Had a CL5428 in my old machine, was a decent enough Windows accelerator, never really explored its DOS performance.

Somewhere in my junkbox, there is a Diamond Stealth 64 video Vram - recognized it as a classic - in the days of setting graphics for DOS programs, EVERTHING had an option for S3.

One old gem, probably rare, was the Paradise ports'o'call - a combined VLB graphics & IO card

I would not recommend the Trident. I have an AMD DX4-100 system that uses the TGUI9440-Agi on an Opti 895 motherboard. Overall I have not had any compatibility problems in DOS, I have not tested the card in windows at all. The performance is ok, nothing out of whack when compared to similar systems using Phil's VGA bench. The problem for me is output quality. It looks fine to me plugged into a CRT, but is complete garbage on an LCD. That might not be an issue for you, but if I were spending the money, I would rather get something that works well no matter what.

I have good experiences with CL-5428, S3 805 and Tseng ET4000/w32i. For DOS usage there isn't any difference between them. But if you plan on using Windows (3.1 or 95) then CL-5428 is the slowest and Tseng ET4000/w32i 2MB is the fastest (speed in Win95 800x600 15-bit can be rated like this: CL-5428 = 1, S3-805 = 2.5 and ET4K/w32i 2MB = 4.5) so S3 805 is a good middle ground.

I don't know much about VLB cards today (availability, price, etc.) but I remember clearly that the S3 chipset was the hip thing. I clearly remember 805 and 928 was a better performer than CL equivalents and a far better one again, compared to Trident. I'm not sure which VLB cards was available after that, since I upgraded to PCI afterwards.

Tseng ET4000 W32p (top notch DOS chip with capable GUI accel)
S3 Trio64 (one of the last VLB chips)
S3 Vision 868/968 (pre Trio chip, high end GUI accelerators, 968 uses VRAM)

Though in practice a 486 tends to make high end GUI chips a bit moot because the CPU is such a bottleneck.

The S3 Vision/Trio VLB cards are just as quick in DOS as the W32p (and quicker in Windows GUI acceleration). They are often much cheaper and more common than the W32p, so they are great cards.

If you want good windows performance get an ATi Mach64, or S3 Vision based card.(some people also liked Matrox and Weitek Power)
If you want good DOS performance, go Tseng ET4000W32P, ARK1000VL or S3 Trio64/868/864/805, or Cirrus Logic
If you want to run reliably at 50MHz, ET4000W32P, S3 805, ARK1000VL, Trident or CL.

S3 DRAM based cards are probably the best all around, but often cause problems at 40 or 50MHz.
Image quality also varies considerably between different cards using the same chipset.

By the way, where are these cheap Trio32 or 64 cards for VLB? The ones I've seen recently go for more than $50.

Maybe you look for this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cirrus-logic-CL-GD542 … =item3cee21eb0f
Not really expensive.

Decent VLB cards are getting hard to find. Most of what you see are CL chips or early S3.

jxhicks wrote:

I would not recommend the Trident. I have an AMD DX4-100 system that uses the TGUI9440-Agi on an Opti 895 motherboard. Overall I have not had any compatibility problems in DOS, I have not tested the card in windows at all. The performance is ok, nothing out of whack when compared to similar systems using Phil's VGA bench. The problem for me is output quality. It looks fine to me plugged into a CRT, but is complete garbage on an LCD. That might not be an issue for you, but if I were spending the money, I would rather get something that works well no matter what.

I will not be using it on LCDs, only CRT, but output quality is of course a factor, as I'm used to Matrox output quality at the moment.
Thanks for the heads up 😀

I've never tried an ET4000/w32, only the regular ISA version back in the days, and I always felt it was overrated. Never noticed it being any better than my generic Cirrus Logic. But we never really ran any benchmarks back then, it was only based on subjectively seeing how well games ran. It does seem like ET4000s are very expensive these days though, so I'll keep away from those I think.
I'm not really in any rush to find parts asap, so I have some time to find a really good deal.

By the way, is there a huge difference in performance of different Multi I/O cards? I mean like Winbond compared to UMC and "Mega-D" and such?

Anyone tried the CL-GD5434 as used on the Diamond Speedstar 64? From the technical specs, this seems like it should be a pretty good graphics chip.
I'm looking at a card based on this chip, with 2MB of memory. This is certified to work at up to 50MHz bus speeds and seeing as it has 64-bit memory interface, it should be pretty fast for a VESA Local Bus card.

I read CL-GD5434 was problematic somehow, it does not bench any faster then the GD5428:
486 VLB UMC-Chipset, what is it?

gerwin wrote:

I read CL-GD5434 was problematic somehow, it does not bench any faster then the GD5428:
486 VLB UMC-Chipset, what is it?

Ah yes, I remember seeing that thread at some point a while back. Thanks for linking it, as those benchmarks show quite a lot of popular graphics cards from way back when.
Perhaps I should also point out that the "Commander Keep scrolling bug" is not a problem for me, as I don't ever play Commander Keen, and generally no side-scrollers. 😀

It also just occured to me that I have a PCI based Trident TGUI9440 AGi sitting around, so I've just swapped out my Matrox Millennium for that, just to do some testing.
It does seem to have pretty good dos performance. I need to retest my Matrox card, but it does actually appear that the Trident is faster in 3DBench.
I'm going to have to test it in Windows as well to see what the image quality is like at higher resolutions.
A VLB card doesn't have to perform the same ofc, but at least it gives me an idea of how the chip itself performs.

Right, after retesting the Matrox, they appear to give identical performance in Phil's benchmark suite. 64.4 in 3DBench. Very respectable results for the Trident adapter imho.

gerwin wrote:

I read CL-GD5434 was problematic somehow, it does not bench any faster then the GD5428:
486 VLB UMC-Chipset, what is it?

Just had another look at that link you gave me. The graphics card chart has an ISA based 5434 not benching higher than an ISA based 5426, but more importantly, ALL ISA cards seem to score the same in tests like 3DBench, which suggests to me that the ISA interface is the bottleneck in those cases. For example, a VLB based 5428 scores much better.

Yeah, "it does not bench any faster then the GD5428" was a wrong remark from me, as I was looking at the GD5434 ISA score in error. There is a GD5434 VLB lower in the chart though.
The CGW magazine pdf has some more benchmarks for each card as well as review articles. The chart in my post was adjusted as to fit the vogons embedded image size limit.

gerwin wrote:

Yeah, "it does not bench any faster then the GD5428" was a wrong remark from me, as I was looking at the GD5434 ISA score in error. There is a GD5434 VLB lower in the chart though.
The CGW magazine pdf has some more benchmarks for each card as well as review articles. The chart in my post was adjusted as to fit the vogons embedded image size limit.

Yeah, I noticed that as well when I looked closer. My apologies to you.
I'm going to have a closer look at the whole article, as the card I've been scoping out is that VLB Orchid Kelvin64.

Done some more testing and it turns out my Trident TGUI9440 AGi PCI is pretty abysmal in Windows 95 at least. Even with 2MB memory installed, it'll only do 800x600 if I want any more than 256 colours, and even then it's only 65k colours. 16.7million colours is only possible at 640x480 resolution. So my conclusion is that although it seems to be a very decent DOS performer, as good as my Matrox Millennium in my system, it's no good for Windows use. That's not really a big issue I suppose, but it's a bonus if I could have both. So, I think I'll steer clear of any Trident VLB cards.

I remember working with Trident 9440 CXi. A friend had one and it couldn't run Diablo remotely fluidly. I gave him my Hercules Dynamite Power card (ET4000/W32p) and that fixed things up. You don't really want any old Trident chips. They eventually became somewhat acceptable in the PCI age though.

Indeed there are some excellent Computer Gaming World articles on VLB cards. That's how I did my shopping back in those days.