At that CPU performance, there's not a lot of difference between many of them, fractions of a frame per second. There is one particular clunker to be avoided for pretty much everything and that's the Cirrus Logic GD-5430... it's slowwww. Conversely the GD-5434 is fine and the GD-5436 even tends towards top tier speeds for 2D PCI. Sometimes these are lumped together by calling them GD-543x, but the last number really matters. GD-5436 are usually pretty cheap. GD-5446 are okay, then S3 Virge and Trio cards are usually cheapish for the less 3D enhanced ones.

I was going into some lower end PCI graphics stuff here Matching early PCI graphics to potential builds... and that collected links to other threads that may be of interest to this topic too.

Edit: Number of Matrox PCI cards seem to be going pretty cheap at the moment on eBay and they are a pretty solid choice, not sure why they fell out of favor, 5 years ago they were among the top priced ones.

https://thandor.net/benchmarks/vga/vga?a=70&c=0&o=0&s=Submit

You may want to limit your expectations, even the absolute fastest 486 setups out there are going to struggle to hit much more than 15 fps and a more garden variety setup, like say a DX4 100 will be around 10 fps. There are plenty of great games that a 486 will absolutely handle, like say Doom or Doom II, but for Quake, a (Super) Socket 7 build with either a Pentium MMX or better yet a K6-2/K6-3 (which are widely available and cheap) would be far better suited.

If you get something Rendition Verite based you could probably get “acceptable” performance from vQuake.

Only two issues with that plan- 1) Verite cards tend to be more expensive and rarer (probably >$65) and 2) that would be at the expense of performance of other dos games (Mode X is SLOW on Verite cards).

I'll echo the comments about limiting expectations for a Pentium OD 83 and Quake.

Is your priority is a system to run Quake or having a 486 for nostalgia?

If the main goal is to run Quake then a Pentium MMX or equivalent system would be a better option. And you could throttle such a system down in speed for 486-level performance for more speed sensitive games.

Alternatively if the goal is a 486 for nostalgia, then I would aim for a system with that in mind.

BinaryDemon wrote on 2024-11-29, 01:36:

If you get something Rendition Verite based you could probably get “acceptable” performance from vQuake.

Only two issues with that plan- 1) Verite cards tend to be more expensive and rarer (probably >$65) and 2) that would be at the expense of performance of other dos games (Mode X is SLOW on Verite cards).

I wouldn't recommend a Verite based card for any DOS system (especially a 486). Its DOS performance is bad.

I believe this should point you in the right direction: https://www.vgamuseum.info/images/vlask/bench/quake320.png

an s3 trio64 is fine

as it's a 486-class, the lack of vesa2 modes won't matter

Could try an S3 Virge with GLQuake... or S3 Trio64.

MikeSG wrote on 2024-11-29, 07:38:

Could try an S3 Virge with GLQuake... or S3 Trio64.

The whole idea of GLQuake is to use it with a card that supports OpenGL...

The Pentium Overdrive did not reach real Pentium levels of performance. Actual Pentiums had a 64-bit data bus, the Pentium Overdrive had a 32-bit data bus, which hurt performance.

As others have said: Temper your expectations. It might not work that well.

jmarsh wrote on 2024-11-29, 07:45:

MikeSG wrote on 2024-11-29, 07:38:

Could try an S3 Virge with GLQuake... or S3 Trio64.

The whole idea of GLQuake is to use it with a card that supports OpenGL...

They work with an openGL wrapper. The Virge, not the Trio64.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPyIwJHs4Vo

MikeSG wrote on 2024-11-29, 13:16:

They work with an openGL wrapper. The Virge, not the Trio64.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPyIwJHs4Vo

But what is the point? Original quake (using CPU-based rendering) would perform better. An OpenGL-to-DirectX wrapper used with a card that has no DirectX acceleration will just end up using DirectX CPU rendering...

S3 ViRGE was one of the earliest ones to support D3D acceleration. However, even with the wrapper, GLQuake is too demanding for it and the 3D acceleration isn't great: Big performance hit when texture filtering is enabled, lacking certain alpha-blending features and not scaling well with faster CPUs.

If the main objective is just to run the original Quake, then I agree with the others of getting a real Pentium computer. PCI video cards that I suggest are the Cirrus Logic GD-5446 or S3 cards starting from the Trio64, these are good enough.

PCI? S3 Trio64. Yes you also need a Pentium for Quake to be playable.

In the interest of science, I decided to do some benchmarks of various graphics cards using a Pentium OverDrive 83MHz processor.

Test setup was as follows:

• Pentium OverDrive 83 MHz
• ASUS PVI-486SP3 motherboard with 256kB L2 cache
• 32MB RAM
• DOS 6.22 (clean install)
• Default BIOS settings (no optimizations performed)

Benchmarks were taken using the Quake time demo (320x200). I tested 14 video cards in total (11 PCI, 3 VLB). Cards listed are PCI versions unless otherwise noted.

Nine of the eleven PCI video cards tested had identical benchmarks of 18.0 FPS. The fastest video card was actually the ET4000/W32P VLB card at 18.3 FPS. This was slightly faster than its PCI counterpart which clocked 17.6 FPS. Slowest card was the Rendition Verite V2100 at only 14.8 FPS.

Bottom line is that Quake is heavily bound by the system architecture and CPU speed with a Pentium OverDrive making video card selection largely immaterial.

For point of comparison, I benchmarked the same Quake time demo (320x200) on a Pentium 133 with an S3 Trio64V+ and it scored 34.2 FPS. That's almost double the performance of the Pentium OverDrive 83 MHz.

With the Verite, you would either run VQuake or I think performs better in standard quake at different vesa resolutions - try 300x240?

brother wrote on 2024-11-28, 16:12:

As a kid I had a 486 dx. Once day I came home from school to find out got thrown out. I was very sad and angry but I couldn't do anything about it. Now I finally want another 486. I found out of I want to play quake I need a Pentium overdrive 83mhz (p24t). But I also read I need a PCI graphics card. so my question is what's a cheapish/easyish to come by mid to late 90's graphics card that works well with quake?

I played through Quake on a 486dx2 @80 with a vlb card.
Quake 2 was a sideshow.

Both run fine on modern hardware.

Same quake on a dx4/100 w/vlb.