All those cards are crap. Nothing beats my Trident 8900B. Nothing!

/Should have smashed it with a hammer long ago.

dh4rm4 wrote:

The "best" VGA chipset for DOS era gaming is subjectional. The oldschool pre-3d acceleration guys will say ET4000 is best as it's the most widely supported and could do many Xmodes well and planar shifts pretty smoothly. The pre 3Dfx crowd will tell you that s3 Virge is best as it has support in many titles and it's cheap. The Voodoo lovers will assume that no other VGA card compares - to any of it's features - some of which are non existant such as proper fully compliant VESA support. Meanwhile the Matrox zealots just are from another plane of existence entirely...

As commented, there's still a sizable stock of used, never sold or trashed, components from most of the X86 history after the 486 DX/2 appeared, including both ISA and PCI video cards -- not a lot, but several besides the S3 mentioned before (a "Trio", I think I said, and I was fresher from handling it when I wrote that. -- Pause, and I'll go look -- yes, a Trio 64, version 1.40). It appears to have 8 MBs of RAM on it, 2 MBs each on 4 NEC chips. It's very small compared to an AGP board like several early ATI Rage boards I have for that interface.

3dFX valued their products so highly that I never did agree with them while they were still in business. I'm unable to recall the ET4000, either. But at the time VooDoo accellerators were popular, there was both enough turn-based RPG software to keep me going when I had gaming time to myself, and not really a lot of free time open, plus those CRPGs never demanded terrifically high performance hardware.

Anyone who actually lived thru those days and played the games can tell you that compatibility is a bitch and it's highly unlikely that a certain set of hardware will run everything perfectly.

The Tseng Labs and S3 stuff actually got attention from game devs tho so compatibility is more likely. Still, you have to rely on whether the card's BIOS is decent too and that can vary between card manufacturer.

The whole retro DOS rig is a one hell of a difficult thing to perfectly figure out. Not only does each piece of hardware have to work right on its own, but it also has to get along together 🤣. There are so many variables.

Your best bet is to pick a card that was popular when a specific game was around. Companies interest in retro DOS VESA standards waned as soon as Windows 9x took over.

And thus we see why DOSBOX has massive advantages. It is designed to run these quirky games. It isn't limited to a set of bulky, decaying hardware.