Did you use the same VGA cable for both?

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Did you use the same VGA cable for both?

Yes, same cables, same capture card/settings.

It's a feature! Free bilinear filtering!

Virge cards were usually cheaply built and sold for cheap too. Unless it was from Diamond, in which case it was cheaply built and then sold for a lot of money. 😀

free filtering? that's a feature , not defect 😁 😁 😁

Is the S3 card a brand named one? or just an "oem" built?

swaaye wrote:

Virge cards were usually cheaply built and sold for cheap too. Unless it was from Diamond, in which case it was cheaply built and then sold for a lot of money. 😀

Yes, exactly. You should be picky about which card you get IF you want to run a Virge on a daily basis. Here is my STB Velocity 3D (S3 Virge VX), which was a highend Virge card directed towards CAD users with its 8MB of RAM. The 8MB version cost 349 dollars at launch (they even offered lifetime warranty! 🤣) . It does give the Matrox some competition in sharpness, but the colors are still more vibrant on the Matrox:

keropi wrote:

Is the S3 card a brand named one? or just an "oem" built?

It's an Appian Duet. So a branded card. I wonder though if it was like this when new or if age has made the output this bad.

To me it looks like the color difference is just brightness / contrast. The cards have different maximum levels on the analog outputs, this could be compensated by the controls of the CRT monitor.

The EMI filtering does hit hard though. Wonder if the good cards passed the test 😉

To me it looks like the color difference is just brightness / contrast. The cards have different maximum levels on the analog outputs, this could be compensated by the controls of the CRT

That's almost word-for-word what I was about to say. Some cards just drive the output signals a little hotter than others... not a big deal, that's part of the reason why monitors have brightness/contrast adjustments in the first place.

vetz wrote:

And still people want S3 Virge's in their old computers for DOS gaming?

They put S3 cards in their DOS gaming rigs because they are more compatible, not because they look better.

Who the heck needs 3dfx if you have one of these?

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

To me it looks like the color difference is just brightness / contrast. The cards have different maximum levels on the analog outputs, this could be compensated by the controls of the CRT

That's almost word-for-word what I was about to say. Some cards just drive the output signals a little hotter than others... not a big deal, that's part of the reason why monitors have brightness/contrast adjustments in the first place.

I have a brand new Sony trinitron CRT and no matter what settings I fiddle with, I can't get any of the several other PCI VGA cards I've tried to produce the same bright, vibrant colours of a Matrox Mystique.

Go Matrox!

The best thing to do is skip the Trio/Virge and go with something more recent. I use a Savage 4, perfect for testing my motherboards from 486 up.

@vetz Can you please re-upload the image? It's not showing up anymore.

Funny that this just got necroed. Last week I swapped a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (a very nice ViRGE card) for a Matrox Millennium. I was quite pleased with the improvement in 2d IQ

You couldn't tell on your $300 .39 dot pitch 14" monitor because you didn't wanna spring $500 for a .28 15"

Barbrady wrote on 2021-05-17, 23:30:

@vetz Can you please re-upload the image? It's not showing up anymore.

Fixed 😀

Yeah I love S3 but my Pentium MMX machine has a Matrox Millennium 2 and it is amazing 2d.

I have two Virge cards from Elsa and Miro. They are fast and have relatively sharp output, but something about their image always felt off. Nothing too obvious, but a lack of brightness and dull colors. I remembered this thread and how impressed I was by the comparison above, and I decided to make my own little test of the Virge's against a few other cards.

These are the contenders:

Cirrus Logic CL-GD5440
S3 Virge (Miro)
S3 Virge (Elsa)
Trident TGUI9680
Control: Ennyah Geforce 4 TI 4200 (best VGA output quality of all my cards)

This is the scene for comparison:

And here's how each card displayed it (click here for bigger version, Forum upload made it too small):

The Elsa has the darkest image and the lowest color saturation. The Miro comes next with noticeably more vibrant colors, but it is still darker than the other cards. Both Virges have excellent sharpness however. Next comes the Cirrus Logic, it has a slighty softer image, but its higher brightness and saturation are immediately noticeable and make for a much more vibrant image. The Trident is even brighter than the Cirrus, but has less saturated colors and lower sharpness. The Geforce, as expected, is absolutely flawless.

I should note that the differences between the cards are more striking in person. The pictures are not screen captures, they were photographed off my LCD screen with a phone, and to a certain extent, the phone seems to try to compensate for the lack of brightness and colors. So the real difference is even bigger.

I'm glad that I did this test, and my suspicions were confirmed, even my name-brand Virge cards are crap. One thing to mention is that they are not generally poor quality, they have both sharper output than the Cirrus and Trident cards. It is just the brightness and color saturation that is off. The Trident card is very slow and has washed out colors, but even that I would prefer any day over the Virge cards with their dull picture.

Now of course, this test sample is way too small to draw a general conclusion, and you can still argue that the quality of the card matters more than its graphics chip. But there seem to be some recurring characteristics among the cards, for example, all Trident cards that I own are blurry with washed out colors, but they are exceptionally bright. And this dull picture problem seems to be common among S3 cards.

It would be interesting to know if these issues are similar with CRTs. I know that some older video cards or chips do have colour problems with more modern LCDs, although S3 cards in general aren't generally considered bad in this regard.