https://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/componen … -ati-mach64-vt2

PCI Video cards benchmark: Electric Boogaloo Edition

IMHO No. And no.
Link to drivers: https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fil … 0&menustate=6,1

Win98 on a 2MB VGA card? Hope you like low-colour, low-resolution...

But if you want a sensible answer, give us more info. What doesn't the S3 Virge (which brand/model card? how much RAM?) do that you would want it to do? What improvement are you looking for?

The Mach64 chip on this card is a generation older than the S3 Virge, and in general ATi isn't good (fast or compatible) in DOS. But you might have a corner case (a Dec Alpha system with limited VGA compatibiltiy, for example) where it might be better. Probably not thoough.

dionb wrote on 2025-02-19, 15:11:

Win98 on a 2MB VGA card? Hope you like low-colour, low-resolution...

2 mb is enough for 1024x768 at 16-bit color, which is plenty for a CRT and more than plenty for any game that would run on those cards. even 1 mb may be sufficient because it doesn't appear that games bothered doing page flipping in video memory. of course some chips can use the extra memory for interleaving which helps performance.

truecolor had its uses in art creation, photo editing and other types of work but was just about pointless for the general user at the time.

dionb wrote on 2025-02-19, 15:11:

Win98 on a 2MB VGA card? Hope you like low-colour, low-resolution...

But if you want a sensible answer, give us more info. What doesn't the S3 Virge (which brand/model card? how much RAM?) do that you would want it to do? What improvement are you looking for?

The Mach64 chip on this card is a generation older than the S3 Virge, and in general ATi isn't good (fast or compatible) in DOS. But you might have a corner case (a Dec Alpha system with limited VGA compatibiltiy, for example) where it might be better. Probably not thoough.

My card is S3 virge dx Surf warrior think 4 mb model

auron wrote on 2025-02-19, 21:21:

[...]
2 mb is enough for 1024x768 at 16-bit color, which is plenty for a CRT and more than plenty for any game that would run on those cards. even 1 mb may be sufficient because it doesn't appear that games bothered doing page flipping in video memory. of course some chips can use the extra memory for interleaving which helps performance.

truecolor had its uses in art creation, photo editing and other types of work but was just about pointless for the general user at the time.

Which time?

We don't know anything about this machine other than that there's some kind of Virge in it and it runs Windows 98 - and apparently the VGA card is lacking for whatever OP wants to play. This could be a late 1999 system with P3 that's totally bottlenecked by that Virge that could use a TNT2 to good effect. Or he could be trying to run Windows 98 on a 486 with 16MB RAM and thinks it's the Virge making it unusably slow...

I'd also disagree with 1024x768@16b being 'plenty for a CRT' - maybe for a 1995-era thing, but later CRTs could happily do 1280x960@75Hz or higher (indeed, my son has one that can do 1600x1200@75Hz or 1280x1024@85Hz). For full-screen games you don't need high resolution, but for things like strategy games it was great, particularly when multi-tasking. I recall playing Colonization for Windows in one window while pretending to write up reports in Word in another - at least, I did that after I had a decent video card and monitor (ATi Rage Pro Turbo 8MB with Sun GDM20E20). So before we can judge this we need to know what hardware OP has and what he wants to do with it.

running at the maximum resolution is hardly recommended for CRTs because it tends to get blurry, unless it's a high-end monitor, and 1280x1024 shouldn't have existed as a widespread standard in the first place, really. and 1 mb could be enough for the entire 9x directdraw era, driver support will be more of a bottleneck than memory in the end.

i didn't make any recommendation for cards, but if someone wants to relive multitasking at high resolutions a matrox is preferred over a virge or ati, as far as "old pci cards" are concerned. given that and the virge, P3 and TNT2 isn't something that enters my consideration by default, and that usually entails AGP cards instead anyway.

The main feature of the ATI Mach cards is it has some basic 2d Windows GUI acceleration which was somewhat useful back when these were new, but of no real use now.
The Virge is newer, faster, more compatible and in your case has more memory. I'd consider the ATI card a downgrade in all areas accept maybe image quality.
(Both the S3 Virge and ATI Mach cards were produced for years and years by many manufactures of which the quality can vary alot)

If you do want the card, I wouldn't pay much for it.

If you're using a LCD monitor, S3 cards are consistently terrible at 320x240 output in Windows, which matters for some games that only run at that resolution such as Machine Hunter. ATi cards do not have that issue.

I have sold several for 10 euros

In my opinion they are good for DOS and relatively fast on windows applications but to play windows based games there are better (and more expensive ones) of course
2 mb is enough for 800x600 32 bit colors and that is more than enough on a 15-17 inch monitor

Cheers!