Are you sure about CL-5429? I get more FPS on a much slower system.

No, there's a mistake it's a copy past of the trident line 🙁
I'll have to run that one again, sorry guys.

edit : mmm, one result is different. Dunno what happend, i'll run it again sometime.

I noticed something interesting with my VLB cards. I've been working on an EISA/VLB Pentium system which uses an OPTi 69x series chipset. Normally on my EISA/VL systems I will use either an ET4000W32P or an ARK1000VL. However, the ET4000W32P does not work in this system at all (so I cannot test it). The ARK1000VL works fine, but surprisingly it does not appear to be working as quickly as it should. I ended up cycling through an S3-968, Mach64, S3 Trio64, and to my surprise on this system the Trio64 felt the fastest (it did not on my SiS 406/411 based 486s). While I definitely need to spend more time looking into this, I suspect that the performance of a given VLB card can vary quite a bit depending on the system it is installed in.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I suspect that the performance of a given VLB card can vary quite a bit depending on the system it is installed in.

That has been my experience too. Some chipsets just don't get along, to the point of being down right incompatible at times. I've found for example that OPTI 495SLC motherboards and ET4000AX VLB cards (tried multiples of each) just don't like each other. All part of the 486 experience!

I'm pretty sure all Tseng VLB cards are quite picky. I've had issues with them in many of the boards I've tried. I believe they use too many I/O ports or something.

In my experience S3 graphics chips don't overclock well. This is based on my observations of two 964s, a 968 and a Trio64. Sometimes not even totally stable at 40MHz. However, the Tseng and ARK chips are excellent overclockers. I've run the ARK1000 at 66MHz on VLB with no graphics related problems.

So while Trio64 can be said to be superior in many circumstances, for my present needs it's not suitable.
Does anyone have any experience running their Trio64 at 40 or 50MHz? I currently own a Hercules Terminator 64 DRAM VLB.

squareguy wrote on 2014-09-28, 19:21:

3: Compatibility, compatibility, compatibility!!! Preferably without tools that need to be used for different games. Becomes a […]
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3: Compatibility, compatibility, compatibility!!! Preferably without tools that need to be used for different games. Becomes a pain in the arse quickly!

Ok. Here is my vote

S3 Trio64V+ (86C765)

Have a look at http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ and you can see it is compatible across the board with one notable exception, Duke Nukem 3D @ 1024x768. I wouldn't play at that resolution anyway.
It doesn't need any tools other than S3VBE or S3Refresh and it is 100% compatible with both.

That was not my experience back in the day.

I remember Warcraft II locking up with a hanging harsh buzzing sound coming from the sound card in a Pentium 100 system with a Trio64V+ installed. Apparently the version of the outdated Universal VBE 2.0 driver that came bundled with that game would confuse the Trio64V+ with an older Trio64V card (sans the plus at the end). I later figured out that I could get the game to work by loading a newer VBE 2.0 driver that did support the Trio64V+ card. On startup, the game would then detect the existing VBE 2.0 support offered by the separately loaded driver, and skip loading the bundled older driver.

So this card would still require the loading of a separate VESA driver, at least for Warcraft II.