VOGONS


Reply 20 of 48, by dirkmirk

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what's the point of high performance GUI acceleration in windows 3.11? Are their any games? Even on my lowly 386-DX40 GUI functions are silky smooth in windows 95, so whats the benefit in comparing an older 2d card like the S3 805 to a matrox G400? I get the feeling its truly a pointless pursuit if you can't see any benefit unless your doing some cad work.

Reply 21 of 48, by ElBrunzy

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dirkmirk wrote:

what's the point of high performance GUI acceleration in windows 3.11? Are their any games? Even on my lowly 386-DX40 GUI functions are silky smooth in windows 95, so whats the benefit in comparing an older 2d card like the S3 805 to a matrox G400? I get the feeling its truly a pointless pursuit if you can't see any benefit unless your doing some cad work.

I think there is sierra's lode runners.

Reply 22 of 48, by Jo22

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dirkmirk wrote:

what's the point of high performance GUI acceleration in windows 3.11? Are their any games? Even on my lowly 386-DX40 GUI functions are silky smooth in windows 95, so whats the benefit in comparing an older 2d card like the S3 805 to a matrox G400? I get the feeling its truly a pointless pursuit if you can't see any benefit unless your doing some cad work.

It's the same point like in any OS I would say. GDI accelerators unburden the CPU and the main bus.
This comes handy especially for older or slower systems and if you like to run them at a higher resolution/colour depth.
Without GUI acceleration your PC will end up like those running one of these crappy linux flavors with their generic VESA drivers (sadly VBE/AF never made it).
Every time you move the mouse cursor the screen flickers and CPU usage jumps to 100 percent.
Win 3.1 is a bit of an exception here, though. Its VGA driver is using dirty-rectangle at least.

IMHO the TIGA cards are an even better choice for CAD. They're not faster, but more powerful.
Also, Mobygames lists over 1100 games for Win 3.x. Some of them also use QuickTime for videos or virtual reality stuff (QuickTime VR).
It think Myst, Robot City and The Daedalus Encounter also belong to them. Others use WinG, like
Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds (first WinG game ever?) or King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 23 of 48, by Jo22

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Hello everyone,

I've just found another 2D benchmark vor Windows 3.1:

WinG Speed

wingspeed.gif
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wingspeed.gif
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Fair use/fair dealing exception

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  • Filename
    WINGS100.zip
    File size
    54.18 KiB
    Downloads
    153 downloads
    File comment
    - WinG Speed -
    benchmark for WinG
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 25 of 48, by yawetaG

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ElBrunzy wrote:

do you think WingG stand for "Windows Graphic" ?

The Wikipedia page doesn't say what the abbreviation stands for, but seeing it was essentially the predecessor of DirectX it's likely it stands for "Windows Games"...

Reply 27 of 48, by oeuvre

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You can get an 8MB ATI Rage XL, I have one and can confirm it works great in Windows 3.11

HP Z420 Workstation Intel Xeon E5-1620, 32GB, RADEON HD7850 2GB, SSD + HD, XP/7
ws90Ts2.gif

Reply 29 of 48, by dr.zeissler

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I really like these matrox cards, because they have reference image-quality. they do have some problems with old ega/apogee titles, but these old games are better played on 286/386/486 with ISA gfx-card.
AFAIK the G400 is the last that has Win3x drivers, but my G400 have a not centered image between textmode VGA (e.g. NC/VC) and EGA/VGA lowres.
The G200/G100 and the older series (mystique, millenium) have a centered image on my TFT. Therefore I do not use G400 cards for my retro-pc's.

Due to the problems with my cwd-486 and the writing-erros on the cf-cards, I actually use a PRO-C6 Desktop with D1026 deluxe-board (Cel300 G100 Onboard, Lan, CS-Sound Onboard). I ordered the CS-wave-table upgrade-chip for it. The FM is not bad, but not good enough for me. The internal FM should be completly disable, so I can use the upcoming FMonster (perhaps with Hard-MPU Daughterboard) That would be nice. I am thinking about a voodoo1 and a matrox pcx2 in that machine.

Beside that I am also building a ProC5 with 200MMX and D1025 with mystique onbaord. Perhaps I can put a normal RainbowRunner upgrade directly on the board. That would be a nice feature!

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 30 of 48, by dr.zeissler

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peklop wrote:

How fast is a Voodoo3 3000 PCI under Windows 3.11 compared to to latest supported Matrox cards?

the voodoo3 is 10% of the speed of the matrox cards within win3x. the matrox cards are WAY! faster!

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 31 of 48, by dr.zeissler

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Win3x gaming is not a good thing. I normally use 16/32Bit colordepths within Win3x if I can get driver-support for my gfx-cards.
Lot's of win3x games do not scale to the highres desktop resolution and mostly they require 256colors. It's very annoying to reboot
for each usage.

Therefore I do not play games under win3x.

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 32 of 48, by Jo22

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dr.zeissler wrote:

Win3x gaming is not a good thing. I normally use 16/32Bit colordepths within Win3x if I can get driver-support for my gfx-cards.
Lot's of win3x games do not scale to the highres desktop resolution and mostly they require 256colors. It's very annoying to reboot for each usage.

There's an easy solution to this..: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_win3_games

😀

Seriously, though, I would had have been very happy with 256 paletted colours in these days.
Back in the 90s, when online services were expensive and when I had got my 286 with Win 3.1 still, 16 fixed colours were all I had.
- Even though my graphcs card technically had got the ability to do 256 colours, I had got no drivers for it.
(Long story here: Re: Which memory manager is better? Memmaker, QEMM or 386max.)

PS: No offense, though. Jedem Tierchen sein Pläsierchen / Each to his own. 😉

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 33 of 48, by Zaithe

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I got this card which has all of the memory upgrades installed so 8MB of vram. Is this a really good card for windows 3.1 and windows 95 or can i get a better card with windows 3.1 drivers?
s-l400.jpg
http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/component … 54-s3-vision964

Reply 35 of 48, by Zaithe

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The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-03-14, 12:05:

Define "better".

More Vram and technology support which will still play well with windows 3.1 and old games. Looking for the best graphics card to use with a Gateway 2000 P5-100 486 machine.

Reply 36 of 48, by The Serpent Rider

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Better GUI acceleration is hardly any useful for games. And more than 2 Mb VRAM also won't make any difference. You're heavily limited by your CPU and motherboard.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 37 of 48, by Jo22

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Update. I've found another Windows 3.1x benchmark named "Speedy".
I hope you don't mind for this little necro post. Because I think this one fits well into the existing thread.
The benchmark is interesting in so far that it uses some form of multi-tasking..

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  • speedy.png
    Filename
    speedy.png
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    84.26 KiB
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    782 views
    File comment
    Speedy on Windows 3.1x
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception
  • Filename
    SPEEDY.ZIP
    File size
    36.13 KiB
    Downloads
    50 downloads
    File comment
    Speedy - Graphics and display speed test (Freeware)
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 38 of 48, by Grzyb

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The above is version 1.1, there's also 1.33:

Filename
speed133.zip
File size
35.06 KiB
Downloads
47 downloads
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

Żywotwór planetarny, jego gnijące błoto, jest świtem egzystencji, fazą wstępną, i wyłoni się z krwawych ciastomózgowych miedź miłująca...

Reply 39 of 48, by rasz_pl

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Speedy - nice benchmark, looking at readme and executable it only tests GDI, the old slow way of doing graphics.

What were the main uses for fast 2D GUI acceleration back in the win3 days?
Win3 problem was GDI with no direct access to video memory, no double buffering, no concept of Vsync. Yes, even GDI accelerators flickered. You created graphic objects in ram and windows copied that around = slow.
WinG created very late in 1994 so irrelevant for win3 https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/video-faq/54-What-is-DCI.html
"Among DCI's capabilities are the ability to write directly to the frame buffer" - this allowed WinDoom at glorious 12 fps 😜 https://doomwiki.org/wiki/WinDoom_(Microsoft)
Alex St John: "Robert Hess worked very hard to make WinDoom work as well as it did. At 12fps John Carmack considered the video tearing in Windows to be unacceptable and we couldn't synchronize the sound with the video to save our lives!"
Alex St John: "WinG was just the CreateDiBSection API in Windows95 so it wasn't dead in that respect. The WinDoom port just made it 100% clear why Windows sucked for games."

That clears WinG as unusable for action games. Win95 I understand as games started actually using directdraw, but even then one of the first if not the first directdraw game was Doom95 port by Microsoft (second try) and that didnt use any acceleration 😀 only direct access to video framebuffer.

Alex St John: "The very first thing we did in DirectX 1.0 is wrap the undocumented KillGDI API to enable Doom95 to play in a 320x200 VESA mode with vertical blank syncronization as Carmack intended. I hired John Miles to create the prototype for DirectSound which solved the audio sync problems"

Supposedly win3 release of SimCity 2000 (the one with use after free memory bug hehe) uses WinG. Would be interesting to test how much difference a fast accelerator card does on a slow CPU in this game.

Then win95/NT had high end high resolution workstation software ported from Unix workstations so you needed that fast 2D subsystem.

Why else would one want accelerated graphics in win3?
DTP? something like Xerox Ventura Publisher was released in parallel for DOS/GEM and worked fine with no acceleration there. QuarkXPress? most ran on Mac. Aldus Pagemaker came bundled with windows 2.0 so definitely ran fine with no acceleration.

Video was a dumpster fire on Windows compared to Apple. Microsoft together with Intel conspired paying Apple contractor to steal QuickTime code for Video for Windows! https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/micros … aid_apple_150m/
"David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."

"Microsoft and Intel had been shocked to find that Apple's QuickTime product made digital video on Windows seem like continuous motion, and was far in advance of anything that either of them had, even in a planning stage. The speed was achieved by bypassing Windows' Graphics Display Interface and enabling the application to write directly to the video card. The result was a significant improvement over the choppy, 'slide-show' quality of Microsoft's own efforts. Apple's intention was to establish the driver as a standard for multimedia video imaging, so that Mac developers could sell their applications on the Windows and Mac platforms. Microsoft requested a free licence from Apple for QuickTime for Windows in June 1993, and was refused. In July 1993, the San Francisco Canyon Company entered into an agreement with Intel to deliver a program (codenamed Mario) that would enable Intel to accelerate Video for Windows' processing of video images. However, although Intel certainly knew that Canyon had developed key parts of the code for Apple, it did not specify that this must be undertaken in a clean room,"

"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."

"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."

Looks like that stolen Apple Quicktime code landed in late 1994 as part of WinG DCI, still too late for win3 and more about Win95.
Interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20091006022255/ht … res/alexstjohn/
FS: What was Microsoft's philosophy or attitude regarding games when you began?
Alex St John: Oh, it was completely nonexistent! During that time, their entire focus was on multimedia video, the primary mission of DirectX wasn't to benefit and push gaming, but simply to drive Apple and Quicktime into the ground.

😮

CAD? no way on crashy dos based 16 bit co-operative multitasking with no memory protection/isolation win3. If anything CAD started showing up on NT.

I sincerely want to know who was the target audience of 2D acceleration on 16bit windows. Serious people used unix workstations (sgi, apollo/hp, sun, sony) or Macs. Games either didnt need it, or needed it badly but couldnt be made to work.

Open Source AT&T Globalyst/NCR/FIC 486-GAC-2 proprietary Cache Module reproduction