I bought a Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM (2MB) once new. This card was based on an S3 Vision968 chip. I bought it for.. 400 or 500 guilders back then (around 200 - 250 US dollars) as far as I remember.

It kind of sucked for DOS stuff unfortunately so I didn't have it very long.

I think I may have had a second-hand Diamond Viper VLB P9000 in my 486DX4-120. I remember it being much better than an ISA card for DOS games (allowing 640x480 FMV) but horribly slow in early Win95 DirectX 3-4 games such as Jedi Knight, Dink Smallwood and Diablo. May have been partially a CPU or bus limitation at that point, though.

I don't know about a Viper VLB being a good DOS card. They usually had an ISA Oak VGA chip. 😉

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~torsten/viper/models.html

I remember it being much better than an ISA card for DOS games

I'm wondering if perhaps you had an SE model, or something like that. The original Viper had an Oak VGA chipset for use in DOS mode, and I'm thinking it was run off the ISA bus (with the P9000 chip running off VLB). I could be wrong about that, but in any case, the thing wasn't really known for good DOS performance.

^Edit: swaaye beat me to it.

Related to the topic, anyone happen to know much about the Boca Vortek, or the IIT AGX chipset in general? I picked up one of those cards a few months ago since it was cheap and it looked interesting... another one of the random Windows accelerators of the time, a little more obscure than some of the others. But I can't find a whole lot about it other than some mentions of a benchmark cheating controversy. Nor can I find any drivers for it, in order to test its performance myself. 🙁

It's also possible that I replaced it at one point with a different VLB video card that worked better in DOS. I can't remember because I only messed with VLB video cards in that machine for a couple years before I bought my PII-450 with an AGP Diamond Viper V550 TNT1.

Salient wrote:

I bought a Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM (2MB) once new. This card was based on an S3 Vision968 chip. I bought it for.. 400 or 500 guilders back then (around 200 - 250 US dollars) as far as I remember.

It kind of sucked for DOS stuff unfortunately so I didn't have it very long.

Yeah I replaced an ET4000W32/p board with a 968 and it was slightly slower for everything but GUI stuff.

Since my 1st pc was a P2 with a Viper 550 (TNT AGP) I never had such cards when they were new. I'm pretty sure I have a number 9 S3 PCI card with one of those pretty looking blue squares in my attic.

My first PC from late 1992 had the ATi Graphics Ultra for ISA bus. It was a VGA Wonder with 512k + ATi Mach8 "Ultra" with it's own dedicated 1MB VRAM. The card was insanely expensive (retailed for something like $500 at the time) and was paired with an $800 Sony 14" display. While it was cutting edge at the time, VLB came out shortly after making it terribly obsolete. The card only did 8-bit colour depths, but I have to admit that it was actually quite fast at windows graphics (for ISA at least). I always wanted to replace it with a Mach32 VLB with 2mb VRAM so that I could do 24-bit colour FMV in windows, but I didn't have another $500 to blow or a motherboard with VLB slots.

Later when the Mach64 VLB came out, I wanted one of those even more (even after PCI was established as the winner). Back then I didn't know that graphics accelerators sucked at DOS. I think this was largely because my Mach8 was actually two separate cards that was good at both VGA and Windows, and I didn't realise that other cards which used VRAM for DOS graphics were slow.

Hmm... and here I thought I was pretty clever, researching for months (magazines - no internet!) before assembling my Pentium 100 computer in spring 1995 with a PCI Diamond Stealth 64V 2mb vram and Vision968 chip .

Seeing it getting lotsa praise in the magz at the time.... had it for 3 years until I had* to upgrade in late 1998 - but never occurred to me that it sucked for DOS... 😕
What was/am I missing ? This was my first computer, so had nothing to compare it with, other than some 386machines at the uni.

(*: having only DOS and win311 all that time, limited budget - no win95(!), while the number of playable DOS games were dwindling ever faster in numbers)

Well, S3 968 doesn't exactly suck for DOS. It's just not as fast as say ET4000 W32/p. You can definitely do worse and I wouldn't be surprised if 968 has good compatibility with games.

An S3 Vision 968 comes close to a Trio64 in DOS speed, if you use the S3 DOS tools. (S3VBE, S3SPDUP...).
As for the Weitek P9100, I got several of these cards http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/papilio_ultracad.jpg
When booting directly into DOS the cards are somewhat slow, but they were highly focused to be used from within windows and this shows.
This means if you are within Win9x the driver enables some additional features as PCI burst support and even replaces the cards BIOS image in a DOS window within windows with a VBE 3.0 compatible version. This is quite unusual. If you have such behaviour with the VLB card too, check the DOS benches within a Win9x DOS window too.

As for the Win Accelerators, how about a IBM 8614/A ? It's old, expensive and it's 2D-acceleration features are used in Win 3.x to speed up rendering.