Not completely sure, but the "305 AGP" makes me wonder if it could be a SiS 305 based OEM card of some sort. Anybodys guess which manufacturer it might have come from though.

Sis 305,never heard of that graphics chip,i'll look it up on the internet,thx for the info.

I think it was mainly used as integrated graphics on SiS chipset motherboards. But I've seen some SiS 305 cards for sale on ebay when looking for retro parts, so I would guess this might be one of these.

the closest match i found was this, a HIS 305 AGP card.

You can try to find something on the internet by searching the PCI ID (that is if at least that part of the chip is still functional).

SiS 300, 305 and 315 were released between the Savages and the Xabres. Strictly budget cards.

Are you thinking of reusing the bios chip of the video card in your soyo motherboard?
Otherwise, if it is the SiS 305 based card then you can forget about gaming (atleast half-life1 & newer ones). maybe dos games will be ok. I have a sis 630 chipset based motherboard which has an integrated sis 305 and I can't get more than 17 fps in halflife.

gandhig wrote:

Are you thinking of reusing the bios chip of the video card in your soyo motherboard?

No,i just got it cheap didn't know what it was and was curious about it,kinda hopped for something else.
Didn't find a lot of info on the internet about it,it's succesor the 315 had somewhat better performance,equivalent to a geforce 2 mx. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/dis … lay/sis315.html

HIS used this PCB for SiS 300 already. Discrete 305 cards are fairly common and runs Half Life easily. It is in the class of 64 bit TNT2 or Rage 128.

@Putas, do you mean to say that there might be considerable difference between SiS 305 'integrated' & 'discrete' ones. today i dusted up my SiS630 based ECS-P6STPFL mainboard with 700 MHz Celeron and 128 MB PC133 CL3 SDRAM and did some benchmarks. I have already tweaked the chipset registers with the help of SIS630 datasheet for max performance as the BIOS settings were conservative and many of them were not available.
3DBench2 score=333.5
PCPBench score=118
Speedsys Vesa memory Bandwidth = 29.3 MB/s
Vspeed DRAM to banked VGA, Linear FB = 44.13, 44.61 MB/s

Though i didn't play halflife today, iirc i didn't get playable frame rates. do you remember the min/max fps for SiS305 for halflife. BTW are you an ex-employee of SiS or something?

Shared memory can make significant difference. 2d benchmarks are IMO irrelevant for chips of this time.

gandhig wrote:

do you remember the min/max fps for SiS305 for halflife

No, I only remember trying it and even more advanced games were just fine.

gandhig wrote:

BTW are you an ex-employee of SiS or something?

no way

Putas wrote:

Shared memory can make significant difference.

Though the minimum shared memory setting available in bios was 2M, i found a host bridge register setting to disable the Shared Memory (Host Bridge Reg:63, bit 7) and tried to disable it with a DOS tool. However the system hanged and i guess it can be done only before POST, in which case bios mod will be required.

If you were running with the integrated graphics then no surprise, you cut off all of it's memory.

No, i had my discrete PCI card hooked up at that time. Actually this approach worked nicely with the VIA chipset board and i was able to gain a few FPS all around.

SiS305 AGP 32MB i tested have 69,9FPS in glquake 640x480 - see http://vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmarks/310-glquake
Thats right between Savage 3D and Savage 4. For example Ati rage 128vr 8MB have 81FPS and vanta LT have 100FPS. So its comparable to slowest 2nd gen 1998 3D cards, but this one came out in 2000. So usable only for collecting, almost everything you got almost for free is faster than this. In 1024 have only 29fps, so its unusable in higher resolutions too.
In unreal 640x480 - 33,5FPS - http://vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmarks/311-unreal

SiS cards had plenty of compatibility problems with VIA's Apollo AGP, was the configuration correct? Also yours 315E seems to be 32bit, poor bastard.

Putas wrote:

Also yours 315E seems to be 32bit, poor bastard.

Thats quite possible and its also only PCI, but i was talking about 305 and not 315e. Ofc these are main reasons for slower fps on mine 315e vs 305.

Another fact is poor quality of sis drivers a bad support of games, any geforce 2mx will be better and theres plenty of them around.

So I put together a similar rig to compare results: K7S5A, Athlon XP 1700, SDR, 133 MHz, 32MB 305 125/125, driver 1.15.
GlQuake numbers were about the same, but Unreal was running bit over 40 fps average. I really suspect AGP bombed for the relevant SiS cards, better check it. Half Life is fine up to 800x600. By the way I see your i740 did also 40 fps in Unreal, that is impossible if the lighting is rendered correctly, check that one too.