AvocadoLongfall wrote on 2023-09-02, 07:30:
I see. Is there an all rounder vlb card that works fine with windows and dos?
Most will do so; for DOS bus speed is most important for performance so all VLB cards will be similar. If (but only if) you want to play SVGA scrolling games, VESA support is relevant. Basically, S3 and Cirrus Logic are exceptionally good at that, Matrix and ATi below par.
For Windows, acceleration and amount of video memory (supported resolutions) matter. Late S3 (868/968/Trio) and ATi Mach32 cards with at least 2MB are great, as are late Trident and GD543x Cirrus Logic cards. Avoid early GD542x cards as they can't sensibly use 2MB, or anything limited to 1MB.
That said, it's not as if you can walk into a shop and choose from any number of VLB cards these days. It's usually better to work the other way round and see what is the best match out of what you can find for an acceptable price available to you.
But to chime in with everyone else: Win95 on a 486 is not fun. I had to suffer it back at uni and the experience was so bad I stuck to Win3.1 on my Pentium 60 until I could afford a Celeron in 1999 to run Win98SE.
Oh, one final thing: you referred to 'integrated' ISA video. There's no such thing. Integrated video means the video subsystem shares other system resources (usually RAM) with rest of system. It was pioneered in high-end SGI workstations but in the PC world became synonymous with low-end low-performance, as shared memory bandwidth badly limited such systems. First integrated video appeared in Pentium chipsets around 1996.
What you're talking about is onboard video, which is just the same components as would be on a separate card soldered onto a motherboard to save space and a bit of costs. Performance is identical to same clocked components on a separate card using the same bus.
I'm not sure in this specific case but a lot of 486 onboard video used VLB, even if the system only had ISA slots for additional cards. Might be worth checking as it makes a big difference in DOS performance and might mean you don't need a separate card or indeed system for your goal. Also, if Win95 sucks on that, don't expect it to run significantly better on any 486...
