Just some general impressions.

OAK are graphics decelerators. Great if a game runs to fast 😀

Cirruc Logic are very good all rounders. Fast, cheap, simple. Trident I believe is in the middle of the pack. The other card I don't know. My best cards I have are ET4000 and WD chip cards.

You can't go wrong with Cirrus Logic cards : fast, good image quality and compatibility.

Yea I'm using a CL whenever I play around with 386 gear. One cool thing is that, compared to other cards, the image stays centred when you go from command line to 320 x 200 games. The other cards always need readjusting on the monitor / scaler.

I remember a LOT of computers, even later VL machines, had CL cards.

The Trident 8900D is the best by far.

Trident, Realtek and Oak are all notoriously slow cards.
The Cirrus Logic is probably the best card in that list.
The Paradise might also be okay, although I believe that is a very early chipset, mainly designed for 8-bit systems.
I don't know the other cards.

dondiego wrote:

The Trident 8900D is the best by far.

Nope, it has blurry output and would probably perform slower than an OAK OTI087...
I don't know how well perform a CL-5401 vs an OAK OTI087 but that would definitely be the most reliable cards of the chart.

That Paradise chip is the one used in the Toshiba T3200SX I think, it is acceptable for a 16MHz 386, Crystal Dream is watchable (though the music goes out of sync, interestingly I think Triton anticipated that however) but it gets its ass handed to it by the Cirrus 510/520 in the Zenith SlimsPort 286 really. The Cirrus in that list would even be fine in a slower 486 system i think (Like an ISA DX-40).

To cut a long story short, out of that lot, pick the Cirrus unless you have a slower 386SX, in which case the Paradise will be fine if the price is right.

That trident is a late isa card, output quality depends on individual samples. I believe that cirrus is an ancient rebranded acumos. Other chips are ancient as well. Oak, realtek and hmc=utter crap.

Eliandas ISA VGA card roundup

dondiego wrote:

Oak, realtek and hmc=utter crap.

Eliandas ISA VGA card roundup

Ok I should have said it first : I own an ISA Trident TVGA8900D loaded with 1024 KB RAM at 70 NS jumpered to work at 16 bits and 0 WS and an ISA OAK OTI077 with also 1024 KB RAM at 70 NS. I tested both on a DX2-66 with fastest bios settings and tweaks => OAK card had better image quality and was 2.5 fps faster than the Trident in DooM. Then an ISA CL-5422 512 KB 70 NS was 5 fps faster than the OAK and only 0.2 fps faster than an TSENG LABS ET4000AX with 512 KB at 80 NS.

I don't think the trident is defective and as Tseng Labs with its ET4000AX, I think the manufacturer really matter in the final product speed.
But still, I would not recommend them over Cirrus Logic.

I ran ET4000 ISA when I had a Cyrix 80486 SLC and CL-5428-VLBus when I had an 80486dx2 back in the early 90's
Both cards were great for the systems I had back then.

jesolo wrote:

[*]Unknown card with a Realtek RTG3105E chipset
[*]Unknown card with a Realtek RTG3105i chipset

Steer clear of these ones. 😵

Diamond Flower VG-7000 256KB max 512KB (OTI067), I have seen for sale.

I use TVGA8800CS on 286 which works great.

I also have Diamond Speedstar Rev. 4 512KB (TSENG ET4000AX) upgraded to 1MB which would work well on a 386.

I'd test different 512 and 1024kb cards to see which one is the best for your configuration.

It's somehow funny with Trident cards. They are usually slow and some can even have bad quality output. But I have one 8900D 1MB that performs as fast as ET4000 and has good image quality. It seems rare but there it is 😉

I even noticed that although the CPU is slow, like 286, there is some performance increase with good VGA card (like ET4000). Tested with 3Dbench v1.0 it went from 6.4 to 7.1 when replaced some slow Trident with ET4000 - I didn't think it would be any faster or at least noticeable faster on such a slow system.

Any card can have bad/good quality image output as these cards are 20+ years old... and some electronic components can get out of shape and make cards perform worse. I've seen cards from Cirrus Logic, S3, Tseng and Trident that had somehow blurry image.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Just some general impressions.

OAK are graphics decelerators. Great if a game runs to fast 😀

Why is the OAK oti087 so bad? I just located one for 10$. hahaha going to test it in my IBM AT.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Trident with TVGA9000i-3 chipset

It may have a stripped-down RAMDAC. My TVGA9000i-3 cannot work in 800x600x256 with LCD monitors as it uses interlaced scan (however, 800x600x16 colours is working perfectly with normal progressive scan).

I have one Trident TVGA 8900D that i got for cheap just for testing, but from what i was told, this board would slow down even a 386, which makes sense, i got mine from a lot of parts from a junk 286 machine(mobo was in a terrible shape, however the expansion cards were good, the mobo i dessoldered all the 74 series logic ic's, so it was pretty nice).

Formulator wrote:

Diamond Flower VG-7000 256KB max 512KB (OTI067), I have seen for sale.

I know they are slow, but they have other very nice vitues. This card can run in both 16 and 8 bit ISA slots, and look at what range of monitors it can support:

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/graphics-cards/C- … -XVGA-VG-7.html

It can emulate EGA, CGA, MDA (with switches, not TSRs) and use their monitors, too. That's a very good thing if not unique.

.legaCy wrote:

I have one Trident TVGA 8900D that i got for cheap just for testing, but from what i was told, this board would slow down even a 386, which makes sense, i got mine from a lot of parts from a junk 286 machine(mobo was in a terrible shape, however the expansion cards were good, the mobo i dessoldered all the 74 series logic ic's, so it was pretty nice).

No the D version is quite a fast card.

Wow, this is a really old thread.

Anyway, I do remember reading that the Trident 8900D is usually a good, fast ISA card. I have one but it blew a tantalum when I tried to test it, so it's awaiting repairs before I can test it myself. 😀