I'm sure its okay but I guess i'm a bit of a power whore. Id like to try and run the more intensive 3D games like Doom or even Duke 3D perhaps. Though id sacrifice a little power for more compatibility.

Id like to try and run the more intensive 3D games like Doom or even Duke 3D perhaps.

Doom and Duke3d will run just fine on your Cirrus. I think you may be misunderstanding how much of a role the video card plays in all this. Those "3D" games aren't actually 3D in the modern sense. DOS games like that don't even take advantage of any graphics acceleration.

On these old cards, acceleration refers only to the 2D GUI acceleration... redrawing windows, displaying graphics files, stuff like that... and it's only useful in a GUI environment, like Windows or OS/2. DOS doesn't use any of those capabilities, the graphics card really only serves as a basic framebuffer.

That doesn't mean all cards are the same in DOS, there are other factors involved, but all other things being equal (CPU speed, bus interface, etc.), a "fast" DOS card isn't that much faster than an average DOS card.

I did some testing this week, running Doom 1.9 on my 486DX2/66, using demo3. With my CL5426 card, I get 3755 realtics. With my Trio64 based Diamond Stealth, I get 3602 realtics. That's a 4 percent improvement.

That's a real improvment, but it's also a pretty small improvement. Benchmarks (e.g. test57 on Simtel) show a much larger difference between the cards. The Trio64 is at least twice as fast at simply drawing to the screen, but if you're playing Doom, you're CPU limited.

Windows may be another story. I'm not putting 9x on this thing, but I may test it in 3.11. Any thoughts on an appropriate benchmark?

I think I will leave it for the time being though I will probably look into it again at the end of this year or the new year. Got some valuable info yet again though so thanks guys. 😀