Artifacts would be memory I think? I was fixing a similarly old (286/early 386) Chips&Technologies F82C451 card recently which had the exact symptoms you're describing.

Actually, I had two cards, one would boot up but display artifacts and crash when displaying anything more complex than text mode. The other card didn't work at all and just wouldn't display.
I found that moving the RAM chips around on the card did change the position but I didn't figure out which specific chip was doing it, so I swapped all the RAM from the dead card to the working card and that made the artifacts go away completely 😁

Thermalwrong wrote on 2020-02-02, 00:27:

Artifacts would be memory I think? I was fixing a similarly old (286/early 386) Chips&Technologies F82C451 card recently which had the exact symptoms you're describing.

Actually, I had two cards, one would boot up but display artifacts and crash when displaying anything more complex than text mode. The other card didn't work at all and just wouldn't display.
I found that moving the RAM chips around on the card did change the position but I didn't figure out which specific chip was doing it, so I swapped all the RAM from the dead card to the working card and that made the artifacts go away completely 😁

but these tend to be random... or just i'm forgetting that pages in this type of cards are static. I will try to change them, but it will take centuries. i have to buy those chips somewhere

You seem to be having different issues than I, but I've never had a lot of luck with my WD chipset on a Dell 386 motherboard. For one, it's extremely slow -- but that's not a fault so much as a characteristic. Games that do high-bandwidth writes, in addition to being very slow, also cause the card to exhibit snow. I'm not sure I've found a Windows 3.1 driver that actually works right. Lockups and artefacts are quite common. I attribute that to the fact that I don't have official drivers for this chip on this board for Win 3.1, just Win 3.0. All the 3.1 drivers I found are generic, and that's always a gamble.

SirNickity wrote on 2020-02-05, 20:23:

You seem to be having different issues than I, but I've never had a lot of luck with my WD chipset on a Dell 386 motherboard. For one, it's extremely slow -- but that's not a fault so much as a characteristic. Games that do high-bandwidth writes, in addition to being very slow, also cause the card to exhibit snow. I'm not sure I've found a Windows 3.1 driver that actually works right. Lockups and artefacts are quite common. I attribute that to the fact that I don't have official drivers for this chip on this board for Win 3.1, just Win 3.0. All the 3.1 drivers I found are generic, and that's always a gamble.

The snow is attenuated placing an extra waitstate (a switch does this). This card had a windows driver, but crashes when enters windows. Games like doom perform "good" not fast but stable, however some signal noise and fixed artifacts appear. This card in particular also has a VESA 1.0 compliant BIOS, So its capable to put just one linear mode. Apparently this is the only bitmap mode that is working well.

I don't know about the WD90C0JK (Paradise PVGA1B ?), but generally speaking, the WDs and Paradise cards aren't bad, though.
Considering that they evolved from the very first SVGA cards and have a history going down to the years '87-88.
For its ancestor, the Paradise PVGA (PVGA1A; Professional VGA ?) came with CAD, GEM and WIndows 2.x drivers,
and could be used in 640x400@256 with a little as 256kiB of Video Memory (see drivers at toasty tech page in win2 group).
Also, I recall it was one of the cards that shipped with a mode utility, which means the card could be forced to run in different text modes
and graphic modes (EGA, Hercules, CGA). Of course, for those kinds of humans playing FPS games like Doom, that's of little interest.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-02-08, 08:25:

I don't know about the WD90C0JK (Paradise PVGA1B ?), but generally speaking, the WDs and Paradise cards aren't bad, though. Cons […]
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I don't know about the WD90C0JK (Paradise PVGA1B ?), but generally speaking, the WDs and Paradise cards aren't bad, though.
Considering that they evolved from the very first SVGA cards and have a history going down to the years '87-88.
For its ancestor, the Paradise PVGA (PVGA1A; Professional VGA ?) came with CAD, GEM and WIndows 2.x drivers,
and could be used in 640x400@256 with a little as 256kiB of Video Memory (see drivers at toasty tech page in win2 group).
Also, I recall it was one of the cards that shipped with a mode utility, which means the card could be forced to run in different text modes
and graphic modes (EGA, Hercules, CGA). Of course, for those kinds of humans playing FPS games like Doom, that's of little interest.

It just works (R). Mine has a switch to control the starting modes and for placing waitstates, Useful for little more faster PC's(386 40, 486). Also, like no card of those ages, has BRILLIANT image quality. No noises. It looks even less noisy than my HD4670. The motto of this card was compatibility and good performance in vga modes with fonts , so is geared towards windows 3/3.1. I have pdf's of the catalog and programming manual.

I saw it mentioned that the switches control starting modes and waitstates, does anyone have documentation on the corresponding settings & switch positions? I have this card as well, trying to figure out the optimal settings. If the docs don't exist I'll begin trial and error 😀