Must it be one card?
Which OS(es)?
What do you have laying around?

For RAM, you should check on how much external cache you have and upgrade up to the limit (or upgrade to more cache). For example, if you have 256K cache, and because this UM8881 chipset uses write-back external cache and robs one bit of the tag as a dirty bit, your cacheable area is 32MB and you should stick to that.

There are no real 3D capabilities on a system like this. What 3D there is would be done on the CPU. Besides being on the PCI bus for speed (and linear framebuffer) the acceleration features for a card of this era are things like filling a rectangle with a certain color (rather than the CPU having to do it pixel-by-pixel), or loading an image of the mouse cursor into the card and then being able to move it around just by position rather than drawing it pixel-by-pixel. i.e., very basic things. An S3 Trio64 series card (there are a few variants like Trio64V+) or CL-GD5434 PCI card would be at home in this system. Be aware that output quality, VRAM speed, etc. can vary depending on the exact manufacturer, but these cards are readily available and affordable and compatible. I have a Trident TGUI9680 in one of my PCI 486 systems also.

You may see some posts on here about trying to experimenting with the most modern video card that will work in a 486. Those are on a UM8886BF chipset system, I believe. Your UM8886AF is more picky about what PCI cards it will accept and you may want to stick to "period correct." In my MB-8433UUC my CL-GD5446 won't even work and it's only a year or two newer than the TGUI9680 that does.

I don't much see the point of doing 3d on a 486, nonetheless windows. I would focus on DOS performance and compatibility . If you occasionally boot into windows 95 or windows 3.1, then any decent PCI video card with at least 1mb of video RAM will give you 16 bit colors at 640x480.

A voodoo1 for glide DOS games and quake gl would make the most some sense, but at that point you are better off just building another system with a pentium MMX or better IMO. A fast 486 can do quake with glide ok but you won't be able to play much of anything in windows.

If you are going to buy a new video card I would suggest a Cirrus logic GD5462 or GD5464. They have driver support for windows 95 and 3.11, its plenty fast DOS, very compatible, and they have reliably good image quality.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-08-13, 18:20:

If you are going to buy a new video card I would suggest a Cirrus logic GD5462 or GD5464. They have driver support for windows 95 and 3.11, its plenty fast DOS, very compatible, and they have reliably good image quality.

I have one of those in AGP format in my super 7 system. I suspect the UM8886A may object to it though so be careful.

Thx @jakethompson1, but why no Voodoo 1 (1996) for 3D and a e.g. S3 Trio64 for 2D (loop cable)?

Should I run MS-DOS 6.22 or Win95?

As the others mentioned you could do the Voodoo card, potential PCI compatibility issues aside. And once you start setting up these systems they tend to multiply so it'd be better when you end up building a Socket 7 system anyway.

If you do the 32MB RAM upgrade then Windows 95. If you stick with 8MB then DOS 6.22 + WfW 3.11. Remember with DOS you're limited to FAT16 and 2GB per partition, unless you run one of those franken-DOS things which is W95 OSR2 or W98 with the Windows parts removed.

leon22 wrote on 2023-08-13, 18:33:

Thx @jakethompson1, but why no Voodoo 1 (1996) for 3D and a e.g. S3 Trio64 for 2D (loop cable)?

Should I run MS-DOS 6.22 or Win95?

the trio64 is a good card, as the others said
the thing with the voodoo is that the games that benefit from it also benefit from the stronger FPU that the pentium has
in a 486 the framerates are subpar and the compatibility suffers as they're not from the same "timeframe"
by the moment the voodoo appeared on the market, the early pentium were gaining popularity due to the rise of 3d games

You could combine a bunch of adapters and put a GeForce RTX 3080 in there... Mind you, the 3D parts wouldn't work with any existing software, and be hard to program for from DOS, but once going it should be hard to beat.

But seriously though, with a 486 class machine I wouldn't bother with 3D acceleration (unless the budget allows for a Voodoo 1, or you're nostalgic for some other proprietary API) and focus on 2D performance.

Thanks for the numerous responses and tips.
Since I'm not aiming for Quake I think I will stick to the Trio64 in the meantime (Doom should run fine?).

Doom will run like a full throttle chainsaw.

S3 Trio64V+ and a Voodoo2 12MB

it'll be fine.

Voodoo 3 are cheaper and if you have an oddity you can overclock the pci bus to 60mhz with one.

If your not into hardcore 5x86 any period correct PCI is fine, I preferred ones that supported Tsing video and mpeg codecs.

elszgensa wrote on 2023-08-13, 18:58:

You could combine a bunch of adapters and put a GeForce RTX 3080 in there...

Won't be possible, because old systems have various BIOS limitations to even initiate such a card.

I wouldn't bother with 3D on a 486. Important are aspects like

• compatibility and speed in DOS
• good Win 3.x drivers and speed
• high color depths at common resolutions in Windows (e.g. 1280x1024x24bit for a 19"TFT monitor)
• reasonable refresh rates (70Hz+) at these resolutions
• a sharp picture.

The PCI bus on the 486 is very limiting, so cards with a very fast bus interface (e.g. Matrox Millennium) have no advantage over cards with a rather slow interface (e.g. S3 968).

I recommend you for the 486 a S3 Virge VX with 4MB VRAM or a S3 968 with 4MB VRAM. If 3D is a Must have, then add a Voodoo(1/2) card.

PC-Engineer wrote on 2023-08-15, 05:20:

I wouldn't bother with 3D on a 486.

Back in the day, I did experience Virtual Reality (VR) on a 486..
This was in the mid-90s, when 3D shutter glasses were popular for a while.

They plugged into serial port, and an output pin of the V.24 was powering/enabling the LC filter, essentially.
In combination with the CRT VGA monitor, the odd and even fields could be seen by one eye each time.

Accelerators.. I mean, sure, 3D accelerators do benefit the most by a strong PC (no bottle neck).
But the other way round is also true, a 486 needs a 3D accelerator much more than a Pentium, exactly because it is weak.

That's why Voodoos were popular, after all.
They allowed the poor guys with a weak machine to run current games.
The guys with a normal, higher-end system could do play via software-rendering in maxium quality.
It's like the old situation of Amiga vs PC, I assume.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-08-15, 05:59:

.
That's why Voodoos were popular, after all.
They allowed the poor guys with a weak machine to run current games.

I completely agree with you, from the perspective of the 90s.

From today's perspective, it looks a bit different. Games in 90s used to be considered smooth if they were over 15fps, nowadays you're at min 60fps for that threshold and used to it too. Also, today a Pentium or Pentium II is much cheaper to get than a 486 if you want to play 3D.

PC-Engineer wrote on 2023-08-15, 06:16:

Jo22 wrote on 2023-08-15, 05:59:

.
That's why Voodoos were popular, after all.
They allowed the poor guys with a weak machine to run current games.

I completely agree with you, from the perspective of the 90s.

From today's perspective, it looks a bit different. Games in 90s used to be considered smooth if they were over 15fps, nowadays you're at min 60fps for that threshold and used to it too. Also, today a Pentium or Pentium II is much cheaper to get than a 486 if you want to play 3D.

I'd also argue that the faster and cheaper Pentium, Pentium II, or even K6 can do everything that a 486 could by dropping clocks and/or disabling caches, but also push your useful range forward by multiple years into the early 3D acceleration era. There's a reason why so many threads end up with a post saying,"The best 486 is a Pentium"

leon22 wrote on 2023-08-13, 19:07:

Thanks for the numerous responses and tips.
Since I'm not aiming for Quake I think I will stick to the Trio64 in the meantime (Doom should run fine?).

https://thandor.net/benchmark/32

You can expect to get somewhere around 40 fps average. Dooms fps cap is 35.

PC-Engineer wrote on 2023-08-15, 06:16:

I completely agree with you, from the perspective of the 90s.

From today's perspective, it looks a bit different. Games in 90s used to be considered smooth if they were over 15fps, nowadays you're at min 60fps for that threshold and used to it too. Also, today a Pentium or Pentium II is much cheaper to get than a 486 if you want to play 3D.

Even from a 90s perspective, Voodoo graphics cards weren't really a thing until 1997 (IIRC, the first one was released in late-96). By that point it was becoming more common for games to require Pentium processors.

486 systems only had a useful life (gaming-wise) up to maybe 1994-1995 or so. And while there were some early 3D cards around this time (e.g. 3D Blaster), there wasn't much support for them.