the test has just got started and the trident 8900d vs 8900c is already yielding some surprising results:
we know that the 8900d is a fast plain svga card but without acceleration, while the 8900c is much slower. if the cpu is fast enough, 8900d can be more than twice as fast as the 8900c in most dos benchmarks. and even with the amd5x86, in all dos and windows 256colors benchmarks 8900d is 30-60% faster than the 8900c. but in all four 16bpp tests, both cards achieved exactly the same score.
this seems to indicate that the 8900c is not really that slow, its just not good at 256color modes.

I wish DOS benchmarking wasn't so dependent on synthetic tests. Unfortunately, games for DOS that can be readily benchmarked are rare.

This thread did come up with some though:
Native DOS games with framerate display built in

thepirategamerboy mentioned Space Simulator which I had forgotten about. I do remember that having an FPS counter in it. Being a sim, I wonder if the framerate in that is uncapped - if so it might be a better test than most. It's not a game anybody cares about though. 😀

WinDoom has a framerate counter if you want to add a Windows game to your list of software.

shamino wrote on 2025-03-07, 09:25:

I wish DOS benchmarking wasn't so dependent on synthetic tests. Unfortunately, games for DOS that can be readily benchmarked ar […]
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I wish DOS benchmarking wasn't so dependent on synthetic tests. Unfortunately, games for DOS that can be readily benchmarked are rare.

This thread did come up with some though:
Native DOS games with framerate display built in

thepirategamerboy mentioned Space Simulator which I had forgotten about. I do remember that having an FPS counter in it. Being a sim, I wonder if the framerate in that is uncapped - if so it might be a better test than most. It's not a game anybody cares about though. 😀

synthetic tests are not that bad, they may not fully present real life performance, but may likely present the limit of cards.
gaming tests on the other hand, may be more presentative to real life but often bound by cpu. for example, card A may be twice as fast as card B when running with an athlonxp(both cards can be considered pushed to the max), but probably only 20% faster on a 486.

doom is a highly recognized game, but seems to send data to video card in single bytes which doesn't make use of their full power. this is probably designed for slow computers to reduce system ram access(rather than storing rendered frame in ram and then copy to video card), but becomes inefficient when cpu and ram performance improve and isa bus becomes the bottleneck.