I think S3 as a reference is perfect. I don’t know what kind of marketplace saturation S3 had back in the day (I had one briefly before I bought my Rendition Verite) but I still see a ton on eBay.

judging by the sheer amount of S3 cards still out there I'd guess they were quite present in the market ^^

For me, "reference" is the earliest/slowest product in its category.

8088@4.77 is the reference for all PC CPUs
386SX@16 is the reference for 32-bit CPUs
IBM PS/2 Display Adapter is the reference for VGA cards
S3 Trio is pretty good as the reference PCI graphics exactly because it isn't very advanced

+ Faster performance (less bottleneck) in both DOS and WIndows

You won't get any faster performance on 486 or early Pentium, outside of Doom or some such. See my testing, I have Diamond Stealth 64 2001 in there too: PCI Video cards benchmark: Electric Boogaloo Edition

I would recommend to stay with the Trio64. There are some points which are wighted very high for comparisons.

- it‘s easy to compare the results with others or others with yours
- possibility of cross bus comparisons (very interesting for 486 world and Pentium too - the center of gravity of DOS)
- a very compatible (Hardware and Software wise) and common DOS card and easy to obtain

On the other hand why not consider a constant Side-Kick to your Trio64, which has more features and higher performance for special high end tests and cross bus Comparisons with PCI-AGP? Maybe with DVI?
My favorites for this would be:

- Matrox G450 - PCI 2.0 compatible, AGP 4x & PCI Version, very fast, very crisp, DVI available
- Matrox G200 - PCI 2.0 compatible, AGP 2x & PCI Version, very fast, very crisp
- V3 3000 - PCI 2.0 compatible, AGP & PCI Version, very fast - BUT: AGP is bad implemented, high power consumption
- Riva128 - PCI 2.0 compatible, AGP & PCI Version, very fast

Thanks

A sidestep could be to use a card with S3 964/968, like Stealth 64 VRAM. Which delivers identical DOS performance with to Trio64 with faster Windows acceleration due to dual-ported VRAM and better image quality (external DAC).

Yeah. It looks like problem is solved. I think I will stick with the Diamond Trio64 as I found at least one 486 PCI board which does't boot with the Riva128 PCI card in.

Interestingly, feipoa used a G200 PCI in his ultimate 486 and 686 series. I find Matrox cards to be sometimes problematic in DOS.

DRAM is minimal slower in Windows than VRAM, if you chose resolutions and/or color depths with the half of typical memory usage than VRAM (e.g. DRAM: 800x600x16; VRAM: 800x600x32; both with 2MB).
On the other hand VRAM cards with S3 Vision are much harder to obtain, than DRAM cards, especially with VLB 😉 An the VRAM versions seem to be lower clocked, than the DRAM versions, except the Diamond VRAM versions. The Stealth64 Video VRAM VLB with S3 968 is nearly equal to the Miro S3 864 VLB and Spea Trio64 VLB. In general you lose in the DOS benchmarks with the VRAM cards appr. 5% to the DRAM versions from the same supplier (tested with Miro 20SD/SV and Spea Mirage/Mercury).

As a conclusion the Trio64 keeps a very good solution for DOS benchmarking.
But two of my three Trios have the „spagettized“ pictures on my TFTs, which i have with no other of my 50 ISA/VLB/PCI graphic cards. For „productive“ systems i would prefer the S3 Vision chips 864/868 and 964/968 with separate DAC.

Feipoa seems to have good experiences with the G200 😃

I just got one of these and was wondering what purpose does the 3,5mm jack has on the back of the card? Thanks!

Martin85 wrote on 2023-11-03, 13:51:

I just got one of these and was wondering what purpose does the 3,5mm jack has on the back of the card? Thanks!

Audio output for the MPEG decoder add-on.

TheMobRules wrote on 2023-11-05, 02:16:

Martin85 wrote on 2023-11-03, 13:51:

I just got one of these and was wondering what purpose does the 3,5mm jack has on the back of the card? Thanks!

Audio output for the MPEG decoder add-on.

Thanks! Good info!