The dos only can use what card provides via bios (interrupt 10h services) and VESA bios extensions (univbe-like programs will know multiple cards and their capabilities), and that's it.
The rest has to be compatible with something very standard - VGA/EGA/CGA, etc. So DOS doesn't know and doesn't care about how many ROP or shaders there are, it only uses BIOS calls, and the DOS apps would only write VGA-compatible registers.

The dos can't do hardware 3d, unless there is a library abstracting stuff for the applications, and essentially being a driver for the card. So you can't replace a 3d card with something totally different. Maybe the library that abstracts 3d rendering interface from one vendor can be aware of multiple cards in the single series, and will support the whole series, but that's definitely can't happen for cross-vendor card replacement.

The 3D capabilities on DOS are wasted due to lack of standardization. There are exceptions though such as S3D for S3 ViRGE, CGL, PowerVR SGL and DOS Glide support (obviously, the best ones for compatibility are the Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2 cards).

If you want excellent DOS compatibility get a S3 PCI card from a good manufacturer, but the 3D capabilities sucks compared to the Voodoo Banshee. Adding an early Voodoo card can help mitigate this problem though.

I'm using a similar system like yours btw. 😁

Oh ok, I understood... so replace my Banshee with this Nvidia Quadro NVS100 PCI doesn't mean better 3D performance, in DOS.

biessea wrote on 2021-09-21, 14:00:

Oh ok, I understood... so replace my Banshee with this Nvidia Quadro NVS100 PCI doesn't mean better 3D performance, in DOS.

Yep, only on Windows is useful.

Ok, I didn't know this before so well.

Thanks