Specific graphics cards and monitors supported this via the control panel (including many OEMs)

I had a 1mb pci graphics card in my mid 1996 AMD 5x86 that came with a lot of neat special effects, xing mpeg and of coarse full resolution, color depth and refresh rate controls all under Windows 3.1

I had downgraded to an old VGA monitor at that point and having the virtual 800x600 screen on 640x480 pan and scan was pretty neat

I even made due with 4mb for a while until ram prices dropped massively (upgraded to 20mb for $69)

GeForce2 MX doesn't have a Windows 3.x driver correct? That means you're using a generic SVGA driver of some sort? The driver will determine the refresh rate, so you might want to see if any of the generic VESA drivers support something better like 72MHz. Typically with the older cards with proper 3.x drivers, they had driver packages that provided a lot of options for setting refresh rates and colour depths.

The S3 cards had fine Windows 3.11 support, in my opinion. The drivers supported all kinds of features, such as DCI, scaling/stretching, Bit-Blit, video decoding, colour transformation etc.
Becareful with the Trio3D, though - it's an early AGP 1.x card so it may not work with modernlAGP slots.
Also, it does thread AGP like a fast PCI slot @66MHz. It doesn't support features like AGP's GART.
That being said, it works fine in DOS. It even suports ViRGE's S3D API, I believe. though it needs a TSR in DOS for compatibility with ViRGE 325 games.

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/S3
http://vintage3d.org/trio3d.php

Thanks all for your replies. Unfortunately the generic SVGA driver does not like the GeForce 2 MX. I have decided to use my LCD display instead of the CRT when the refresh rate is 60 Hz until I replace this card.

Ok, good luck! 😀

PS: There's also an utility that changes 60Hz to 67Hz in Standard VGA..:
67HZCT.ZIP from https://www.uwe-sieber.de/util.html

i'm just waiting for windows 3.x in 144Hz

oeuvre wrote on 2019-06-11, 16:41:

i'm just waiting for windows 3.x in 144Hz

I'm not sure 144 Hz is doable, but I've been able to run DOS at 120 Hz, just for the hell of it. You need however a fairly recent graphics card, here I was using a HD4000.

For more information see [HOWTO] Running DOS games natively with perfect 4:3 aspect ratio @ 70 Hz over DVI

Back in the day, I insisted on having 75 or 85 Hz vertical refresh monitors, even the first monitor I had was 75 with .28 pitch dot, 640x480. Cost some money and still remember the name, was Darius.

This was all about flicker that cannot stand that if I can see flicker. I played with 8514A monitor once. I will NOT tolerance interlaced image ever, too!

Cheers,

I had really good luck with the Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM. Getting it up to 85Hz in Windows 3.1 on my Pentium 200 computer back in 1996.
I'm very sensitive to flicker so I had to have my monitors at a minimum of 75 Hz @ 1280x1024. Interlacing was forbidden.
I always had a love/hate with CRT. Super fast response time but...bulky, heavy, flickery, power hungry etc.
Needless to say, I switched over to LCD panels as soon as I could. The early ones sucked but more modern ones are nice. I'm not a purist when it comes to having something all vintage.

60Hz was pretty nasty to look at for sure, especially above 640x480. I don't know how people managed to run 800x600 and 1024x768 at 60Hz in the late 80s and early 90s. They must have had filters on their screens or something, or just had high tolerance for migraine headaches.

Interlacing was more of an 80s thing, and mostly relegated to home computers. If you had to use interlaced modes on your PC in the 90s then you were definitely slumming it up.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-08-10, 02:23:

60Hz was pretty nasty to look at for sure, especially above 640x480. I don't know how people managed to run 800x600 and 1024x768 at 60Hz in the late 80s and early 90s. They must have had filters on their screens or something, or just had high tolerance for migraine headaches.

Interlacing was more of an 80s thing, and mostly relegated to home computers. If you had to use interlaced modes on your PC in the 90s then you were definitely slumming it up.

1024x768 at 87Hz interlaced was definitely still a thing in the early 90s on cheap monitors. 800x600 interlaced was supported by the TVGA9000i (max non interlaced at 800x600 was 56Hz on that chip) .

1024x768 interlaced was definitely a feature being offered by cheap monitors an VGA cards, but did anyone actually use it? I thought it was more of a check mark on advertising list. I don't know anyone who actually used it. You would think someone who needed 1024x768 back then would have been a professional and gotten a proper setup.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-08-10, 03:49:

1024x768 interlaced was definitely a feature being offered by cheap monitors an VGA cards, but did anyone actually use it? I thought it was more of a check mark on advertising list. I don't know anyone who actually used it. You would think someone who needed 1024x768 back then would have been a professional and gotten a proper setup.

The cheap TTX monitor with Fujikama brand TVGA8900B combo that my parents had topped out at 1024x768 87Hz interlaced and did get some use as a CAD system .

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-08-10, 03:49:

1024x768 interlaced was definitely a feature being offered by cheap monitors an VGA cards, but did anyone actually use it? I thought it was more of a check mark on advertising list. I don't know anyone who actually used it. You would think someone who needed 1024x768 back then would have been a professional and gotten a proper setup.

I did and 800x600x56hz because my video card and 15in monitor had the largest brightest image set there.

Used the interlaced mode for years, never bothered me.

For the record, the solution I found is to use the unofficial Voodoo3 Windows 3.1 driver along with VBEHZ configured with the correct modelines for my iiyama CRT (I reused the modeslines that are automatically setup by Xorg). In this way I can run Windows 3.1 at 640x480@75 Hz and 16-bit colors.