Look there - http://vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmarks

For DOS gaming, speed is all about video memory access, and there's a bunch of cards that hit the ISA limit there: Tseng Labs ET4000 series, Acumos AVGA2 a.k.a. Cirrus Logic 5402 and above, Western Digital 90C11 and above, late variants of Trident 8900...

What makes me wonder, was there ever a fast VGA card for 16-Bit version of MCA (Micro Channel bus) ?
I mean, technically, the MCA bus was faster than ISA. And it was available as an 16-Bit native bus, suitable for 80286 PCs.

et4000

awgamer wrote on 2023-09-17, 08:36:

et4000

It's a classic, but it's a bit buggy also (Commander Keen IV).
Still, it used to be the reference VGA in the demo scene. ^^

Early Super VGA games supported it, next to Paradise PVGA.

Also had a buffer/FiFo for ISA bus, like Trident 8900D and C ?

Grzyb wrote on 2023-09-17, 08:21:

Look there - http://vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmarks

For DOS gaming, speed is all about video memory access, and there's a bunch of cards that hit the ISA limit there:
Tseng Labs ET4000 series, Acumos AVGA2 a.k.a. Cirrus Logic 5402 and above, Western Digital 90C11 and above, late variants of Trident 8900...

The list looks incomplete to me, though. I'm missing ATI VGA Wonder series, ATI V.I.P., Video 7 VEGA, Trident 8800 series, Trident 8900 series, those Realtek ones and a few no-name models.

Also, there's something unclear with the ISA card testing.
a) was the RAMBIOS utility loaded or was VGA BIOS shadowing enabled in CMOS Setup ?
Otherwise, VGA BIOS code has to be loaded each time from EPROM chips, which are interfaced through ISA bus.
b) was the period-correct VESA VBE utility from the driver/utility diskette loaded, as well ? Or was it UniVBE ?
c) at which speed was ISA running ? Basic 8 MHz or was it 10, 12, 16 MHz ? Wait states enabled/disabled ?

Jo22 wrote on 2023-09-17, 08:48:

ATI VGA Wonder series, ATI V.I.P.

They are all based on 18800 or 28800 - both are included in the benchmark: the former sucks real bad, the latter is much better but still below the ISA limit.

Trident 8800 series

There are 8800CS cards there - and they all suck.

Trident 8900 series

All Tridents up to CL-B suck, only the CL-C is OK.
I'm only wondering about the D variant - it scored poorly in that benchmark, but there may be some mistake, it's listed as "256 KB", which would be a very poor configuration for that chipset. Somebody should benchmark a proper 8900D card, with full 1 MB of RAM - I suspect it would hit the ISA limit.

Realtek

There's a few - all suck.

All suck with fast processors. somehow I dont think you will spot the difference on 286, even 25MHz one.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-09-17, 10:57:

All suck with fast processors. somehow I dont think you will spot the difference on 286, even 25MHz one.

The funny thing is that I got a benchmark rating of about 14 in Super Scape v2, on a humble 16 MHz 80286 PC with Trident 9000 (on-board).
Other sources on the web seem to be lower for some reason, don't know why. I didn't even overclock, just removed the bottlenecks (well, I tried). 🤷
All I did was to install 4 MB of quick memory modules, no wait states, loaded the RAM BIOS and VBE utility. Not sure what ISA is running at, though.

The most important thing is to use a motherboard supporting higher ISA clock speeds. If your motherboard can only operate at 7.16 MHz or 8 MHz, the graphics card will not be fully utilized.