In my experience, S3 Trio and Virge cards are the best bang for your 2D DOS money!
Cirrus Logic cards after 24 and 29 series are just superbe. After CL-GD 5429 are good compatible and ok speedy cards.
Nvidia Riva 128 TNT TNT2 and Geforce MX(4) cars are for AGP slot, and you can make your Pentium III or AMD Super Socket machine to a DOS powerhouse.
Ok Voodoo Banshee and 3 are allso the shit 😉

Well.... I was not speaking of eBay prices. I have seen these 5446's a lot of times on local sales sites. And they are cheaper and there are more of them. That has been in the last few years. In the last 6 months, there has not really been some S3 or CL for sale locally. The price for CL cards have allways been soemthing like 3 US Dollars when converted from Danish Kroners.
S3 has allways been somewere between 7.5 and 15 Us Dollars when converted. eBay is just too expensive, unless you want to buy something now at this moment. Still... 5446 are a bit cheaper than S3 trio64v.

clueless1 wrote:

So maybe the CL-GD5446 is best for 486 and slow Pentium systems where you won't be gaming in SVGA anyway. Newer, faster DOS systems (fast Pentiums/MMX and higher) might be better suited with a Voodoo3, Banshee or TNT, where old game compatibility isn't an issue and VESA modes are built into the BIOS so you don't have to run a VESA TSR.

Well....
You won't go wrong with eighter S3 trio64, V3, CL5446, or something else like that, when dealing with standard resolution gaming on 486 systems. The problem is more like if the motherboard has the right PCI version I guess.

I have seen a 486-PCI board that would not run with an Creative TNT2-M64 PCI. I think it was the PCI version or something like that. It ran fine with S3 Virge 325, S3 trio64, CL-5440 and CL-5446.

brostenen wrote:

Well.... You won't go wrong with eighter S3 trio64, V3, CL5446, or something else like that, when dealing with standard resoluti […]
Show full quote

clueless1 wrote:

So maybe the CL-GD5446 is best for 486 and slow Pentium systems where you won't be gaming in SVGA anyway. Newer, faster DOS systems (fast Pentiums/MMX and higher) might be better suited with a Voodoo3, Banshee or TNT, where old game compatibility isn't an issue and VESA modes are built into the BIOS so you don't have to run a VESA TSR.

Well....
You won't go wrong with eighter S3 trio64, V3, CL5446, or something else like that, when dealing with standard resolution gaming on 486 systems. The problem is more like if the motherboard has the right PCI version I guess.

I have seen a 486-PCI board that would not run with an Creative TNT2-M64 PCI. I think it was the PCI version or something like that. It ran fine with S3 Virge 325, S3 trio64, CL-5440 and CL-5446.

Possibly how the slot on the card is keyed? I have two PCI TNT2 M64s: one is keyed 5v, the other universal. The 5v one will work in my Pentium system, the universal one won't. But the universal one will work in newer systems.

clueless1 wrote:

After quite a bit of testing, I concluded the best DOS video card is the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446.

I might pick one of these up to play with. Does the GD5446 need a VESA extension driver for any common VESA modes? That's what I like about the TNT2 and Voodoo3: all the VESA modes I care about are built-in to their video BIOS.

It doesn't. PCPbench, Duke3D and Z (Zed) run at 1024x768 perfectly, w/o the need to load univbe. The TNT2 and Banshee should be faster at 1024x768 tough.

dr.zeissler wrote:

And what is the choice for an AGP-Card?

Like it has been previously stated, AGP machines are too fast for some dos games. On the other hand, there's the super 7 platform that can be slowed down, and there's late dos games that are not speed sensitive. For agp I'd have to say the Riva TNT2, the S3 Savage 4 / Savage 2000 and the Voodoo Banshee / Voodoo 3. These will do 3D acceleration and DOS games just fine.

For dos gaming only there's the S3 Trio 3D and the Trident 3D Image series cards. They suck at 3D but are excelent in dos.

There's also rarities like the Trident Blade 3D (9880, 64 bit) and Blade XP (9980, 128bit) witch are excellent in DOS and do well in 3d games. The Blade 3D is as fast as a Voodoo 2, if not faster, w/o the 800x600 resolution limitation of the V2. Quake 2 runs perfecly at 1024x768 on a Blade XP, but good luck finding one.

Anyone else here, been testing these cards stacked up to each other?

^^ There isn't a single card that works with everything. I use oddball demoscene programmes to test compatibility. For the widest compatibility, your best bet is to use AGP systems with ISA slots; you can have three VGA cores on each slot-type (AGP, PCI and ISA). You can switch between them when required via BIOS or switches. The ISA card will be the hardest to switch.

I've got a forthcoming industrial build that will highlight this when I get some time.

Nice.... Looking forward to a speed vs. compatibility test for odd software and not only most populair software.

brostenen wrote:

Anyone else here, been testing these cards stacked up to each other?

Yeah, the ones I own at least. 😀 I'm tempted to pick up a GD5446 to play with, even though I'll likely stick with the TNT2 M64. It's been such a perfect card for me with zero compatibility issues in games I play on that machine, and nothing has been able to beat it in speed benchmarks yet.

I think I have about come full circle on this issue. Might not be absolutely the best by any means but certainly does the job.

S3 Virge (Original, DX, GX) paired with a Voodoo 1 3D Accelerator

brostenen wrote:

Anyone else here, been testing these cards stacked up to each other?

Choose 'Graphics Card' in the type drop down menu and click 'Filter' at http://retronn.de/imports/hwgal/hwgal_empty.html
That are all cards I tested.

Does anyone have maybe a list (link) of 3dfx cards, where the different models from each company are decribed?

Especially for voodoo2 VGA cards?

melbar wrote:

Does anyone have maybe a list (link) of 3dfx cards, where the different models from each company are decribed?

Especially for voodoo2 VGA cards?

Not exactly a list, but good info in the videos nonetheless:
http://www.philscomputerlab.com/3dfx-voodoo-s … ut-project.html

Just a FYI: Looks like Gona has completed his VGA test matrix because every column is now filled in (at time of posting):
http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

Not sure if more tests are planned, but it is already a very comprehensive matrix. I noticed some recent additions where there are subtle variations in compatibility between Trio64V+ cards, for example.

clueless1 wrote:

melbar wrote:

Does anyone have maybe a list (link) of 3dfx cards, where the different models from each company are decribed?

Especially for voodoo2 VGA cards?

Not exactly a list, but good info in the videos nonetheless:
http://www.philscomputerlab.com/3dfx-voodoo-s … ut-project.html

No Description but look at this http://tdfx.de/ger/grafikkarten_voodoo2.shtml

Seems Gona’s matrix is no longer available, is there anyone have a backup?

Works fine for me:
http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

I have found that the Nvidia Geforce 4MX is a pretty decent DOS card in AGP format. It also has excellent windows 9x performance (for the PII class of machine) and pretty good RAMDAC output. It is NOT perfect, but it is cheaper than a Voodoo 3 card by a LONG way.

The 3d virge and 3d trio tend to be slightly more compatible all way around, but they have fairly awful windows and RAMDAC performance in general, once you crank up the resolution and colour depth. Better off using the 3d virge or trio in 486 and pentium systems.

The matrox cards have nice performance in windows, but things go pair shape in DOS.

This has just been my experience lately though.

Thanks, it’s working now.

i've been playing duke3d on my 98se p3 system with an asus gf2 gts and noticed several issues. running the game at 800x600 (from windows), i get some weird "rogue" frames once in a while that show up for a split second; this isn't extremely common, but it happens about every few minutes on average, so it's definitely noticeable sooner or later.

what i then found by pure chance is that when i load the 4th episode and press esc and just wait, the game will lock up after a few minutes. not sure if this is specifically related to the menu screen but i've been able to reproduce this 3 times so it's not a fluke, and i verified that nothing is overclocked. not sure if it matters but driver is one of the late forcewares, either 61.76 or 71.84.

for testing i plugged in an old s3 vision868 2mb card and simply ran the game without installing any driver in windows or loading any TSR, couldn't reproduce any of the described issues. of course the game was locked in the 20s but i suppose that's fixable with a driver/TSR. what's interesting is that it automatically put out a 84 hz (or something like that) signal whereas the nvidia was stuck at 60hz...

edit: just noticed that "flashing" actually is noted for gf4 and up, however only with 1280x1024 which i am not running.

edit2: s3vbe20 makes it run in the 26-60 range, with the fps strongly depending on scene, not sure if that is how fast it is supposed to run?

well i did some proper comparisons now by loading hollywood holocaust and typing dnrate, still on the piii 1100 from 98se. game was run at 800x600 with the default "1" setting in cfg.

s3 868 2mb (note: noticeably darker image compared to the other cards)
27
45-46 (S3VBE20 loaded)
51-53 (S3VBE20+MTRRLFBE LFB WC loaded)

matrox millennium 2mb
45
50-51 (MTRRLFBE LFB WC loaded)

gf2gts
96-106

the one thing i still didn't bother doing was to install windows drivers for those older pci cards, since i'm not planning to actually use them in this system, i'm thinking MTRRLBFE should do everything that those drivers could do really? so a geforce card really is twice as fast in DOS VESA games as those mid-90s cards? a shame that it exhibits those aforementioned issues though... by the way, setting uswc in bios seemed to have no effect (tested on the geforce and s3 cards) and interestingly enough unplugging the gravis gamepad seems to give 5fps extra on the geforce card, even when keyboard+mouse is selected.