I think that they were cheap cards with no 2d acceleration for windows, while in their time (1990-1992/3) there were other faster cards.

8900C is a dog for SVGA. I found a measly Cirrus Logic 5426 to be like 2x faster. Your 386 is very likely a bottleneck. Put it in a high end 486 and compare. I got a 8900C in a DX2/50 machine.

And yeah the 8900C has no Windows acceleration at all. Some of their later stuff does of course but it was still subpar. I had a friend with a VLB Trident 9400 CXi and it was clearly slower than the VLB ET4000 W32/p which I gave him.

I would imagine that their PCI hardware wasn't too bad for Windows. Very cheap. Decent value, especially compared to overrated stuff like Matrox's $400 cards (assuming you don't need 1600x1200x24 or similar).

So what's the worst ISA card you can get?

My 386 went into warranty once and they replaced the VGA card with one from OAK. All my games ran slower...

Most of the early VGA stuff. They had slow RAM, slow memory interfaces, ISA bus, no GUI hardware, no VESA VBE, etc.

You really want something on VLB or PCI from 1994 or later.

With some games that break because of your 486s speed you want a slow graphics card 😁

How many SVGA games were there that would run on a 386 anyway?
I'm just curious since I know a few people are running tseng cards in their 386.

So it's a tie between Trident and Oak?

Anyway, would putting anything faster then either of these 2 in a 386 make any noticable difference?

If all else fails, there are ISA based ET4000 and Mach64 cards.
Those have a good reputation for ISA cards ... the later is damn rare tho.

shock__ wrote:

If all else fails, there are ISA based ET4000 and Mach64 cards.
Those have a good reputation for ISA cards ... the later is damn rare tho.

\

I'll second the Mach64 as being one of the best ISA boards you can get. I think Mach64 was the last chipset to be released on the ISA bus and had 1, 2 or 4 megs of memory so you get either more resolution or more colors with them than most other ISA boards. I actually have two of them. An ATi Graphics Xpression with 2mb DRAM and a ATi Graphics Pro Turbo with 4mb VRAM. Both are boxed but the 2mb card is opened. The other is still sealed. It can be really hard to find them for reasonable prices these days. Too many people know what they are and how hard they are to find. You can find them in PCI fairly easily and even Sun and Mac versions aren't hard to get but the ISA's are really rare. Most people were making the migration to motherboards with PCI slots by the time it was released so it never sold well in ISA.

Hows the performance of the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434 ISA card fit into this? I have one with 2MB and, even though these were never considered high end, it was, afaik, the last CL chip to have made it on an ISA card.

I'm glad I killed my OAK VGA card and replaced it with an ATI Graphics Ultra Pro mach32 ISA with 2MB VRAM... yeah, I was still using my 386SX/16 at the time and was in no position to upgrade to a 486... I got the card used and it was still pretty expensive... I managed to get the manuals and driver floppies later on when I knew someone that worked at ATI at the time

still have the card, manual, drivers somewhere 😀

if I ever get the heart to resurrect my 386 (still have the board too), I'll throw that card in

The cirrus logic cards were also cheap, but as they were accelerators they were a lot faster than the older trident 8900x based cards. I remember reading a 1993 magazine that was having a test for 386sx pcs. They were affordable pcs for that time, but supposed to run windows. The first was a 386sx-40 which had a CL 5426 card, and had the best score, and the second was an IBM 386sx-25 with a CL 5422, that had also very decent performance. However some systems had trident 8900 cards. They described this chip as "ancient", and (I quote the exact words from one) "we have to mention again, that this chip and also the cards that make use of it, are ancient and suitable only for upgrading 286 systems graphics cards, for our kids to play PacMan. The limitation of the 8bit DAC to only 256 color doesn't bother us so much, as even in that case you have to wait for a century for a window to move"..... I guess the latter has to do with that specific card, as some others I think had drivers for more than 256 colors.
From my experience, I remember having just upgraded to a Pentium 100 with 8MB ram. I had a cheap 256kb vga, and I wanted to run Need For Speed, so I couldn't as it required at least a 512kb SVGA. So I bought a used trident 8900 with 1MB. The game would play, even on high resolution. It wasn't as fast as possible, but I remember it being playable( as opposed to my best friends 486dx2/66 with VL bus CL card that would play it only on low-res). And then I bought a CL PCI card(I think 5436), and with that the game would run perfect.

CL chips slaughter the Trident 8900C. I will vouch for that with first hand experience. Mainly in SVGA, but I'm sure you could tell in VGA as well if your CPU isn't too slow.

In a 386 though you may not be able to notice because the CPU will be the bottleneck almost without exception.

Back in my ISA 386 days the choice of video card did matter. My OAK was a dog and I later got an ISA ET4000 and the difference was very noticeable.

My next machine was VLB based and I made sure I got a good card. I went with a VLB ET4000 which totally killed for DOS gaming performance!

Next machine was PCI based and I had a S3 Trio 64 V+ because German magazine PC Player recommended highly recommended it. Got a Creative Labs 3DFX a bit later. Was a good combination with a Pentium 133.

I had this "Wing Commander" Strategy Guide and it covered hardware and it too recommended an ET4000 for you 386 PC.

I guess I've forgotten how bad Trident 8900 really was. 😀

Once windows took off things became more interesting. RAW speed didn't matter as much as "Windows acceleration" features.

Though when I sold my ISA ET4000 to a school friend, he told me how much better it was under Windows 3.1 🤣

There was German computer magazine which did DOS video throughput tests and once cards went to VLB the VLB ET4000 was the king of the hill. I remember seeing the score and though ZOMG and then I got a VLB ET4000 and it was lighting fast...

Back in those days when you typed in DIR you could see the difference in speed betweek computers 😜

Vobis (Huge German Computer chain) add from 1993!

ET4000 and Mach32. Prices are in DM (Deutsche Mark). Divide by 2 to get the price in Euros:

I keep a 1 Mb Trident 8900C just to recover from bad flashes. Used it only once in all these years for that purpose. I also remember having tried it on a Pentium II-something, and Curse of Monkey Island sort of worked, was almost playable.

I made an interesting little discovery today. I was hunting some stuff down on TH99 and in the process ran across the a match for one of my Trident cards... and I found that it was set to the forced 8-bit mode. That got some gears turning in my head, and in one of my rare of moments of insight, I took a look at my other Trident cards, and found the diagrams for those as well. And sure enough, out of the five I own, every damn one of them was set to 8-bit mode.

I'm wondering if maybe that is part of the reason these things perform OK for some people and not for others. That's one of those settings I'd never even thought to look at, since you'd normally expect a 16-bit card to be set to 16-bit mode. I'm going to have to re-test a couple of the ones I have, now that they're set up correctly, and see how they compare to other cards now.