Picking PCI Video Card for ~1995 Win 95 Machine \ VOGONS

Picking PCI Video Card for ~1995 Win 95 Machine

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First post, by kingcake

Posted on 2024-05-25, 16:22

kingcake Offline

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Joined: 2018-03-20, 02:09

I'm building an early-ish Win95 era machine. It's mostly for testing software and peripherals I've accumulated from this time period. Maybe some light gaming. (I have a PIII W98 machine for serious 3D gaming)

It's a Pentium 133 CPU (Max supported) and 64MB FP DRAM.

I have several PCI video cards at hand, and am having trouble deciding on what to use. I'm mostly concerned with directdraw and video acceleration.

Is there any point to using an early 3D decelerator with a P133? I looked on Moby Games at several early direct3d titles and they all seem to require a Pentium 166 at minimum.

The cards I have:
Diamond Stealth 3D 3000 (S3 Virge VX)
Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM (S3 Trio 64)
Matrox Mystique
ATI Mach 64 (Not the Mach 64 GT /w 3D functionality)
"New" Chinese ATI Rage XL that I've 5V modded (Pretty sure this doesn't have driver support and I'd have to use drivers for older Rage chipsets to make it work in W95)
AOpen SIS 6326

Reply 1 of 2, by waterbeesje

Posted on 2024-05-25, 18:15

waterbeesje Offline

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Honestly, I'm a fan of the SiS 6326 chip. In 3D it does not compete to the big boys but it sure isn't useless (like pretty much the Virge is for 3D except a few titles)

Also I found the 2D support is quite strong with it.

But as you said, it's mainly used for 2D titles, and there the S3 Trio64 and Virge are the kings. These are the de facto reference cards everybody uses, and for a reason: very strong vesa support and rock solid Windows drivers. The Virge can handle 4MB of video ram for higher resolution and colour depth. If your card has that, I'd go for this one. Otherwise the SiS would make sense to me. That one has probably 4 or 8MB.

Matrox always had rock solid drivers too and had better video output, but I've heard it's vesa support has flaws...

Stuck at 10MHz...

Reply 2 of 2, by kingcake

Posted on 2024-05-25, 18:26

kingcake Offline

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Posts: 819
Joined: 2018-03-20, 02:09

waterbeesje wrote on 2024-05-25, 18:15:
Honestly, I'm a fan of the SiS 6326 chip. In 3D it does not compete to the big boys but it sure isn't useless (like pretty much […]
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Honestly, I'm a fan of the SiS 6326 chip. In 3D it does not compete to the big boys but it sure isn't useless (like pretty much the Virge is for 3D except a few titles)

Also I found the 2D support is quite strong with it.

But as you said, it's mainly used for 2D titles, and there the S3 Trio64 and Virge are the kings. These are the de facto reference cards everybody uses, and for a reason: very strong vesa support and rock solid Windows drivers. The Virge can handle 4MB of video ram for higher resolution and colour depth. If your card has that, I'd go for this one. Otherwise the SiS would make sense to me. That one has probably 4 or 8MB.

Matrox always had rock solid drivers too and had better video output, but I've heard it's vesa support has flaws...

I really agree that the SIS 6326 gets a bad rap. Back in the day I was a system builder and we put AGP 6326 cards in all our office desktop class machines. I was always impressed with the compatibility and driver stability/features for such a budget chip. It also did 3D well enough to run fancy screensavers or whatever else an office normie would need 3d for.

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