According to an archive of the S3 website, that was the only official Win98 driver for that card. Also IMO that cards is better suited for DOS games, maybe you just need something faster than that. PCI cards that can do 3D are becoming rarer each day, so better grab what you can. 😀

The issue isn't exactly low framerates. Just that the motion will be fairly consistent for a bit and then become really jittery for no reason even if I'm just sitting in a menu or an FMV is playing, etc. It seems to effect anything using DirectX. I'm pretty sure this is a Win9x era card, too, and perhaps newer than Win95 itself because the OS doesn't come with drivers for it. Maybe I'll try to film a video of what I'm talking about later. I may also try reinstalling Windows and see if that helps.

I just installed Win98 SE on a different hard drive as a test to see if these issues would happen under there. Using the video driver and DirectX 6.1a that Win98 comes with, everything works fine. No jittering issues at all. So, there's something wrong with my Win95 installation. I'd much rather use Win95 because system performance overall is a bit speedier. If it's possible, how could I go about downgrading my DirectX version and seeing if that fixes it? Also, the driver Win98 comes with is newer, being from 1999, is there any way I could extract that and use it under Win95?

I downgraded to DirectX 6.1 and... it sadly didn't fix the issue.

thepirategamerboy12 wrote on 2021-02-24, 11:41:

Also, the driver Win98 comes with is newer, being from 1999, is there any way I could extract that and use it under Win95?

I've transplanted Ati Rage Pro WinME drivers to Win98, it was a matter of figuring out in which .cab file on the cd the files were, and then extracting the relevant .inf/vxd/etc files. If you know in which .inf file to look, it will say what other files it requires. Or you could probably just extract all of them, point the new hardware wizard there, and pick the right device. I'm sorry that I can't give more specific instructions, it was a while ago.

Of course if the driver actually works with an older OS is another matter, I'm not well versed in how compatible Win95/98 video drivers might (not) be.

Oetker wrote on 2021-02-24, 13:43:

I've transplanted Ati Rage Pro WinME drivers to Win98, it was a matter of figuring out in which .cab file on the cd the files were, and then extracting the relevant .inf/vxd/etc files. If you know in which .inf file to look, it will say what other files it requires. Or you could probably just extract all of them, point the new hardware wizard there, and pick the right device. I'm sorry that I can't give more specific instructions, it was a while ago.

Of course if the driver actually works with an older OS is another matter, I'm not well versed in how compatible Win95/98 video drivers might (not) be.

I'll give that a shot and let you know if I'm successful or not.

thepirategamerboy12 wrote on 2021-02-24, 11:41:

I'd much rather use Win95 because system performance overall is a bit speedier.

You may also try to use Win98 First Edition (4.10.1998). I think it is better suited for earlier systems.
Moreover you can use 98lite to strip IE from it.

Well, as I expected, using a 98 driver didn't work. I got it to install (it's dxs3.inf, fyi), but every time I'd try to use it after restarting it will always give me an error saying the display adapter is disabled and even if I enable it It'll just give me the same error again after restarting once more.

zyga64 wrote on 2021-02-25, 11:11:

You may also try to use Win98 First Edition (4.10.1998). I think it is better suited for earlier systems.
Moreover you can use 98lite to strip IE from it.

I have tried 98lite before, and honestly I didn't really like it. Installing it breaks the Win98 USB mass storage driver, too. Fyi, I do have USB mass storage working under Win95 on this machine.

On my Win95 OSR2.5 CD, there is this folder:

1D:\DRIVERS\DISPLY\S3_2

According to the readme file, it contains drivers for S3 Trio32/64. Not sure if these will work on your card, but it might be worth a look.

thepirategamerboy12 wrote on 2021-02-25, 12:45:

zyga64 wrote on 2021-02-25, 11:11:

You may also try to use Win98 First Edition (4.10.1998). I think it is better suited for earlier systems.
Moreover you can use 98lite to strip IE from it.

I have tried 98lite before, and honestly I didn't really like it. Installing it breaks the Win98 USB mass storage driver, too. Fyi, I do have USB mass storage working under Win95 on this machine.

Never quite had that problem with 98lite, Nate Lineback's hacked USB95 driver at least seemed to work fine regardless of 98lite.
http://toastytech.com/files/w95usbflash11.exe

that behavior vaguely sounds to me like a badly running vsync, so i would try the "override directdraw refresh" option which i think was under dxdiag.

if that doesn't help the best option is to plug in a different card and see if that changes anything... i'm just curious though, what games show this behavior exactly? since you mention fmvs - i'm pretty sure that for instance the age of empires 2 intro never played all that smoothly for me from CD, even on setups newer than that game.

You might want to try SciTech Display Doctor. It can be used as a universal Windows 9x driver for a number of PCI graphics cards of the era, including the S3 Trio64, and I'm fairly sure the V2 as well.

I remember using this as an alternative driver for the Diamond Edge3D (based on the NVIDIA NV1 chip), and I got considerably better results with it than with the official or chipset-specific drivers for that card.

Give it a try.

auron wrote on 2021-02-25, 16:47:

that behavior vaguely sounds to me like a badly running vsync, so i would try the "override directdraw refresh" option which i think was under dxdiag.

if that doesn't help the best option is to plug in a different card and see if that changes anything... i'm just curious though, what games show this behavior exactly? since you mention fmvs - i'm pretty sure that for instance the age of empires 2 intro never played all that smoothly for me from CD, even on setups newer than that game.

I've been using Virtua Cop and Atlantis: The Lost Tales as my main benchmarks for this problem since they're the easiest ones to spot it with.

Virtua Cop runs very smoothly on here with 320x240 or whatever the lowest resolution is, until the issue suddenly pops up and then the game runs very jittery for about 30 seconds and it then becomes very smooth again for a little while more. It doesn't matter what's going on in the scene, the issue triggers at totally random spots.

Now here's an example with Atlantis. I'm just sitting on one of the 360 degree panoramas, and for a bit when moving the mouse you can look around the panorama at a fairly smooth/consistent framerate. However, once the issue randomly decides to pop up, it's no longer smooth and instead quite jerky with it skipping frames. Eventually it'll go back to being smooth again, but soon the issue will just come back. It's very distracting, and as I said earlier, it doesn't matter what I'm actually doing in the game. It pops up whenever it feels like it.

I'll try looking for that option later, thanks.

digger wrote on 2021-02-25, 22:37:

You might want to try SciTech Display Doctor. It can be used as a universal Windows 9x driver for a number of PCI graphics cards of the era, including the S3 Trio64, and I'm fairly sure the V2 as well.

I remember using this as an alternative driver for the Diamond Edge3D (based on the NVIDIA NV1 chip), and I got considerably better results with it than with the official or chipset-specific drivers for that card.

Give it a try.

I will do so, thanks. I'll let you know how it goes later.

Just tried SDD and... it didn't really work out. It was a nightmare to install, kept blue screening the first few attempts, but eventually got it working and the perfomance may actually be worse now when using the SDD driver. The DXDiag refresh rate override didn't help, either. I think next I'll test installing Win95 on a spare hard drive and if the issues don't happen there, I'll reinstall it on the main drive. As I said earlier, this issue did not occur when I briefly tested Win98, but I want to avoid installing that instead of 95. I'm gonna take a break before trying that, though, because this is really annoying me. Reinstalling Win95 on the main drive will really suck since I have so much stuff on there... I do appreciate all of you guys trying to help me, by the way.

I just don't get why things are the way there are right now. I also have a Toshiba Tecra 550CDT Pentium 266mmx laptop with an integrated S3 Virge and also has Windows 95 as the OS, and that's been running great and it wasn't hard at all to get it up and running.

Atlantis: The Lost Tales is know for disk access woes. Also the symptoms when running Virtua Cop makes me think it's an disk access problem somehow. Are there any DMA settings in 95 you can check?

Rawit wrote on 2021-02-26, 10:32:

Atlantis: The Lost Tales is know for disk access woes. Also the symptoms when running Virtua Cop makes me think it's an disk access problem somehow. Are there any DMA settings in 95 you can check?

Atlantis is running entirely from the hard drive using the patch from this post: Getting rid of CD-Check on Atlantis: The Lost Tales. It runs pretty much exactly the same from the CDs anyway. Also, Virtua Cop only uses the CD for CD audio when you're in a stage. This happens with games running completely from the hard drive, too, like for example the puzzle game Flux. And yes, DMA is enabled on the HDD.

one difference between 95 and 98 is how the swap file and vcache are managed; if you have a lot of RAM installed (even just >32mb, according to some), it's usually said to set 95 to manually limit the vcache size because it can grow quite large and take a lot of memory away from programs to use. you can install system monitor from the windows install cd (add programs -> components -> accessories, i think) to check what your "faulty" win95 installation is doing in terms of things like this, and also cpu load; just note that the cpu load measurements are broken under win98 ACPI installs.