CU_AMiGA wrote:

Hi

I currently have an old ISA ATI Mach 64 2mb in my setup and was pretty happy with it. But keropi is standing in his Cirrus Logic corner telling metheir cards are better (is this true). So i am asking how good is the Mach64 for DOS/Windows games and what is the fastest ISA GFX card ever? My setup is a 233mx Pentium MMX and 32mb RAM.

Regards

A Pentium 1 machine and you're using an ISA gfx card?

The fastest performing cards in DOS are the Tseng or Ark based chip gfx cards

When Keropi mentions the Cirrus logic cards he's talking about oid 386 pc's or an Amiga with the Golden Gate 486SLC card 😉

I would recommend an S3 based PCI card for your P1 233mmx rig
Fast and very compatible

For ISA, eh? Unfortunately you can't have an ISA card that is fast and both DOS and Windows it seems. DOS likes DRAM, and Windows likes VRAM. But, I am assuming you are asking about mostly about speed under DOS games. I have heard that the Mach64 DRAM card is pretty quick. I've only used the VRAM version myself which is just okay...but this is an ISA card afterall. One of the things I have heard that is great about the ISA mach64 cards is that you can overclock the hell out of them...like 20MHz on an ISA bus. That works out great so long as you have other cards on the bus which can also handle the speed, but in reality it's pretty much almost impossible to do, especially if you want to run an ISA soundcard as well.

Cirrus Logic cards are usually okay under DOS, but I have heard the CL-5434 based cards are better than average.

One card I have heard is really great but have never used is based on the Tseng ET4000W32i chipset. Those are pretty hard to come by.

I think there are a few ISA cards out there based on S3-864, and those should be similar to the Mach64 DRAM.

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure there were no ARK based ISA cards.

Anyway, unless you can find this Tseng card I mentioned, I think you're best off with your Mach64.

I "upgraded" from a Trident 8900C ISA to a Diamond Speedstar Pro ISA (CL GD5426) back in the day and saw a major performance jump.

Anyway, here is an article from an ancient CGW that will do the trick hopefully.

(links to a gallery at imagebam)

Well, according to that list the card with ET4000W32i chip on an ISA card isn't nearly as fast as I though it would be. It seems you're best off with your Mach64. However, that list only shows the results for the VLB version of mach64, not ISA.

Personally I find the list to be a little useless because of the mix of ISA and VLB cards. The performance of the two is totally different.

According to this list the CL 5434 is a pretty damn nice ISA card. But I am still really shocked that the Cirrus cards beat the ET4000W32i card so badly. Did they do something wrong?

Fastest VLB card I ever used was a Number 9 with it's Ticket to Ride "When I'm 64" processor.

Yeah, those cards are based on the S3 96x/86x family, which is pretty similar to Mach64 in terms of performance.

You'd probably be pretty well off with a Cirrus Logic ISA card. ISA is so slow that there just isn't much that can be done. Unless you definitely want GUI acceleration, but ISA cards are not what you want if you desire that.

so everyone is saying that mach64 is a faster isa card than the cl cards? i have an amiga setup like keropi but i use a sbc rather than goldengate so isa is the only way!

regards

What's your motherboard? Does it have VLB or PCI?

Please, someone can explain me what "a fast 2d card" should mean? As far as I know, 2d pc graphics is not much more than updating a framebuffer in video card memory. So, as long as your cpu, video card and system bus are fast enough to transfer bits from main memory, you should see smooth rendering according to the selected refresh rate. Sure, with some optimizations and a bit of support from video card, transfers can be reduced to only parts of the screen that actually changed. This will save some cpu power and system bus bandwidth, but you shouldn't get smoother rendering for this particular reason (if the optimization is necessary to get a better frame rate and tearing/flickering free refresh, it was the framebuffer that couldn't be updated fast enough by the cpu, not the video card that couldn't read and display it just in time). I don't think there are many visual effects offered by pc video card, as consoles and amiga custom chips had. So, as long as the card has support for standards like EGA, VGA, VESA and supports high resolutions and high refresh rates, there shouln't be much worrying about "performance". Or am I wrong and someone can explain me better?

Don't think in modern terms. Think of things as they used to be, when PC hardware of all sorts wasn't really standardised and video display hardware was still very much in its early development phases. The ISA cards in discussion were practically on the verge of VGA being new. Various IHVs and chip vendors were trying out new ideas with optimisations of BUS bandwidth and core logic to improve performance and lower production costs. So, in turn, various ISA VGA cards performed differently from each other and many didn't even fully support standards such as VESA or differening refresh rates, resolutions and colourspace. Back in the ISA days the PC's 8 and 16 bit busses were servely hampered when exchanging data with the CPU and system RAM so much of the work had to be done directly on display (and sound cards) alone and so the mentioned optimisations had to come into play, even for simple 2D field scrolling effects (many VGA cards were bundled with 2D demo software that employed direct access to the display chip's features). This runs entirely in opposition to how the amiga operates with it's fast busses and shared memory space which each of its multitasking aspects (sound, display, disk access) could access.

I think you'll find, with some research, that there were indeed display cards for PC that outstripped features found on consoles and the amiga. 3D consumer grade cards had their birth on the PC and there were even complete consoles, such as the 3DO which were released as PC cards.