Matrox Ultima PCI 4MB has worse Super Scape (3DBench2) score than Video 7 VEGA VGA 256kB ISA 8bit.
VEGA VGA scores 15.4 FPS, Matrox Ultima scores 13.7FPS.
How can its DOS performance suck so much? Am I missing something, or is Matrox Ultima trully a horrible DOS performer?
Some Matrox cards run a little horribly in DOS until their VESA driver is loaded.
Might be a driver for it here; http://www.dosdriver.de/graph.php
Matrox were really a specialized product, so they possibly didn't intend that model to be any good at that kind of thing. 3DBench is inaccurate anyway IMO, try PCPBench.
They were specialized cards for high resolution desktop use in Windows 3.1. For this purpose they were the top of the line with performance and driver support.
These early Matrox PCI cards have a jumper so they are disabled in DOS mode and only work when their driver is loaded in Windows, meaning they made it easy for the customers to use other grphics card solutions in DOS.
So I can have two graphics cards in this computer?
Can Ultima have better dos performance?
This is the card i have - upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ ... _(PCI).jpg
It has two jumpers , one saying VGA DISABLE other saying 2MB/4MB.
{EDIT]
WIth UNIVBE, and without, PCP Bench score is 2.8FPS. Which is pretty poor 😀
If you can switch off VGA then the motherboard will just use another video card.
Collector of old computers, hardware, and software
wrote:How will windows 3.11 react to two graphics cards?
This kinda sucks because Matrox Ultima looks really cool, but performs poorly.
According to the manual the Matrox will take control in Windows 3.11 when the drivers are loaded. You use the VGA disable jumper for this feature.
I have the Matrox Ultima manual at home, so I'll scan the pages for you.
I assume it doesn't have a passthrough or something like that, so you'll probably need a VGA switchbox or to keep moving the cable arround.
wrote:I assume it doesn't have a passthrough or something like that, so you'll probably need a VGA switchbox or to keep moving the cable arround.
That's correct 😀
I thought it was well-known that Matrox Ultima and Impression were really bad in DOS. (Bad as in "slower than a Rendition card" or "bad even compared to several ISA cards".)
See http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmarks
Performance really took off with Millennium/Mystique.
I still can't believe Rendition never fixed up that VGA performance. Gaming cards you can't practically play Mode X games on. Their renutil TSR can fix up other VGA games though at least.
I don't think it's that easy to "fix up that VGA performance". IIRC they bought the 2D core and only developed the 3D hardware themselves. And maybe they thought people would just stop playing DOOM in DOS. (I don't know how many other games where incompatible with renutil and really needed the performance.) I suppose today you could just use DOOM MBF, or does that still use a tweaked mode?
To be fair, performance is quite good in VESA modes, as opposed to Matrox Ultima or Impression.
wrote:I don't think it's that easy to "fix up that VGA performance". IIRC they bought the 2D core and only developed the 3D hardware themselves. And maybe they thought people would just stop playing DOOM in DOS. (I don't know how many other games where incompatible with renutil and really needed the performance.) I suppose today you could just use DOOM MBF, or does that still use a tweaked mode?
To be fair, performance is quite good in VESA modes, as opposed to Matrox Ultima or Impression.
Yeah for whatever reason the Verite VGA mode was not a performance priority. Not such a great call when every other company was pretty concerned about top notch VGA support. Backwards compatibility and lack of compromise sells...
I wonder why Verite needs specific VGA and native modes. Maybe somebody else has some insight.
