VOGONS


First post, by retro games 100

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

Introduction
I am testing a VGA VLB Tseng STB ET4000 W32P video card. It's made by STB, and is part of their LightSpeed series of video cards. It has 2MB of RAM.

1) Link to a Windows 3.x driver, including a utility to set the resolution and refresh rate inside Windows 3.x (mpoli files website, et4-w32p file name, files dated 11/08/94)
2) Link to a newer driver, but without the additional utility mentioned above. (mpoli files website, w31w32fe file name, files dated 17/02/1995)
3) Link to an older STB Lightspeed driver.
4) Link to the Windows 95 driver (mpoli, W95W320.ZIP file name)

Notes
1) & 2) There seems to be 6 different driver packages for Windows 3.x on the mpoli files website. I've checked the dates for each package, and the best two seem to be the ones that I have linked to above. The first driver package uses an older driver, but it's got a useful Windows 3.x tool to select the resolution and corresponding refresh rate. I tried 1280x1024 @ 60 Hz, and it worked! The second driver package does not contain any utilities, but the drivers are newer. They look like different drivers, but when I installed them, the 1280x1024 @ 60 Hz worked OK. I do not know if it worked well like this, because I had previously installed and run the refresh utility, or if they worked well because this high resolution defaults to 60 Hz. For an image of this utility, please see the image below titled "The resolution and refresh rate utility".

3) I guess that the Windows 95 CD-ROM will have a similar driver "built in to it". The w95 driver linked to above had a date circa '95, whereas the "built in" w95 had a date circa '96. I wonder if there's any difference between the two, other than Microsoft just checking to see if it was OK, and adding it to their driver database on the w95 CD, and adding their own datestamp? Or maybe they tweaked it a bit, who knows?
4) Although it's older than the other drivers listed here, it seems to be for the STB Lightspeed Tseng card, and is therefore appropriate to include. It aso has a Win NT driver sub folder.

Questions
1) Is it possible to take the driver listed in the above list number #1, and then somehow do a "forced upgrade" of its important driver files using the driver listed in list number #2? What I mean is - driver #1 seems old, and driver #2 seems newer. But driver #1 includes a useful utility, and seems to be "tied to" its own driver, whereas driver #2 does not have this utility. Can you "cherry pick" the best bits of each package, and kind of "squash 'em together", to produce a newer driver package, with the utility from driver list #1 "linked to" the driver files in list #2? I doubt it actually. I mean, I doubt if any of that drivel makes any sense.

Benchmarks
I'm testing this card on an Asus VL/I-486SV2GX4 revision 2.1 mobo. It has an AMD DX4 120 MHz (write back) CPU in it, with 1 stick of 16MB FPM. I have been using 3DBench version 1.0, Quake, Doom, WinTune 2.0 for Windows 3.x, and WinTune 97 for Windows 95. For all of these tests, I have run them using the mobo's FSB setting of 50. I can run this mobo+CPU with every setting (both mobo and BIOS) maxed out. I increased the CPU's voltage jumper from 3.3 to 3.6.

* 3Dbench 1.0 = reading off the scale! I then ran 3DBench 1.0c and got 96.0. That's so surprising. The Windows 3.11 scores are great for this card, faster than the VLB S3 805 card I have tested recently, but for this DOS test, it's fractionally slower than this S3 805 card. For that card, I got 97.4.
* Quake shareware 1.06, fullscreen timedemo demo1 = 13.9
* Doom shareware 1.9s, fullscreen timedemo demo3 = 2134/1306
* PcpBench, vgamode = 21.9. That's more like it. This score beats the S3 805 card's score of 20.0.

The resolution and refresh rate utility. It works in Windows 3.11 (WFWG), for 1280x1024 @ 60 Hz for an LCD monitor.
tseng.jpg

Wintune 2.0 for Windows 3.11, Video score comparisons. It beats all Pentium 90 machines!
tseng1.jpg

Wintune 2.0 for Windows 3.11, Video score.
tseng2.jpg

The card.
ts.jpg

Wintune 97, for Windows 95.
ts_vid.jpg

Reply 1 of 3, by retro games 100

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

I ran some more DOS benchies, X-Vesa, and VidSpeed4. Here are the links to both of these programs. Here and here. For these two tests, I ran them both in 640x480x8 mode. Here are the results -

VidSpeed4, in 640x480x8 mode
80486 with VGA 2meg Vesa VBE support
------------------------------------
24812W 30663R Bytes per millisecond Normal Ram
54458W 53417R 16 bit writes/reads
108916W 80254R 32 bit writes/reads

10835W 4913R Bytes per millisecond 28.80KHz 59.99Hz 640x480x256 (S-VGA)
21670W 9590R 16 bit writes/reads
43341W 18472R 32 bit writes/reads

X-Vesa 1.02, in 640x480x8 mode
VESA video mode speed result
VESA Version: 1.2
OEM name: STB Lightspeed ET4000/W32P
Capabilities: 00000000
Video memory: 2,048 Kbytes - Detected: 2,048 Kbytes
Video mode: 0101 - (640x480x8)
Read 8 bit: 4,800 Kb/s
Read 16 bit: 9,370 Kb/s
Read 32 bit: 17,900 Kb/s
Read 64 bit: 15,600 Kb/s
Read 80 bit: 14,000 Kb/s
Write 8 bit: 10,500 Kb/s
Write 16 bit: 21,000 Kb/s
Write 32 bit: 41,700 Kb/s
Write 64 bit: 41,300 Kb/s
Write 80 bit: 34,900 Kb/s

Reply 2 of 3, by noshutdown

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

man i really love tseng's et3000/4000 pre-pci video cards, they are godlike in the dos days, but i only managed to get an isa et4000 with 512k ram, which could not even display 16bit colors.
can you test your cards with quake2 crusher?(in software rendering mode of course) 😁
but really, have to admit that the best isa card in windows would go to ati mach64. 😠