The performance list on the VIDSPEED page is a bit unrealistic. Alot of cards seem to be tested with the original card-BIOS which is often not optimal.
Also some test system specs are not clear.

If you got two cards test them in your own system using the specific VESA drivers for your cards which stick to their features.

I find all of these DOS performance tests rather meaningless at this point anyway. Maybe they were always meaningless. It's reminiscent of modern 3DMark obsessing nonsense. In real DOS games, once you get beyond the level of shitty Trident/Oak/WD ISA stuff, you start getting diminishing returns and start splitting hairs.

If you have PCI/AGP and want great compatibility and crazy speed, you probably should look for a S3 ViRGE /DX/GX/GX2. If you want something that has usable 3D too, then 3dfx Banshee or NV TNT card (or newer on either side) have effectively infinite DOS speed but they do have VESA problems. Stay away from Radeons IMO.

If you're on VLB, it's ET4000 or maybe Trio64. Really nothing else to say on that bus.

I have 3 VLB cards. La creme de la creme: 1 Mb Tseng ET4000, 1 Mb Cirrus Logic 5428, 2 Mb S3 928.
Tseng is the fastest, I need a TSR for S3's VESA compatibility and CL is ok, nothing special but nothing bad either.

ET4000 is even faster when you have 2MB. That lets it interleave memory banks for more memory speed. 😀

Hmm.. I didn't know that CL5428 was considered to be one of the top cards. Personally I think it's quite slow (15 mb/s in 8 bpp) mode. Also my card only has 1 Mb vram. It's quite ok though and compatible with most games and demos.

CL chips aren't that bad really especially on VLB. It does depend on what CPU you have though as to when you will get bottlenecked by what. But check out these results from '94.

I actually upgraded to a ISA CL card once. I had a ISA only 486 with a Trident card and the best (cheap) option was a ISA CL GD5426 card.

Very interesting article. Thanks for posting!

In my opinion, the fastest VLB card when running DOS VGA games is something based on ET4000W32P with 2mb (it uses memory interleaving). I have many of the top end VLB cards of the day, and the ET4000W32P beats the pants off of everything by a wide margin in real world use. It's even better if you get one that works at 50MHz 0ws.

For a while I was really interested in the ARK chips, because I had read many newsgroups comments stating that it was even faster than the Tseng. Actually, it's not true. The ARK is only about 5% faster in the 320x200x8 mode, but significantly slower in every other mode.

I originally believed the ARK used memory interleaving like the Tseng cards, but that is false. Upgrading to 2mb provides absolutely zero benefit while running DOS VGA graphics. From what I have have read, VGA performance between ARK1000 and ARK2000 chipsets is exactly the same. All cards I've tested on VLB use either ARK1000PV or ARK1000VL (essentially the same chipset).

The real kick in the pants is that hardly any of these cards will work with 0ws on the VL bus, and the 1WS setting completely kills the performance, and is easily beaten by the Tseng in all modes. The funny thing about the ARK cards is that about 95% of the ones out there are manufactured by ARK, regardless of whether they are made by Paradise, 2themax or Hercules (though they all use a slightly different BIOS). I wasn't able to get any of those to work at 0ws.

I just received an Octek board based on their own PCB layout which I haven't tried yet. I'm hoping this one will actually work at 0ws, but I highly doubt it will topple the Tseng.

So is the ET4000W32P king of VLB graphics or what?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

[...] So is the ET4000W32P king of VLB graphics or what?

Interesting words there. From all what I've heard and read my assumptions for DOS performance, 640x480x256 and lower, would be:

1) Hercules
2) ATI or ARK based cards
3) S3 based cards
4) ET4000

But perhaps there's a big performance difference in lower vs higher resolutions. Also, perhaps even more important, there seem to be a substantial performance difference between VLB and PCI, especially at higher resolutions/more colors. But then I'm personally only interested in VGA and lower resolutions on a 486/Pentium. So, is the ET4000 king of low-res then?

At 320x200 (or so) lots of cards/chips will get the job done very nicely, especially with a gimpy 486 leading the way. When you go SVGA then the speed starts to matter much more.

^^^ Agreed.

However, I want to bring up the "demo scene" aspect one more time. In 1995, ET4000 was the best documented video chipset available (with the exception of the original IBM VGA, which is too slow to be any fun). A large part of mid-nineties scene productions was programmed on machines with Tseng cards.

That's interesting 5u3. I'm mainly interested in the (486) Demo Scene too. I remember all the fuzz about ET4000 but I never got my hands on one of these cards back in the day. I'm still using my 15+ years old CL-5428 today 😁 Which delivers in about 90% of all demos from that time.

swaaye wrote:

At 320x200 (or so) lots of cards/chips will get the job done very nicely, especially with a gimpy 486 leading the way.

Yes and No. IIRC, the Local Bus is synchronous with the CPU, which means that the CPU must wait for a memory transaction to the VLB to finish. And since all graphic drawing in DOS means directly accessing the graphic card's frame buffer (video memory) it heavily depends on the speed of the VLB interface (i.e the graphics card memory and bus logic).

A slow card would force the CPU to wait longer for a transaction to complete thus wasting expensive cycles to run the main program code. On my machine for instance, the maximum video memory write throughput is about 15'000 kb/sec. In 320x200x256 mode this means roughly 240 frames per second. But that would eat 100% of the CPU. No time left to actually do anything useful.

To achieve an acceptably smooth experience a frame rate around 30 fps is required. So on my system that would require about 30/240 = 12.5% CPU time. Plenty of time left to run program code perhaps. But at 640x480x256 this number is efficiently quadrupled. Suddenly the CPU is spending half of it's day to fill the screen. Add 16 bit color mode and the CPU is already choked and you have to drop to 15 fps to do anything useful.

So, well... for most 320x200x256 tasks a mid-range VLB graphic card would do the trick. But for slightly higher resolution or more colors you'd definitely want to go as fast as possible in the graphic compartment 😀

Well of course the optimal solution is the fastest possible and the ET4000 just happens to be about the most compatible too.

swaaye wrote:

Well of course the optimal solution is the fastest possible and the ET4000 just happens to be about the most compatible too.

I'd really like to try this beast in my setup. Any suggestions for a particular ET4000 card? Were they only made by Tseng or were they OEM:ed as well? Also, I suppose the 2 Mb cards do memory interleaving, or?

Tseng only made the chipsets. There was a great variety of cards from many companies (e.g.: Diamond Stealth32, Hercules Dynamite, Video7 Showtime+ STB Lightspeed), however most of the Tseng cards were noname or OEM.

The ET4000 doesn't have an integrated RAMDAC, so card models come with different RAMDACs and clock generators. Getting a good OEM/noname card involves a bit of luck.

Hi,

I figured I would post this so folks can have some comparison as to a Tseng ET4000 performance and how it compares against other cards...

I have a Tseng ET4000 W32p with 2MB VLB in my 486 DX5-133 with 128MB RAM and I get the following results with the X-VIdeo tests below.

640x480x8:0101 mode:

8-bit writes: 8,090 Kb/s
16-bit writes: 16,100 Kb/s
32-bit writes: 31,800 Kb/s
64-bit writes: 31,800 Kb/s
80-bit writes: 26,700 Kb/s

For Comparison to a person's earlier post regarding their "1mb Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 VLB video card":

8-bit writes: 5,420 Kb/s
16-bit writes: 10,800 Kb/s
32-bit writes: 10,800 Kb/s
64-bit writes: 10,800 Kb/s
80-bit writes: 10,800 Kb/s

The et4000 to me appears to be almost 3x faster.

My 3dBench rating is 71.4.

To give you an idea of the game play performance, I can play Duke Nukem 3D at VESA 2.0 at 640x480 with smooth game play with no skipping frames. I can push it to VESA 2.0 to 800x600 but its not as smooth.

I have been assembling my 486 for the last 3 years and recently scored a Tseng ET4000 2mb VLB on ebay for a mere $50 US.

My 486 DREAM machine specs:

Asus PIV-486SP3 Socket 3 VLB+PCI Motherboard
AMD 486DX5-133MHz (P75) CPU Processor
128MB (2x64MB) Memory 8x32 72pin non-parity FPM 60ns RAM
Tseng ET4000 W32p 2MB VLB Video Card
Epson SD-800 Dual Floppy Drive 3.5” 5.25”
Gateway LKM-F934 LS-120 3.5” 1.44mb 120MB Super Disk
JAZ 2GB Drive Internal
IOMEGA 750MB Zip Drive Internal
Creative Encore MK5005 PC-DVD 8X Dxr3 CD-ROM
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 CT2760 w/36MB RAM
Creative Modem Blaster v.90 56k Voice Data Fax Modem ISA
21” Mitsubishi DiamondPro 9ITXM Monitor RGB w/RGB Cables
Altec Lansing ACS-500 Series Dolby Surround Sound Speakers w/Subwoofer
Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 20.1GB Hard Drive IDE
Western Digital 9.1GB SCSI 50-pin Hard Drive
3COM Etherlink 3C905B-TX ISA Network Adapter
Adaptec AVA-1515 SCSI Adapter (Bootable BIOS)
QuickShot Super Warrior Joystick QS-201 Controller
Panasonic KX-P2180 Color Dot Matrix Printer
Hewlett Packard 5100C Scanner
Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0a
Windows PD Keyboard KBD-WIN95

And yes, it is connected to my home network and I can share files with my Windows 7 PC.

I even get Internet Access 😜

quite frankly you don't see that 3x speedup in most benchmarks - correct me if i'm wrong, with a proper benchmark please;

MDKagent007 wrote:

Panasonic KX-P2180 Color Dot Matrix Printer

Ever had a color dot matrix? They are agonisingly slow in color mode and you get 2 good prints out of them before the ribbon is messed up and the colors have dirtied each other.

I'd wanna go for a classic HP Deskjet like a 550C for color or a LaserJet for b/w.

mrau wrote:

quite frankly you don't see that 3x speedup in most benchmarks - correct me if i'm wrong, with a proper benchmark please;

If you don't see it, than that's fine by me...I'm not going to test anything further to prove a point...it was just a comparison based on the Cirrus Logic numbers posted on previous page on this forum....

BitWrangler wrote:

MDKagent007 wrote:

Panasonic KX-P2180 Color Dot Matrix Printer

Ever had a color dot matrix? They are agonisingly slow in color mode and you get 2 good prints out of them before the ribbon is messed up and the colors have dirtied each other.

I'd wanna go for a classic HP Deskjet like a 550C for color or a LaserJet for b/w.

I wanted a dot matrix for the system to show how things have evolved, don't want an ink jet or a laserjet. For the time era that I was aiming, ink jets were not yet on the market.

That and I have used the system in demonstrations in IT gatherings of vintage hardware and my system has always attracted a huge crowd as people have been fascinated that someone actually still have a system that old.

I also have all original software in mint condition with all manuals with all boxes for things like DOS 6.22, Windows 3.1/3.11, Office 4.3, Adobe PhotoShop 4.0...and games such as Elder Scrolls ARENA, Wolfenstein 3D...etc

My entire collection including the system has an estimated value of $5,000 US