So, I recently obtained a Packard Bell PB5310 that seems to be completely stock (original Win95a install, all PB software, Aztech sound card, etc.) and I've been fixing it up so my wife and daughter can play with it. My wife's first PC as a kid was identical to this one and I happen to have a lot of the software that was used on these machines too.

Our main interest at this time is using Spiderman Cartoon Maker, since it came with PBs from this era (it looks like a Windows 3.1 program) and my wife had very fond memories of playing with it. I must say, this is one of the most interesting and hilarious pieces of old software I've seen. Definitely check it out if you like to tinker with silly old software. It's like if you put Mario Paint on the PC and added pre-animated spiderman characters, sprites, sound effects, music (either GM or FM!) and the ability to record narration via a microphone. Neat! 😀

Long story short... when playing with it, I noticed that the animation and sound playback would slow down noticeably when animating characters that were blown up to their largest size (you can resize them). I looked up some benchmarks and saw that the PB's built in CL-GD5430 is okay but not real great compared to other cards of that time. I was curious to see if the problem was VGA related, so I dropped in a Matrox Millennium II 4MB and it actually fixed it! The strange thing is, the animation doesn't look any smoother, it's just that the audio no longer slows down with it. I'm certainly not surprised that a Millennium II is faster in Windows than a low end integrated Cirrus Logic chip, I'm just amazed that the video chip is the bottleneck in this situation on a 75Mhz Pentium! Prior to this, I'd always assumed that any decent PCI VGA chip would be fast enough not to bottleneck a CPU this slow. Most VGA benchmarks are run on massively overpowered CPUs which inflate the numbers a bit.

Can anyone explain what I'm seeing here? There is no visual increase in performance, but there seem to be more resources available for audio processing. Why wouldn't this also make the visuals smoother?