. The AT15 showed rare minor "jumps" while scrolling but they are only noticeable if you really look for them. The smoothest of the bunch was the Cirrus Logic card, followed by the SiS. Jazz ran particularly smooth on these, as did Supaplex. On the Matrox cards both Jazz and Keen were nausea-inducing - the screen jumped around whenever the image would scroll to the left or right. The Paramedia 2 showed "flickering corruption" in keen - like some sort of artefacting that would pop up now and again while scrolling, on only in parts of the screen. Golden axe displayed tearing while scrolling, like playing a 3D game with v-sync off.
Conclusions:
The S3 Trio64 and ALG2302 seem to have the best ballance of performance and compatibility - usually sitting in the middle of the benchmark charts. All games ran flawlessly on them, and they are solid performers. The Trident card seems to only pick up speed at higher resolutions. Performance-wise it beats the S3 Trio at 640x400, but stays behind it at 320x200. The trident also feels smoother then the S3 in windows at resolutions over 800x600. I'd say it's a good card for retro gaming - if seems to run just right while playing older low-res games, and it seems quite competitive at higher resolutions. The Trident is also one of the few cards able to run quake at 640x400, and it performed a little slower then the S3 Virge DX, while trailing behind both cards at 320x200 - curious huh?
The Matrox cards show their muscle in games and in windows, unfortunately quite a few games refuse to run properly on them. They are great for games like Quake and Duke3D in VESA modes, but older titles - particularly platforms - seem to have issues with these cards. Even newer DOS games like C&C Gold (the DOS version) have issues - the game tears and stutters when scrolling left and right, but not when scrolling up and down.
The ALi ALG2302 surprised me quite a bit. It not only performs well enough, it ran every game I could come up with perfectly. So did the MX86151 equipped voodoo Rush, witch unlike it's AT25 equipped brother, managed to both perform very well and run all games perfectly - no tearing or stuttering whatsoever. I'd say the MX86151 is the best Voodoo Rush card for a DOS / early windows glide PC.
As for the title of BEST OVERALL DOS GAMING PCI CARD - I'd give that to the PCI Voodoo Banshee. Not only does it manage to be the fastest card tested, but it runs all games w/o any glitches or bugs, has excelent image quality in both DOS and Windows regardless of resolution, and is 3D capable! GL_Quake, Quake2, 3DFX Descent and Carmageddon as well as Blood, MW2, MW3 and other early 3D games will run beautifully on this card on a pentium MMX system, or in a K6-III - the latter allowing for slow-downs critical for speed sensitive games. This card can cover a lot of gaming territory, making it the best choice for a late 80's - late 90's gaming rig. Some 2000 games even manage to run pretty well on it + a K6-III - like NFS Porsche (albeit at lower resolutions and detail levels).
