By the way considering the context, I think the S3 Trio3D would win something here. 😁

Well, there is the youtube series for old 3d accelerators where you can see the rendering quality/performance by yourself.
Laguna3D has a performance where old 3D games run well and doesn't have huge rendering errors.
S3 Trio3D has a better 3D compatibility than the Virge and is also faster. It has the best VESA BIOS support I have seen yet. I actually recorded a lot of old DOS demos from this card.

As for bad cards, how about the Alliance ProMotion AT3D?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysfAAX3zXmM

Also the i series of Trident cards are good candidates, such as the 9000i.

Hm the Trident Blade 3D was well, i remember playing NOLF on it, only missing OpenGL Support sucks 😀

And the 9000i ? still better as Cirrus Logic Eagle II

What makes a Card worse ?
Picture Quality ?, Bad 3D Accelration ?

Vote for Alliance ProMotion AT3D - slow like Virge and even much more broken image almost everywhere. http://vintage3d.org/at3d.php

In attachment screenshot from Expendable.

Laguna3D review: http://vintage3d.org/cirrus.php

I been testing a Laguna 3d,agp version with 4 mb of ram and it's not that bad.U can play some old 3d games on it.
So far i tried it with fifa 98 rtwc and it looks fine and works ok.

Played Quake II, Half-Life, Homeworld 1, SiN, Kingpin and other 3D titles flawlesly on my Trident Blade 3D chipset integrated card (VIA MVP4). It perdormed surprisingly well for an on board, and had no compatibility issues with it whatsoever. It also supports OpenGL.

Likely nobody wants my input on this thread, but from what I have used - and not what I have read - I prefer original research, some candidates would be;

> SPEA ShowTime Plus - An ET4000 PCI card which performs like a sick TVGA9000i and causes Sound Blaster cards not to work due to its incompatible CODEC for the capture circuitry.
> nVidia FX Series - Nothing the 4 Ti couldn't fix. These were notoriously lackluster. They could have been worse and really only make the list for the drivers which caused BSODs.
> ATi Radeon 2600 XT - No, jut no.
> ATi FireGL V3100 - It doesn't work. In my tests it proved slower than the original Rage 3D. Was DELL OEM though.
> nVidia 8600 GT - Poor image quality and lacking performance. I outran it on a low-end GeForce 7! Can't speak for the rest of the 8 series, but the 9600 GSO was great so probably good, given it was practically identical.
> Voodoo 2 - Simply put, the worst idea ever in 3D graphics. This should have never made it past QA.
> 3DFX Voodoo 5 - Further proof, as if it were needed, that the company never learned anything and had no idea how to make a practical product.
> Whatever that SiS thing was in the SiS 530 chipset. Often throws a fit when asked to do anything at all. I didn't mind the 6326 though, that had a purpose at least and was dirt cheap.
> Cards from old RM(>) systems. They had standard ICs like Trident, but they used non-standard memory. Also, said trident was an ISA chip on a VLB card. Almost no fingers on the VLB part go anywhere!

Alright, I guess that now you need to explain the presence of the voodoo 2 on this list to the rest of the forum. 😜 😜

HighTreason is our resident 3Dfx hater. 🤣

My good friend had a Trident 9000i with 512k. Neither of us thought it was particularly crappy. It did 800x600@256 colours in Windows at a decent speed, and I don't ever recall DOS games having issues. It ran Syndicate Plus at 640x480 fairly well (for the time). Mind you, these opinions are based on what I remember from the early-mid 90s when I couldn't compare against other cards except my own (ATi 8514/Ultra).

Well.... Voodoo's are not THE card to rule all other 3D-Cards in the world. By far....
I feel that I go with Hightreason on that they were in fact a bit behind.
On the other hand, 3DfX hardware is great to have, for those few and good Glide-only games.
Here I am thinking of mainly NFS2-SE. Yeah... And other reasons for me to have Voodoo's.
Are that I think the hardware is really beautifull, and yeah... They have a huge historical value.
Finally... I have a nostalgia feel for them. They are a part of my personal past.
Wich I think should be the ultimate retro reason to rule out all other retro reasons for having V's

If games support other and more powerfull technologies than Glide, well...
Then it is a no brainer to run it on that. Voodoo's are great and nice to have, they are just
valued insanely high on places like eBay.

I love them for what I feel they are, nothing less and more than that.
So yeah... I go with the flow here on Vogon's just as I go with HighTreason as well.

For really great cards. (Again my personal taste)
I will say that 486 era's ultimate VL-Bus cards are Cirrus Logic. 5428 as an example.
For late 90's gaming, I tend to say TNT2 and G400/G400-Max Plus Voodoo2 and 3.
For 00's hardware for Win98, I tend to go for Radeon 9200/9600/9800.

And finally. For XP gaming, get that GF4/FX-5xxx card.
One type of card is not THE answer to all GFX-Quests. It depends highly on the MOBO too.
And the CPU. It' all about what you wish to get running on a certain Board and CPU.

HighTreason wrote:

> nVidia FX Series - Nothing the 4 Ti couldn't fix. These were notoriously lackluster. They could have been worse and really only make the list for the drivers which caused BSODs.

Lackluster, but they worked with older DX9 stuff just fine. Not a great card, but there have been much worse cards out there IMHO

HighTreason wrote:

> nVidia 8600 GT - Poor image quality and lacking performance. I outran it on a low-end GeForce 7! Can't speak for the rest of the 8 series, but the 9600 GSO was great so probably good, given it was practically identical.

Did you have the DDR2 variant by any chance? I had one and, yes, that thing is pretty slow. The true non-cheapo 8600 with GDDR3 memory was supposed to be decent, but I never had one of those.

HighTreason wrote:

> Voodoo 2 - Simply put, the worst idea ever in 3D graphics. This should have never made it past QA.

It at least worked, was a drop-in replacement for the original Voodoo, and performed better, so it did what it was supposed to do. The Voodoo Rush was a much worse idea (THAT should not have made it past QA - poor idea and poor execution). Though I find myself using mine almost never since I got a Voodoo3, as the image is much better and it is faster as well. Does the Banshee have better compatibility with DOS games than the V3? Does that support pre-Glide2x games? If so then the Banshee might be a better call for something like a K6-2 or early P2 - unless, of course, you wanna pair it with something different for D3D or OpenGL.

HighTreason wrote:

> Whatever that SiS thing was in the SiS 530 chipset. Often throws a fit when asked to do anything at all. I didn't mind the 6326 though, that had a purpose at least and was dirt cheap.

I have fond memories of my SiS 630 chipset - it even outperformed my Savage4 (though one was being pushed by a Duron 1200, the Savage4 was in an old P3-700). Was the 530 graphics core that much worse?

My vote for worst card ever goes to the Rush. So 3DFX had a decent performing 3D accelerator and wanted to create a fully-fledged graphics card. What did they do? License a 2D core and make a new chip? Nope. They put two chips in a single card. Wasteful, yeah. Then they selected a less-than-average 2D chip. Yup, worse. Then they made them share memory. Yeah, slowing things down. And, finally, did not put both chips on the bus directly, they put the Voodoo behind the 2D chip. Oh well, I'd have a hard time believeing they even wasted time developing that card if it weren't for how poorly they managed the whole Rampage project.

alexanrs wrote:

HighTreason wrote:

> Whatever that SiS thing was in the SiS 530 chipset. Often throws a fit when asked to do anything at all. I didn't mind the 6326 though, that had a purpose at least and was dirt cheap.

I have fond memories of my SiS 630 chipset - it even outperformed my Savage4 (though one was being pushed by a Duron 1200, the Savage4 was in an old P3-700). Was the 530 graphics core that much worse?

Well, SiS 530 doesn't share graphics core with the SiS 630, but it does with the SiS 620. SiS 630 graphics core is an updated version of the SiS530/620 core, and has corrected almost all the bugs that plaged the older model, in both driver and hardware. SiS 630 also supports DirectX 7, and a full OpenGL ICD (v1.2 i guess ), while the old core only supports DirectX 5 (Win9x only), and a OpenGL subset (MiniGL), so basically you had to use it as a 2D framebuffer.

In a few words, SiS 530/620 isn't a stellar core, but SiS 630 is a very acceptable one, if the motherboard designer knew how to wire it. PCChips crap shows how misuse the chip, while ASUS could wire it in a way that can sometimes outperform VIA and the i810/815 in performance, and has a pretty acceptable graphics core.

alexanrs wrote:

Did you have the DDR2 variant by any chance? I had one and, yes, that thing is pretty slow. The true non-cheapo 8600 with GDDR3 memory was supposed to be decent, but I never had one of those.

The problem was NV initially wanted $250+ for these chips that were about 1/4 an 8800GTX. The initial D3D10 midrange chips were just a rip off. Radeon HD 3800 and GeForce 9600 were much better.

Yes, in the early days of 3d acceleration there have been quite a few ill-conceived cards and/or drivers.

However, the card that impressed me most, in a negative sense, was a Realtek ISA VGA card in my friend's 386SX-16 clone.
It's the only Realtek VGA card I've ever seen, and what I recall especially was that it was horribly slow in the graphic adventures we played back then... Space Quest IV, Larry V, Monkey Island 1/2 etc... Namely, these games would sometimes 'scroll' the screen horizontally, and they did this with bruteforce copying of memory. Now, this was not exactly smooth even on a good card like a WDC... and noticeably worse on a Trident... But the Realtek was just... terribad. The screen would slowly 'roll down' at every step in the scrolling process, probably taking at least a second every time.
Wow, just wow.

Scali wrote:

Yes, in the early days of 3d acceleration there have been quite a few ill-conceived cards and/or drivers. […]
Show full quote

Yes, in the early days of 3d acceleration there have been quite a few ill-conceived cards and/or drivers.

However, the card that impressed me most, in a negative sense, was a Realtek ISA VGA card in my friend's 386SX-16 clone.
It's the only Realtek VGA card I've ever seen, and what I recall especially was that it was horribly slow in the graphic adventures we played back then... Space Quest IV, Larry V, Monkey Island 1/2 etc... Namely, these games would sometimes 'scroll' the screen horizontally, and they did this with bruteforce copying of memory. Now, this was not exactly smooth even on a good card like a WDC... and noticeably worse on a Trident... But the Realtek was just... terribad. The screen would slowly 'roll down' at every step in the scrolling process, probably taking at least a second every time.
Wow, just wow.

leileilol has not nice things to say about the Realtek RTG3105IEH: Re: Simplest SuperVGA VGA extension card with at least 800x600x8 video mode?
I looked for the datasheets a few months back and couldn't find 'em...

I have a Realtek card... Not fun to use and the mounting bracket is a few mm different to most others - it is also missing, so I don't have one until it turns up or I can be bothered to make one... Not likely as it doesn't see much use.

Trident i series was mentionned here. There was a time when all retro stuff I had was a 386SX with Trident 9000i-3. Honestly, most stuff that was supposed to work worked. It was OK speed-wise in a 386SX-40 that could not reach its limits under DOS anyway... One thing that pissed me off though was that it needed a software switcher to work in color mode, because at startup the card randomly decided wether it feeled like displaying in color or in shades of gray.

I also don't understand what Voodoo is doing here. I have never had one as a kid (my first PC was a 1.7GHz Celly) and once I got my hands on Voodoo graphics 5 years ago, I was really happy. I played a lot of Tomb Raider and Dethkarz and other stuff and I liked the experience very much and went on and tracked down a pair of V2s, which also serve me very well, providing even better experience then the newer TNT2. They have speed, they have quality, they perform their simplistic blending and rendering the way they were supposed to, with no flashing textures or disappearing objects, with working lightning and no alpha glitches. Is not that what you need in a videocard? No need to forget what hell other 3D accelerators threw in your face.

It's hard for me to say what videocard I consider worst. As I see it, among working samples there are cheap and pricey, widely supported by games and not, etc. I used to think FX5200 was the worst card ever until I understood that it was the reason many people with low budget could enjoy games that would be otherwise completely out of reach. So the cheapest are out of question. Are then the worst cards among those not supported by many games? Then earliest professional cards are the worst: there were ones that supported no 3D games whatsoever. And yet a lot of great things were done using them, including movies and machinery. Perhaps the worst were the ones that did not work pretty much at all... and I don't know much about them anyway.