I don't believe VBE was loaded for the tests.
As far as I know the only major change to the Trio64 over the 864 was the RAMDAC. Many 864s used an 8-bit RAMDAC, so compared to those cards the Trio64 should offer a better windows experience on a CRT due to support for higher refresh rates. Most of the Diamond 864 cards seem to have the 16-bit RAMDAC equipped as far as I can tell.
I can't recall exactly when the Trio64 came out in relation to the 868 and 968, but as the 968 is VRAM it is indeed a little slower in DOS, but for a VRAM card it's still very fast. I was surprised to see that on the Mach64 cards the DOS performance was identical in both the DRAM and VRAM versions.
"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
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