A 486, even a fancy OC'd 586 was arguably not made for any Pentium era SVGA title. So the quick answer would be "No".

But if you reaaaalllyyyy wanna get every little frame out of it...😎

1. Try Univbe/Display Doctor. Some games with VESA screen modes like Duke 3D will get a small, but decent boost by using proper drivers.

2. Get a faster card like a VLB TSENG or move to a PCI motherboard and shove in a Matrox. Another 2-3 FPS at most

3. Run games with low sound settings. Sound Blaster/Mono/11khz. Will save up a few CPU cycles.

That's all I can really think about. I guess moving to a late PCI board in general might help, maybe give you some more timing options and a better, faster chipset.

But honestly, a 586 160 is about as good as it gets for performance with the 486 platform. Unless your into playing around with Cyrix CPUs or the POD83.

Are you able to run the VLB slot with 0 wait states? That would help the video a bit.

Can your motherboard take 1MB cache?

For ISA stuff, you can try lowering the AT clock divider in BIOS.

SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-10-06, 16:28:

A 486, even a fancy OC'd 586 was arguably not made for any Pentium era SVGA title. So the quick answer would be "No". […]
Show full quote

A 486, even a fancy OC'd 586 was arguably not made for any Pentium era SVGA title. So the quick answer would be "No".

But if you reaaaalllyyyy wanna get every little frame out of it...😎

1. Try Univbe/Display Doctor. Some games with VESA screen modes like Duke 3D will get a small, but decent boost by using proper drivers.

2. Get a faster card like a VLB TSENG or move to a PCI motherboard and shove in a Matrox. Another 2-3 FPS at most

3. Run games with low sound settings. Sound Blaster/Mono/11khz. Will save up a few CPU cycles.

That's all I can really think about. I guess moving to a late PCI board in general might help, maybe give you some more timing options and a better, faster chipset.

But honestly, a 586 160 is about as good as it gets for performance with the 486 platform. Unless your into playing around with Cyrix CPUs or the POD83.

Hi, I noticed the Univbe gave a boost in some games, but still not yet there 😀 I have a PCI board but quite frankly it seems slower as im running the VLB at 40MHz BUS speeds, the sound trick is a good idea 😀 I will try that!

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-10-06, 16:32:

Are you able to run the VLB slot with 0 wait states? That would help the video a bit.

Can your motherboard take 1MB cache?

For ISA stuff, you can try lowering the AT clock divider in BIOS.

I'm running the VLB already at 0 wait states 😀 the clock dividers are at minimum, 512kb is max the mobo supports.

If I would find a motherboard that supports 1MB of cache, what kind of performance boost would it give?

Since you have an S3 card, have you tried S3VBE20? It may give you a video performance boost in VESA modes.

Get a faster card like a VLB TSENG

Tseng card won't be faster. Especially when it comes to VESA.

1MB cache probably won't show a bunch of difference unless the benches you are running use in between 512KB and 1MB RAM... Or if they access that range a lot.

At least that is what it looks like to me from running cachechk.

A faster VLB card might help some but they get quite expensive.

I have a VLB S3 Trio64+ I can run some benches on. I might have an 864 card as well.

A POD83 at stock clocks is about 1 point higher in Speedsys than what you are reporting with your AMD 5x86.

TheMobRules wrote on 2020-10-06, 17:58:

Since you have an S3 card, have you tried S3VBE20? It may give you a video performance boost in VESA modes.

Yes I have tried that too, nice performance boost for instance in Duke3D but in other games not that significant 😒

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-10-06, 18:50:

1MB cache probably won't show a bunch of difference unless the benches you are running use in between 512KB and 1MB RAM... Or if […]
Show full quote

1MB cache probably won't show a bunch of difference unless the benches you are running use in between 512KB and 1MB RAM... Or if they access that range a lot.

At least that is what it looks like to me from running cachechk.

A faster VLB card might help some but they get quite expensive.

I have a VLB S3 Trio64+ I can run some benches on. I might have an 864 card as well.

A POD83 at stock clocks is about 1 point higher in Speedsys than what you are reporting with your AMD 5x86.

I think that faster VLB cards are pretty much impossible to find, for instance in ebay there are virtually none. I have a Trio64+ PCI card and it actually performa worse than the 864. Perhaps because the PCI bus is 33MHz

My dream would be to run Hioctane in SVGA mode with my 486, maybe its impossible 😒

What about 50Mhz FSB? Drop the CPU down to a 3x multiplier for 150Mhz.

I think that @SodaSuccubus already make some solid recommendations and I also agree with what the rest has already stated.
I also like @cyclone3d's recommendation, if you can get your motherboard and VLB to run stable at 50 MHz FSB. However, the downside of such a high FSB is that you will then most likely have to apply wait states to your VLB slots, which will probably negate any performance increase. If you can get faster cache memory chips (12 ns), you can probably try and run the wait states as tight as possible and still have a stable system.

I ran some benchmarks a while back on my SIS496/497 chipset based motherboard with my Am5x86 @ 160 MHz and I must say, it runs really well for a 486 based CPU. I dare to say almost on par with that of an Intel Pentium 90 MHz (in terms of integer performance). More than that you are most likely not going to squeeze out of a 486 based system.
I also benchmarked my Pentium Overdrive 83 MHz, but that CPU more or less runs on par with an Am5x86 @ 133 MHz (at least, in terms of integer performance).

The only other tweak that comes to mind is to confirm that you are running your CPU's L1 cache in write back mode, versus write thru mode, but there are caveats to that as well.
Some BIOSes didn't fully support it and it's also dependent on how much RAM you had on board , etc.
Some users have reported over the years that there isn't that much benefit in running a 486 CPU's L1 cache in write back mode as opposed to write thru mode, but you can also play around with that and see if you notice any performance improvement and in some cases you actually have a performance degradation if you enable L1 cache in write back mode.

What are you getting in speedsys for hard drive buffered read & linear read speeds?
And are you using Smartdrv? Maybe try both with and without it; you do a good bit of spare memory to use as a cache presumably.
I don't think this will make much of a difference, but for VLB IDE and these early onboard PCI controllers they don't necessarily tune to the maximum supported PIO modes, etc., and there can be quite a difference with a driver+tuning vs. without.

Parni wrote on 2020-10-06, 19:56:

My dream would be to run Hioctane in SVGA mode with my 486, maybe its impossible 😒

Not even with the 3D Blaster VLB is that possible at a playable framerate. Pentium required.

The graphics card is not your problem. SVGA has just so many pixels for a 486 to push at decent framerate. The S3 864 is as fast as it gets on VLB. There might be marginally faster boards, but a bit faster not a lot.

You want a fast Pentium. I am sorry.

So I fiddled with an Evergreen AMD 5x86 to get it working half decent in my M912 v1.7 motherboard.

Not able to lower timings all the way though so I am probably going to test on a different machine as well.

With the 5x86 running at 160Mhz with the cache in Wr-Through mode (dumb BIOS disables all cache if it is set to Wr-Back), there are some cards I was able to get a 90.9 score in 3DBench 1.0.

TSENG ET4000 (STB Lightspeed)
S3 Trio64+ (STB Powergraph 64V)
S3 805 (ACRO Computers)
Sierra Semiconductors Falcon64 (TechWorks Falcon/64)

These gave 83.3:
ATI MACH32 (VRAM and DRAM score the same)
Cirrus Logic 5428

This gave 71.4
WDC WD90C33-ZZ (STB Powergraph C33)

This gave a horrid 66.6
Trident TGUI9420DGi (JC9224 / K37JC9224) - only 512KB so maybe that is an issue..

My S3 864 card is not working. Forgot it had a few damaged traces on the back which I already fixed. Not sure what is wrong with it.
Have some other VLB video cards that didn't want to work either.

Edit: Getting 57.86 in Speedsys

So I also did some tests with the POD83 running at 100Mhz (40x2.5)

Speedsys gave a 73.03 score and 3DBench still only got a score of 90.9.

My guess is that the 40Mhz fsb is now the limiting factor.

This board acts really goofy with the AMD 5x86 and POD83 in regards to caches so I am going to try testing on another board once I figure out what this VIP board I want to try is... Looks like a PC-Chips but it isn't an M919. No stickers on the NB or SB so that is not helping either.

Edit.. found it. It is a PC-Chips M915 / Amptron DX-9200

I also have an M919... those take the lame special COAST stick don't they? Will any others work in it?

Also have a PVI-486AP4 (intel chipset) - can only take 512KB L2 cache.

You can squeeze somewhat playable frame rate in Duke Nukem 3D SVGA on specific PCI motherboards with 180 Mhz AMD 5x86.

You already have a very perfomant component selection for a Socket3 486. The graphics card is also already at the top end of the performance scale. With a few improvements (more cache, different board) you might be able to get out +10%. In the mid-90s 15FPS were already considered fluid, so a certain jerking from today's point of view simply belongs to it. For SVGA with 30FPS it should go towards Pentium MMX or Pentium II/III.