noshutdown wrote on 2014-01-17, 09:37:

who is the isa speed king in windows with 2d acceleration?

To answer that question we must define "doing what". Moving windows? Rendering fonts in Word documents with tons of text?
For example when it came to games it looks like it didnt matter much Re: Your opinion on the ATi Rage IIC and Rage Pro

elianda wrote on 2014-01-18, 12:15:

You should better ask, what about Win NT or NT4, since 2D is implemented there much faster than in Win9x. Typically a factor of 5 to 10.

Highly doubt that. GUI was very polished in w95, up to hand optimized assembly where it made sense. One way someone could make above conclusion would be using driver employing hardware blitting on NT, but falling back to software path on W9x.

Cornerstones ISA cards seem to have the most acceleration features, that and other high end fixed frequency cards

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-01-31, 05:37:

elianda wrote on 2014-01-18, 12:15:

You should better ask, what about Win NT or NT4, since 2D is implemented there much faster than in Win9x. Typically a factor of 5 to 10.

Highly doubt that. GUI was very polished in w95, up to hand optimized assembly where it made sense. One way someone could make above conclusion would be using driver employing hardware blitting on NT, but falling back to software path on W9x.

Yep. Microsoft went through great lengths to provide their own accelerated/direct draw Win95 drivers for legacy video cards that were all but abandoned by vendors.

IIRC, lots of the accelerated functions, like line drawing, made huge differences in synthetic graphic drawing benchmarks, but the real world speedup wasn't that impressive.

There's multiple factors to a good windows ISA card. Resolution, LCD clarity, performance...

One of the last VGA cards from Chips & Tech supported all interfaces including ISA, VLB, PCI, Mobile. The F65545.
https://vgamuseum.info/index.php/comments/ite … nologies-f65545

Speciality was in LCD clarity and windows performance, at the expense of low video memory - 1MB. Chips & Tech claiming +80% performance using optimised drivers verses standard software methods.

Other high performance cards... Tsengs W32i 64-bit memory interleave claims +70% performance.

The fastest ISA card in Windows is of course ATI Mach64 VRAM.

Ha, you are really often underlining this in the forum I just discovered 😀

No honestly, I would summarize the situation about ISA GDI Accelerators like this:
- There are kind of common "opinions" or "favorites" in the forum like W32i, S3 928, ATI Mach64, GD5434/5429 for GDI for ISA
- Finally there are no (or I couldnt find them) real benchmarks available showing the GDI 2D performance of ISA cards under e.g. W95 via Winbench, Wintach, Wintune oder whatever
- It is also unclear if there is any difference in the GDI support in dependency to the power of the CPU used. Compareable to #Riva128 performance vs Voodoo performance on slow OR fast CPU systems

Regards

kixs wrote on 2024-02-01, 09:16:

The fastest ISA card in Windows is of course ATI Mach64 VRAM.

What about an S3 Trio 64V card?

Marco wrote on 2024-02-01, 09:55:

- Finally there are no (or I couldnt find them) real benchmarks available showing the GDI 2D performance of ISA cards under e.g. W95 via Winbench, Wintach, Wintune oder whatever

What bench mark would you like to see?

lolo799 wrote on 2024-02-01, 10:21:

kixs wrote on 2024-02-01, 09:16:

The fastest ISA card in Windows is of course ATI Mach64 VRAM.

What about an S3 Trio 64V card?

I've never seen an ISA version of the S3 Trio. This might be S3's best ISA card: https://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/companie … /345-s3-p86c801

douglar wrote on 2024-02-01, 12:43:

I've never seen an ISA version of the S3 Trio. This might be S3's best ISA card: https://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/companie … /345-s3-p86c801

There's a pcmcia one, I benchmarked it some years ago.

As far as I know, trio32/64 doesn’t support ISA natively. Are you sure the card wasn’t cardbus?

The best s3 should be the 928. The 801 was their slowest.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2024-02-01, 14:12:

As far as I know, trio32/64 doesn’t support ISA natively. Are you sure the card wasn’t cardbus?

The best s3 should be the 928. The 801 was their slowest.

It was definitely not cardbus, you can see the benchmarks results in the link in my signature.

Marco wrote on 2024-02-01, 09:55:

Ha, you are really often underlining this in the forum I just discovered :) […]
Show full quote

Ha, you are really often underlining this in the forum I just discovered 😀

No honestly, I would summarize the situation about ISA GDI Accelerators like this:
- There are kind of common "opinions" or "favorites" in the forum like W32i, S3 928, ATI Mach64, GD5434/5429 for GDI for ISA
- Finally there are no (or I couldnt find them) real benchmarks available showing the GDI 2D performance of ISA cards under e.g. W95 via Winbench, Wintach, Wintune oder whatever
- It is also unclear if there is any difference in the GDI support in dependency to the power of the CPU used. Compareable to #Riva128 performance vs Voodoo performance on slow OR fast CPU systems

Regards

I guess you mean me 😉

Mach64 VRAM is really on another level with performance compared even to VLB cards like S3 805.

I have benchmarks made on PcChips M919 - ISA, VLB and PCI cards Trio64, ET6000 for reference - Win95 OSR2.1 + Winbench 3.11 + WinTach 1.0 + usual DOS apps/games.

I've probably tested around 30+ ISA/VLB cards. Also where possible 1MB vs 2MB to see memory interleaving performance boost if available.

If you ask me. Best overall ISA card is based on Cirrus Logic GD5434 chipset. As it's very fast in Windows and probably fastest in DOS. Mach64 VRAM is fastest in Windows but average in DOS. The average performance in DOS also applies to VLB and PCI version.

lolo799 wrote on 2024-02-01, 14:19:

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2024-02-01, 14:12:

As far as I know, trio32/64 doesn’t support ISA natively. Are you sure the card wasn’t cardbus?

The best s3 should be the 928. The 801 was their slowest.

It was definitely not cardbus, you can see the benchmarks results in the link in my signature.

From what I understand about the PCMCIA Trio32/64, is it can use VLB in 8/16/32 bit transfer mode. Ie multiple transfers... and although the PCMCIA bus is 16-bit ISA, you can technically convert it to a slow version of VLB.

The Trio 32/64 and 64V were more integrated, so I guess there's cost savings.

kixs wrote on 2024-02-01, 14:55:

I've probably tested around 30+ ISA/VLB cards. Also where possible 1MB vs 2MB to see memory interleaving performance boost if available.

If you ask me. Best overall ISA card is based on Cirrus Logic GD5434 chipset. As it's very fast in Windows and probably fastest in DOS. Mach64 VRAM is fastest in Windows but average in DOS. The average performance in DOS also applies to VLB and PCI version.

Any possibility to share your bench results? Would really appreciate.

Regards

lolo799 wrote on 2024-02-01, 14:08:

douglar wrote on 2024-02-01, 12:43:

I've never seen an ISA version of the S3 Trio. This might be S3's best ISA card: https://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/companie … /345-s3-p86c801

There's a pcmcia one, I benchmarked it some years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Trio
Motherboard interface: ISA, VLB, PCI, AGP (Trio3D only)

So if that's correct, I guess it was possible. I just can't find the cards.

douglar wrote on 2024-02-01, 15:49:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Trio Motherboard interface: ISA, VLB, PCI, AGP (Trio3D only) […]
Show full quote

lolo799 wrote on 2024-02-01, 14:08:

douglar wrote on 2024-02-01, 12:43:

I've never seen an ISA version of the S3 Trio. This might be S3's best ISA card: https://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/companie … /345-s3-p86c801

There's a pcmcia one, I benchmarked it some years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Trio
Motherboard interface: ISA, VLB, PCI, AGP (Trio3D only)

So if that's correct, I guess it was possible. I just can't find the cards.

Apart from the pcmcia one, which you can use in an isa slot with an isa/pcmcia interface, there is no Trio64 ISA card available.

Models using the 16bits C-bus interface on PC-98 do exist.

kixs wrote on 2024-02-01, 14:55:

If you ask me. Best overall ISA card is based on Cirrus Logic GD5434 chipset. As it's very fast in Windows and probably fastest in DOS. Mach64 VRAM is fastest in Windows but average in DOS. The average performance in DOS also applies to VLB and PCI version.

Agree 100%. The Cirrus Logic cards also have excellent image quality/compatibility with LCD monitors.

douglar wrote on 2024-02-01, 12:43:

What bench mark would you like to see?

Thanks for asking. At the end I don’t really care about a certain specific bench but I’m interested in any bench that is comparing 2D acceleration performance with isa cards. So Wintach, winbench, I would appreciate anything 😀

A snippet as I want to redo all the benchmarks...

kixs wrote on 2024-02-03, 09:43:

A snippet as I want to redo all the benchmarks... […]
Show full quote

A snippet as I want to redo all the benchmarks...

Very nice start.

You are using 1/4 ISA divider, yes? Does the screen refresh affect numbers? Are you going to use a 1MB cache stick when you retest?